After the success of Pokémon GO, it comes as no surprise that there are more augmented reality (AR) games being developed by Niantic. However, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Catan was the last game on your mind to get an AR edition. In collaboration with Asmodee, Niantic is bringing the popular board game to life on your mobile phone!
CATAN: World Explorers turns the whole world into a gigantic playable game of CATAN. As you might expect, if you’ve played the popular board game, you will be collecting resources: bricks, lumber, grain, ore and wool to trade with other players and building settlements into cities. You’ll also be playing in teams to collect Victory Points at local and global levels – similar to the team mechanic in Pokémon Go.
As you might expect from a Niantic game, CATAN: New Explorers uses the same maps from Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite to create interactive landmarks which become central to the gameplay. These real world locations are then pieced into a humungous, global map and playing board for an AR game of CATAN.
The new CATAN AR game is one of ten projects currently being developed at Niantic. The company has teased the projects in a new announcement blog post on website.
CATAN: New Explores is ready for its beta debut and has opened pre-registrations at its official website.
