How to play Catan on Mac

Game summary

Catan is a handheld implementation of a board game Settlers of Catan. There is a flat board with the game world divided on a number of hexagons. The goal of the game is to reach ten Victory points that are earned by having settlements, point cards and some other conditions, however there could be other goals in this version. Every turn players can either build roads, settlements and cities or expand onto over territories, which also produce different resources needed for construction. Resources could be either purchased for Settlement cards or traded with other players. The N-Gage version, besides the traditional board game rules, also features a multi-stage tournament and a quest-mode with a number of different objectives, like building the longest road or having the largest army, by the end of the game, or reaching ten points under a certain amount of turns. Most of the in-game actions are decided by the roll of dice and it is done automatically. There are ten different computer characters who has their own portraits and things they say during the game, if you are playing alone. Of course, there's a multiplayer option for up to four players as well. Also there's a short tutorial to grasp the strategy basics.
First released: Oct 2005

Play Catan on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Catan on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Catan installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Catan like you would on any PC.
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