[INCyr]

I'll start out by saying that like most familiar with the game, I'm a large fan of it. It was one of the first games that brought me from the more "american" style of games (roll dice, move pawn, do stuff) to the more strategic "european" types of games (a lot less change, a lot more planning.) The concept is simple, yet has subtle complexities, and the game, as noted from the many rewards won, is great.

This game is a faithful adaptation of the 2-4 player game of Catan for the iPhone. You can play with any mixture of 2-4 human or computer players - the interface for setting up a game is simple and intuitive, and takes only a few moments to get a full game set up. There are 8 AI opponents to choose from, each with a different personality and play style.

The game gives you quite a few options to play with, although none of them will change the games in large ways.

Map: Fixed or Variable
Robber: Normal or Friendly (Can't be robbed until >2 victory points)
Dice: Normal, Stack, Stack 5 (Dice, Uniform card distribution, or cards with 5 options removed.)
Start: Settlement or City
Victory Points: 8-12
Resource Bonus: On or Off (If no resources for 5 turns, get to choose a resource)

So you can see, there are a good number of game options to play with to suit the game to your liking.

Once you have the game set up, you'll start the settlement placement. You can choose if you go first, or if it's a random assignment. The settlement placement is as in the board game - Players go in the following order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1. You'll place a settlement and a road on your turn. When doing so, the game will highlight the available locations, and you'll select the one you want, and then confirm it. This process will go at a decent speed - the largest hold up is the fact that the game will zoom in and move the board to the next settlement location, which takes a bit of time. It's not so annoying at first, but this will happen again and again over the course of the game - every time resources are handed out. After about the 3rd turn (if not before) I really started wishing that the board would just zoom out and show me which settlements were active from there.

The game play is very smooth. On your turn you'll have a menu button that gives you your choices. I believe there's almost always a help button in the lower right if needed, but the options are fairly easy to figure out for anyone familiar with the game. You can buy options, buy or use development cards, trade, skip to the next turn, close out the menu or save your game. Everything is on a fairly easy to use interface, that left me with few questions as to what my options were. When not looking at the menu, you can slide the board around to examine different locations, and pinch to zoom in/out as per normal iPhone functionality. The graphics for the game are well done - I'm not a huge fan of them, but they are tasteful and don't interfere with it. I wish they had gone with a slightly simpler design (ala kolonists) but it's not a detraction from the game - just personal preference.

Trading is well implemented, although it takes a little bit of time to really get the hang of it. When you request a trade, you're given the option to trade with players, or with the bank. Either way, you'll end up in a screen with the 5 resources, and the ability to request or offer the resources. You have to both request and offer at least one resource, although you can offer multiple resources (both quanitity and type) in a single trade. The one thing I wished for here was the ability to ask or offer a resource and see if anyone was willing to trade anything for it at all - as anyone who plays knows, sometimes you end up with resources you're willing to trade just to get rid of, or resources you need and are willing to pay the asking price for. It's not a big complaint, as going through the trades are fairly easy, but I think it'd pick up the game in some situations a bit.

The game gives you a nice bit of information both during the game and after it's complete. During the game you can see # of resources, # of development cards, # of (known) victory points, # of knights and length of longest road. After the game, you get a much more detailed breakdown of stats, including such things as likelihood of production, total number of resources used, number of resources lost (from your hand) to the robber on a roll of a seven, etc. (I actually would have also liked to see number of resources you were kept from getting from robber placement as well.)

The last thing I'll mention before closing comments is that the game does seem to be a fair bit of a battery hog. I played 2 games, and during my second needed to plug my phone in as I was at the 20% mark (3GS). However, I'll caveat that by saying that I don't know what it started at, but I believe it was at least 50% or above. However, given the complexity of the game and the graphics, I'm not surprised about this.

All in all I'd say this is well worth the purchase if you're interested in it. $5 is a steal for this game as compared to the boxed version, and you're getting all of the functionality. Time will tell if they offer up any expansions for it, but I'm well enough content without them. I do hope they continue to update the game, as I would like to see the ability to turn off some of the more time consuming portions of the game (watching the dice roll, the zooming in on resource production, etc.) I think this would streamline the game immensely and provide a very nice version of the game that can be played fairly quickly.

Rating: 4/5 (Great game, well implement, just a few issues keeping it from being dead on perfect, but nothing that I can't see possibly fixed through patches.)