# Welcome to Catanatron!

Catanatron is a high-performance simulator for The Settlers of Catan, designed to help you develop, test, and benchmark AI players. Whether you're a machine learning researcher, game developer, or just a Catan enthusiast curious about AI strategies, Catanatron provides the tools to explore the full strategic depth of the game at scale.

### What is Catanatron?

Catanatron is an open-source project that allows you to:

* Run thousands of Catan games per minute between different bots.
* Develop your own AI players with simple Python interfaces.
* Test strategies using weighted decision trees or custom algorithms.
* Train reinforcement learning agents using an OpenAI Gym-compatible environment.
* Web UI to watch, inspect, and play games against Catanatron!

### Getting Started

You can start simple by playing against catanatron at [https://www.catanatron.com](https://www.catanatron.com/).

Or jump right in:

<table data-view="cards"><thead><tr><th></th><th></th><th data-hidden data-card-cover data-type="files"></th><th data-hidden></th><th data-hidden data-card-target data-type="content-ref"></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>Getting Started</strong></td><td>Running a simulation</td><td><a href="https://2307297720-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fc1RWZmD8LVh4SmyKwO9W%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-3a9f37fc26fc0c0eb1899abaa05dcf0aacada057%2FScreenshot%202025-05-21%20103849.png?alt=media">Screenshot 2025-05-21 103849.png</a></td><td></td><td><a href="getting-started/quickstart">quickstart</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Simulation Hooks</strong></td><td>Learn how to compute statistics on simulations</td><td><a href="https://2307297720-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fc1RWZmD8LVh4SmyKwO9W%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-035e9713fb61e461725a96eee772ffb6df7903e4%2FScreenshot%202025-05-21%20104023.png?alt=media">Screenshot 2025-05-21 104023.png</a></td><td></td><td><a href="https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron/blob/master/documentation/broken-reference/README.md">https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron/blob/master/documentation/broken-reference/README.md</a></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Graphical User Interface</strong></td><td>Improve the web UI</td><td><a href="https://2307297720-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fc1RWZmD8LVh4SmyKwO9W%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-64272c55c34ef6d74b7b5db9e65feeb6fafb6199%2FCatanatronUI.png?alt=media">CatanatronUI.png</a></td><td></td><td><a href="https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron/blob/master/documentation/broken-reference/README.md">https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron/blob/master/documentation/broken-reference/README.md</a></td></tr></tbody></table>