Klaus Teuber & Benjamin Teuber. Catan Studio / KOSMOS, 2024.
3–4 players | 60–120 minutes | Age 12+
Catan – New Energies gives the world-famous Catan a new challenge. Instead of just building roads and settlements, it puts players in a situation where they must decide whether to rely on fossil fuels for quick advantages or invest in renewable/cleaner energy sources, which take longer but would pay off in the long run.
You still have the familiar trading and building mechanics of classic Catan, but now with an added emphasis on sustainability. Players are encouraged to think about the long-term effects of their choices and how they impact the whole table.
That said, some players feel that the energy and pollution aspects are not fully integrated into the game’s core mechanics and could be improved. More consequences for pollution or better rewards for using renewable energy could make it even better.
Analysis from the STRATEGIES Ecogames Play Sessions in Manchester, UK
Catan – New Energies is a standalone adaptation of the best-selling Settlers of Catan, retaining the game’s familiar resource-trading and settlement-building mechanics while adding an energy economy layer in which players must choose between fossil fuel and renewable energy sources to power their expanding civilisations. Brown energy (fossil fuels) offers quicker, cheaper returns; green energy (renewables) requires greater upfront investment but generates fewer pollution tokens. As pollution accumulates across the board, climate events are triggered at escalating thresholds, imposing collective penalties on all players. A science card system provides technological development options, and players must balance individual competitive strategy against a shared pollution level that no single player controls. The game was produced with sustainability in mind: components were sourced as responsibly as possible, and the publishers have been transparent about their environmental commitments in the game’s production. Catan – New Energies is designed as a mainstream commercial product.
The game’s most significant achievement is also the source of its central tension: by building ecological stakes into one of the world’s best-selling board games, Catan – New Energies brings a climate change framework to audiences unlikely to seek out explicitly environmental games. For some players, this will be their first encounter with energy transition mechanics in a game context, and the green/brown energy choice, however imperfect, introduces the logic of externalities, collective action, and long-term investment in an accessible and familiar format. The game’s responsible production choices reinforce this message at a material level, signalling that ecological consideration can extend to the supply chain as well as the theme. That said, play sessions with STRATEGIES researchers revealed the limits of what ecological values can achieve when layered onto an unreconstructed competitive framework. Standard Catan strategies, which are to expand aggressively, trade opportunistically, and accumulate victory points, remain effective regardless of energy choices, meaning that players oriented toward winning can treat the green/brown decision as a peripheral optimisation rather than an imperative. As play session participants observed, the game ultimately feels like what it is: a bolt-on to normal Catan, with the climate dimension remaining peripheral for players not already disposed to engage with it. This is a risk in ‘value-added’ ecological game design, where environmental mechanics are layered onto existing competitive frameworks without restructuring their incentives. The collective action problem at the heart of climate politics is nonetheless reproduced with some fidelity: the green energy strategy only pays off if enough players adopt it, making its benefits dependent on collective commitment that the competitive framework does not incentivise. A further pattern observed was that a heavily fossil-fuel-dependent player could remain competitive by reactively cleaning up pollution, inadvertently modelling a ‘pollute and remediate’ economic logic rather than incentivising structural decarbonisation. Participants also noted the absence of dynamic cost adjustment: there is no mechanism for green energy to become relatively cheaper as the science deck develops, nor for the true costs of fossil fuel use to be internalised through pricing or taxation mechanics, despite these being among the most discussed real-world policy levers for energy transition. The pollution event thresholds were experienced as relatively mild, producing cautious collective management rather than the escalating pressure found in games like Pandemic. These design choices likely reflect a deliberate conservatism appropriate to a mass-market product: Catan – New Energies cannot afford to make climate consequences structurally catastrophic or to reward strategies that sacrifice competitive performance for collective ecological benefit without alienating its core audience. The result is a game that models what might be called a ‘green capitalism’ solution to the climate crisis, one that features technological investment, market incentives, and individual consumer choice, rather than the systemic transformation that many climate scientists and environmental humanities scholars argue is required. This framing is worth making explicit in educational contexts, where the game can prompt discussion of what kinds of change it imagines and what kinds it forecloses. Finally, participants raised a pointed question about the game’s own material footprint: however responsibly sourced its components, the decision to produce an entirely new large-format commercial game rather than a downloadable expansion or scenario pack, which would have allowed players to repurpose existing Catan sets, sits in tension with the reuse logic the game nominally promotes. This tension between ecological theme and mode of production makes Catan – New Energiesa productive case study in the broader challenge of sustainable game design.
Content written by Gareth George, Rachel Dunk, Jane Mork, Paul Wake, and Chloé Wake. Developed from notes recorded during a STRATEGIES project play session.