Anyway, today’s episode. We’re going to take a deeper look at multiplayer, both online and on the couch. Whether you're grabbing your friends and family for a night in with CATAN around the TV (whatever one of those things is), or challenging others online - across PlayStation, Xbox, or both - there's a lot to get through.

Couch Multiplayer is all about getting your family and friends together around the TV playing CATAN – Console Edition. Picture the scene if you will. Your buddies are round, you’ve gone all out and bought drinks and snacks and out of the blue one of them says “Shall we play a game?”. You panic, and a potato chip falls from your hand. You don’t own a single boardgame, then you remember, you have CATAN – Console Edition installed on whatever console you own and you’ve got 3 friends over! (Perfection)

Pick your characters, dice skin, and hex frame. Decide if you’d prefer the default board layout or, if you fancy mixing things up, opt for the variable set up which will randomise the 19 terrain hexes and 18 number tokens creating a new experience, every time!

Keep it secret, keep it safe. Everyone playing, scan the QR code on your device, select your character, and your resources and Development Cards will be safely hidden away from your competitors!

You also only need 1 controller that you can pass around depending on whose turn it is, just make sure no one throws it through a window!

We know that playing boardgames sat together around a table (or in our case, a TV) is how boardgames were originally meant to be experienced, but one of the amazing things about bringing CATAN to PlayStation and Xbox consoles is that you can play with your friends, wherever they are in the world, and with Crossplay, it doesn’t even matter if you have a PlayStation 4/5 and your pal has an Xbox One, X/S because CATAN - Console Edition features CROSSPLAY or should I say Cross-yay!?

Playing Online Multiplayer gives you all the same options when it comes to setting up a game as playing together in a room, the only difference when playing online is, no one can steal your snacks. To set up and join an Online Multiplayer game, the host sets up the game and gives that game a name, for example, “pants are optional”, tell your pals the name, they search for it, join, and off you go!

If you don’t have any friends and you just want to play online against other people just join the queue, this is also where you go if you want to try and increase your online rank by beating players of a similar skill level to you!

Everyone knows that the most important thing about games that have multiplayer is the ability to show the world how good you are and to induce immense fear into your opponents when they see you in a lobby.

For CATAN – Console Edition we achieve this through a five Star system! Everyone starts with two stars. If you remain a two-star player, you are either brand new to the game or and I’m sorry to say, awful (but that’s fine too as long as you’re having fun) on the flip side, if you are a five-star player, you are probably among the world’s greatest players! It’s also worth noting that who you are matched against is based on your Star level, so if you are brand new and have two stars, you can expect to be matched against other players with two stars.

Stars are earnt by winning games and can also be lost by losing games!

If you’ve got this far and are just thinking to yourself, “hmm, I don’t think I ever watched the first episode of this and I didn’t even know there was a CATAN – Console Edition till right now” then fear not, I’m here to steer you in the right direction.

CATAN - Console Edition, developed with our friends at Nomad Games, will be released for PlayStation and Xbox consoles February 28th and you can pre-order now, and regardless of which version you pre-order, you’ll benefit from Early Access to the game five whole days before general release on February 23rd!

*Xbox price. PlayStation version = £15.99

Catch you down the road, Catanians