A TUI familiar to fans of the real game
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 aren’t to everyone’s tastes, and with plenty of licensed Catan games available, including digital editions for mobile and consoles, this isn’t by any stretch a definitive experience.
But, if you enjoy using terminal apps and you love resource hoarding Catan (only it’s not Catan-Catan cos, y’know, trademarks and all), you’re sure to find El Poblador an ingenious yet faithful command-line recreation.
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
Replace the names in the command with the names you want to use. If you need a fourth player, append 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, and the creator encourages community packages to be made.
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