Games like Catan: what to play next
Last checked 17 October 2026 · Prices from United Kingdom (UK) shops
Catan's the first modern board game for a lot of people. The hook is building your own patch on a shared board, collecting resources, and a race to a points target that keeps everyone in it to the end. These five keep that feeling, and most of them cut the downtime of waiting on dice and haggling over trades. They're all easy to find in UK shops.
1. Carcassonne
Take turns laying landscape tiles to build a shared medieval map, then drop your little wooden people on roads and towns to score.
- Players
- 2 to 5 players
- Age
- 7+
- Play time
- 30 to 45 minutes
- How easy to teach
- Explain in 5 minutes
Why it suits this: The closest in spirit. The map grows as you play and you claim roads and towns on it. There's no trading, so turns are quicker and a lot calmer.
£25.94 at Magic Madhouse (2025 edition), stock not confirmed
Prices and details last checked 17 October 2026. Prices change often.
2. Ticket to Ride
Collect matching coloured train cards and claim railway routes to link cities across North America.
- Players
- 2 to 5 players
- Age
- 8+
- Play time
- 30 to 60 minutes
- How easy to teach
- Explain in 5 minutes
Why it suits this: If building roads was your favourite bit of Catan, this whole game is that. You collect matching cards to claim routes, which will feel familiar, and the rules are simpler.
£37.00 at Magic Madhouse (2025 Refresh edition), stock not confirmed
Prices and details last checked 17 October 2026. Prices change often.
3. Splendor
You're a Renaissance jewel merchant. Collect gem tokens to buy cards that give you permanent discounts, and race to 15 points.
- Players
- 2 to 4 players
- Age
- 10+
- Play time
- about 30 minutes
- How easy to teach
- Explain in 5 minutes
Why it suits this: Catan's ‘collect resources, then build’ loop squeezed into a tight, quick card game. One action a turn, and the cards you buy make later purchases cheaper.
£25.49 at Firestorm Games (2024 edition), in stock
Prices and details last checked 17 October 2026. Prices change often.
4. Cascadia
Each turn you take a habitat tile and an animal, building a nature landscape where your bears, salmon and hawks are happy.
- Players
- 1 to 4 players
- Age
- 10+
- Play time
- 30 to 45 minutes
- How easy to teach
- Explain in 5 minutes
Why it suits this: Hex tiles again, like Catan's board. The difference is that everyone builds their own landscape, so there's nothing to fight over. Randy Flynn's design is a calm, puzzly one.
Some details (players, age or time) still need checking against the publisher. Player count confirmed by the publisher; age and time are from UK retailer listings.
£33.99 at Firestorm Games, in stock
Prices and details last checked 17 October 2026. Prices change often.
5. Azul
Grab colourful tiles from shared piles and fit them onto your board to decorate a palace wall. Simple to learn, surprisingly tense.
- Players
- 2 to 4 players
- Age
- 8+
- Play time
- 30 to 45 minutes
- How easy to teach
- Explain in 5 minutes
Why it suits this: The same pleasure of slowly building something nice to look at, with more meaningful choices and a lot less luck than rolling dice.
Some details (players, age or time) still need checking against the publisher. Publisher page gives no player count, age or time; values need checking against the box (one retailer listing shows a different player count).
£40.79 at Firestorm Games, in stock
Prices and details last checked 17 October 2026. Prices change often.
How we choose and check
We pick games for the situation, and ignore hobby rankings and hype. Player counts, ages and play times come from the publisher's own page or the box wherever we can get them. If we haven't confirmed something yet, the card says so. Prices are checked by hand at UK shops on the date shown, and nobody pays us to include a game. See how we make money.