Catan Trainer
How Colonist.io Ranks Work: Rating, Placement Games, Seasons, Karma and the Leaderboard
Colonist.io shows a rating next to your name and a leaderboard with a season countdown, and explains almost none of it. This is the plain-language version: what the ten placement games do, how rating moves after a game, what the leaderboard columns mean, how seasons end, what karma is for, and which ranked behaviours get accounts banned. Where Colonist has not published a rule we say so rather than guess.
The four ranked modes
Ranked on Colonist is four separate ladders, each with its own rating, its own leaderboard tab and its own placement games:
| Mode | Players | Points to win | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 Player | 4 | 10 | The classic game. The biggest ladder and the one most guides are written for. |
| 1v1 | 2 | 15 | Friendly Robber on, Balanced Dice on, "Very Fast" speed. Almost no trading, so coverage and ports matter more. Colonist's own 1v1 guide has the full rule set. |
| Cities & Knights | 4 | 13 | The expansion: knights, barbarians, commodities and progress cards. A different game with a different rating. |
| Colonist Rush | 4 | Shorter | Colonist's fast variant with its own rules and its own ladder. |
Your 4 Player rating says nothing about your 1v1 rating. Players who switch modes start at the placement games again.
Placement games: the first ten
When ranked launched, Colonist described the system plainly: your first ten ranked games in a mode are placement games, used to set your matchmaking rating (MMR), and after that you are matched with players of a similar rating. Nothing published since has changed that. Two practical consequences:
- Placement games move your rating much more than later games. A rating system has to find your level fast, so the early swings are large. Ten careful games are worth more than ten rushed ones.
- Matchmaking only gets accurate after placement. During the first ten you will meet a wide spread of opponents. A loss to someone much stronger is not a sign you are in the wrong bracket; it is the system still looking.
How rating moves after a game
Colonist has not published its rating formula. What is observable is that it behaves like an Elo-style system, the family used in chess and most ladders:
- Beating a higher-rated opponent gains more than beating a lower-rated one; losing to a lower-rated opponent costs more than losing to a higher-rated one.
- In 4 Player the result is not just win or lose. Finishing second against three strong players is worth something; finishing fourth against three weaker ones costs. Think of it as three pairwise results, one against each opponent.
- Ratings cluster around the middle and thin out at the top. The whole leaderboard sits in a band of a few hundred points.
If you want the mechanics of Elo-style systems in general, the Elo article is the standard reference. Just do not assume Colonist's constants match chess's.
Reading the leaderboard
The leaderboard page has tabs for each mode and filters for Global, your continent, country and region, plus a Friends view. The columns are Rank, Player, Division, Rating, Win % and Games. Three things worth knowing from the November 2026 4 Player board:
- The top is around 1,850. The number one player sat at 1,849, the top ten were above 1,720, and the top 100 cut off near 1,620.
- Top players do not win most of their games. Win rates in the top 100 ran from about 22% to 45%. In a four-player game the baseline is 25%, so the best players in the world win perhaps four games in ten. If you are losing more than you win on a four-player ladder, you are in good company; rating comes from finishing second and third consistently.
- Games played varies wildly. Players in the top 20 had anywhere from 31 to 175 games in the season. Volume is not required; consistency is.
The Division column groups players into tiers. Colonist listed leaderboard divisions on its roadmap when ranked launched and the column now exists, but the tier names and rating cutoffs are not documented anywhere public. Players on r/Colonist describe their rank with labels like "Gold 1 at 1,550 rating", so metal-style tiers with numbered steps are in use; treat any cutoff you see quoted as a player's observation, not a rule.
Seasons
Ranked runs in seasons. The leaderboard shows a countdown ("Season ends in: 2M 27D" in early November 2026), and Colonist announces each new season in its version notes. Colonist has not published the exact season length or how ratings are treated at the rollover, so the safe assumption is: your leaderboard position resets, and you may need placement games again. Two things seasons do affect:
- Rewards. Colonist has given free memberships to the top 50 in 4P, 1v1 and Cities & Knights at a season's end (August 2024), and the Championship 2026 page says a top-three finish in any ranked season earns a Championship ticket.
- Timing. The last days of a season are the sweatiest. Players chasing a top finish queue hard, and the author of Colonist's 1v1 guide describes winning 19 of 24 games on the final day to lock a top-50 finish. If you are mid-placement, early season is calmer.
Karma: the other number next to your name
Karma is separate from rating. It is a public score out of 20 that drops when you leave a game before it ends and recovers slowly over days. Players and lobby hosts can see it, and many will not play with low-karma accounts. From community reports on Colonist's feedback board, the details that bite:
- Leaving a game costs about one karma point. A bot plays for you and you have roughly two minutes to reconnect; players report losing karma even after reconnecting if the gap was longer than that.
- Leaving a ranked game also forfeits the rating you were playing for. The real price of quitting a ranked game is karma plus rating.
- Colonist's own 1v1 guide notes that about a third of 1v1 games end in a resignation. Resigning a lost game is allowed and common; making a habit of quitting games you are losing is listed in the community guidelines as something not to do.
What gets a ranked account banned
Colonist's community guidelines are short and worth reading once. The rules that matter for ranked, in Colonist's own words:
Don't play two accounts in the same game. Don't agree with another player on who is going to win, before or during a game. Don't use extensions or any third-party tool that plays for you or shows hidden information. Don't lose on purpose to raise or lower someone's rating, including your own.
Cheating can lead to an immediate ban. Note what the extension rule does and does not cover: a tool that plays for you or shows hidden information is out. A tool that reads the public game log, or reviews a game after it ends, is on the right side of that line. We go through the popular ones in the best Colonist.io extensions.
What actually raises your rating
None of the above moves your number. Knowing how the ladder works stops you wasting rating on timeouts and quits; it does not win games. The part that wins games is the opening: on Colonist, where opponents are fast and rarely blunder mid-game, the two settlements you place before the first roll decide more than anything after it. If you are new to that idea, start with how to rank up on Colonist.io; if you want the specific habits, the ranked tips post lists the things that cost rating and the fixes.
See what your placements are costing you
Connect the free Catan Trainer extension and every finished Colonist game gets its opening graded against the best spots on that board, with the reasons in plain English. Nothing runs during the game, so it is squarely within Colonist's rules.
Connect Colonist →