Unpopular opinion: The "Catan is a starter game" take is backwards and here is the stat that changed my mind

Joel Butler · 2026-09-17T18:00:03.923811+00:00

I was scrolling through a thread on here last week and someone pulled up the BGG rankings history, and I noticed something I had never really thought about. Catan has stayed in the top 500 for close to 25 years now, which almost no other game from that era has done. Meanwhile half the "gateway" games people push in 2024 as replacements for it have already slid down a few hundred spots in just a handful of years. I get why folks call it a starter game, but I think that label does it dirty, because a game that people keep coming back to for decades is not training wheels, it is just a well built design. I have taught it to probably 40 people at my local shop in Salem, and the ones who end up loving heavy euros still ask to play it after a long week. So I guess my hot take is that calling it a beginner game is less about the game and more about us wanting to look serious. If it is such a basic starter game, why does it keep outlasting the stuff we replace it with?

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Unpopular opinion: The "Catan is a starter game" take is backwards and here is the stat that changed my mind | Board Game Geeks - Chatter Central