El Poblador is a fully playable Settlers of Catan clone that runs entirely in your terminal.
Written in Go by developer vicho, El Poblador is a compete rendition of the iconic competitive board game, which is all about resources, trading, building settlements and blocking your opponents.
All of Catan’s core mechanics are accounted for, albeit free of the tactile joy of handling and placing tiny wooden blocks in the real game.
It’s a game designed for 3-4 players, so you’ll want to huddle around a laptop or on a PC to play it.
You use arrow keys to navigate the TUI and smush enter to okay an actions or esc to cancel it. Keyboard number keys are used to switch between player perspectives.
Games can be saved mid-session and loaded back up, so you’re not committed to finishing in one sitting. A nice touch.
Local multiplayer game only for now, but online play is on the developer’s to-do list, alongside a few other mechanics pulled from the real thing.
TUIs are to everyone’s tastes, and plenty of licensed Catan games are available on mobile, consoles etc. But if you’re fan of terminals and resource hoarding Catan (only not Catan-Catan cos, y’know, trademarks and all), it’s worth trying it out.
Here’s how to try it on Ubuntu
You’ll need Go installed, so first open your preferred terminal and run:
sudo apt install golang-go
Next, install El Poblador from its official repo:
go install git.sr.ht/~vicho/el_poblador@latest
Finally, launch a new three player game:
~/go/bin/el_poblador new Joey Elijah Scott
You can replace the names in start command with the names you need, obviously. For a fourth player, just add another name to the list.
El Poblador is licensed under EUPL v1.2, with the game’s code hosted on sourcehut. You’ll find builds available for download there, if you’d rather those (the creator encourages community packages to be made).