Impressive fan-made Pokémon Catan lets you trade ‘em all

Like peanut butter and chocolate, pineapple and pizza before it, Reddit user Cambino1 has found another great flavor combination: Pokémon and Catan. They applied a pocket monster aesthetic to the resource trading classic for a homemade board game that’s garnering a lot of community praise.

According to comments from the creator, the game functions like standard Catan: roll to collect resources, trade them among your opponents, and vie for objectives to eventually be crowned the very best (like no one ever was). Only here, all the names ascribe to the Pokémon world: Pokémarts instead of ports, routes instead of roads, a Team Rocket member instead of the thief and five types of Pokémon cards instead of the traditional resources.

What many others found most impressive about the project was the execution on the game board’s tiles, which feature pixel art pulled from the Game Boy Advance generation of Pokémon video games set in the original Kanto region. The clean lines and tight fit once assembled had many thinking Cambino1 had done this before. But it’s apparently their first time building a board game from scratch.

“I had designs to 3d print more pokecenter and gym styled buildings for the pieces but the printing shop i went to quoted like $120 for all of them,” they said on Reddit. “I had nowhere near the budget for that. Spend $5 on air drying clay instead. Shaping buildings with clay is harder than it seems.”

The hex tiles were constructed from thick, hand-cut cardboard with printed A4 paper wrapped and glued around each individual piece. Cambino1 said they have plans to upgrade everything to hardboard in the future, bolstered by the avid response from other Reddit users.

They also mentioned adapting the Seafarers Catan expansion in order to connect their remixed version to the Pokémon regions of Johto, Sinnoh and others. Several commenters asked when and where they could purchase their own copy, but Cambino1 said fear of Nintendo’s historically litigious protection of intellectual property will keep this in the realm of hobbywork, for now.

Catan has endured more than a fresh coat of Pokémon theming. The favourite entry point to board gaming has been transformed into shoes, an upcoming film adaptation and even an unofficial beer.