| Author(s) | Title | Organization | Date | Link | GitHub |
| Jonathan Lamontagne-Kratz | RainbowZero: Combining Advancements in Search and Reinforcement Learning for Complex Environments | McGill University | 2026 | https://doi.org/10.26443/msurj.v21i2.428 | |
| Visakh Madathil | Can LLMs Play Catan? | independent (Catan Bench) | 2026 | https://visakhmadathil.com/blog/2026-02-09-can-llms-play-catan | https://github.com/vmmadathil/catan-bench |
| Ali W. Bekheet | Catan Multi-Agent RL Training System | Queen’s University | 2025 | https://bekheet.ca/projects/catan-rl.html | |
| Nikolas Belle, Dakota Barnes, Alfonso Amayuelas, Ivan Bercovich, Xin Eric Wang and William Wang | Agents of Change: Self-evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning | University of California, Santa Barbara, USA | 2025 | https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04651 | https://github.com/nbelle1/strategy-game-agents |
| Cole Miller, Christian Lindler | CatAnalysis: Neural MCTS for Multi-Agent Strategy Games | Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science | 2025 | https://www.thegravity.app/catanrl.pdf | |
| Wiktor Piszczek | Improving Settlers of Catan agents with Natural Language | University Leiden, Netherlands | 2025 | https://theses.liacs.nl/pdf/2024-2025-PiszczekWWiktor.pdf | |
| Ozzy Simpson, Lauren Schmidt, Marlena Alvino, Andrea Seno | Catan AI — Playing Catan with Monte Carlo Tree Search | catan-ai GitHub org (student team) | 2025 | https://catan-ai.github.io/project/ | https://catan-ai.github.io/project/ |
| G.J.B. Roelofs | Monte Carlo Tree Search in a Modern Board Game Framework | | 2012 | | |
| Andrea Martinenghi, Gregor Donabauer, Simona Amenta, Sathya Bursic, Mathyas Giudici, Udo Kruschwitz, Franca Garzotto and Dimitri Ogniben | LLMs of Catan: Exploring Pragmatic Capabilities of Generative Chatbots Through Prediction and Classification of Dialogue Acts in Boardgames’ Multi-party Dialogues | University of Milano-Bicocca / Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy / University of Regensburg, Germany | 2024 | | |
| Matthew Whelan, Nitin Maddi and Sidhardh Burre | Reinforcement Learning in Catan | University of Virginia, USA | 2023 | https://sidhardhburre.com/CS6501RL/final.pdf | |
| Henry Charlesworth | Learning to Play Settlers of Catan with Deep Reinforcement Learning | Rowden Technologies | 2022 | https://settlers-rl.github.io/ | https://github.com/henrycharlesworth/settlers_of_catan_RL |
| Brahim Driss and Tristan Cazenave | Deep Catan | Université Paris-Dauphine, France | 2022 | https://www.lamsade.dauphine.fr/~cazenave/papers/DeepCatanEvo.pdf | |
| Bryan Collazo | 5 Ways NOT to Build a Catan AI | | 2021 | https://medium.com/@bcollazo2010/5-ways-not-to-build-a-catan-ai-e01bc491af17 | https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron |
| Bryan Collazo | Catanatron | | 2021 | https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron | https://github.com/bcollazo/catanatron |
| Lauren Nagel | Analysis of ‘The Settlers of Catan’ using Markov Chains | Texas Christian University Fort Worth, USA | 2021 | https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/49062 | |
| Gabriël van der Kooij | Actor-Critic Catan: Reinforcement Learning in High-Strategic Environments | | 2020 | https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/40638 | |
| J. Dormans | Engineering emergence: applied theory for game design | University of Amsterdam, Netherlands | 2020 | | |
| John Spencer, Hillary Umphrey and Nikita Lilichenko | AA228 Final Project: Settlers of Catan Simulator | | 2020 | https://web.stanford.edu/class/aa228/reports/2020/final128.pdf | |
| Chris C. Kim and Aaron Y. Li | Re-L Catan: Evaluation of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Resource Management Under Competitive and Uncertain Environments | Stanford University, USA | 2020 | | |
| Masoud Masoumi Moghadam | Monte Carlo Tree Search: Implementing Reinforcement Learning in Real-Time Game Player – 3 | | 2020 | https://towardsdatascience.com/monte-carlo-tree-search-implementing-reinforcement-learning-in-real-time-game-player-a9c412ebeff5/ | |
| Masoud Masoumi Moghadam | Monte Carlo Tree Search: Implementing Reinforcement Learning in Real-Time Game Player – 2 | | 2020 | https://towardsdatascience.com/monte-carlo-tree-search-implementing-reinforcement-learning-in-real-time-game-player-25b6f6ac3b43 | |
| Quentin Gendre and Tomoyuki Kaneko | Playing Catan with Cross-dimensional Neural Network | The University of Tokyo, Japan | 2020 | https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07079 | |
| Martin L. Altenburg, Sandy Li, Benjamin I. Rocklin | Online Planning Methodologies in Settlers of Catan | Stanford University (AA228) | 2020 | https://web.stanford.edu/class/aa228/reports/2020/final31.pdf | |
| Peter McAughan, Arvind Krishnakumar, James Hahn and Shreeshaa Kulkarni | QSettlers: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Settlers of Catan | | 2019 | https://akrishna77.github.io/QSettlers/ | https://github.com/akrishna77/CS7641-Qsettlers |
| Mihai Sorin Dobre | Low-resource learning in complex games | University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics | 2019 | https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/35534 | |
| Konstantia Xenou, Georgios Chalkiadakis, Stergos Afantenos | Deep Reinforcement Learning in Strategic Board Game Environments | HAL Open Science | 2019 | https://hal.science/hal-02124411 | |
| Márton Attila Boda | Avoiding Revenge Using Optimal Opponent Ranking Strategy in the Board Game Catan | Szent István University, Gödöllő, Hungary | 2018 | https://doi.org/10.4018/IJGCMS.2018040103 | |
| Mihai Sorin Dobre and Alex Lascarides | POMCP with Human Preferences in Settlers of Catan | University of Edinburgh, Scotland | 2018 | | |
| Gabriel Rubin, Bruno Paz and Felipe Meneguzzi | Optimizing UCT for Settlers of Catan | Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil | 2017 | | |
| Mihai S. Dobre, Alex Lascarides | Exploiting Action Categories in Learning Complex Games | University of Edinburgh | 2017 | https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/alex/papers/intellisys.pdf | |
| Simon Keizer, Markus Guhe, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Ioannis Efstathiou, Klaus-Peter Engelbrecht, Mihai Dobre, Alex Lascarides, Oliver Lemon | Evaluating Persuasion Strategies and Deep Reinforcement Learning methods for Negotiation Dialogue agents | Heriot-Watt University / University of Edinburgh | 2017 | https://aclanthology.org/E17-2077.pdf | |
| Mihai S. Dobre, Alex Lascarides | Combining a Mixture of Experts with Transfer Learning in Complex Games | University of Edinburgh | 2017 | https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/alex/papers/aaai_ss_2017.pdf | |
| Emmanouil Karamalegos | Monte Carlo tree search in the Settlers of Catan strategy game | Technical University of Crete (ECE) | 2016 | https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.66891 | |
| Ioannis Efstathiou, Oliver Lemon | Learning Better Trading Dialogue Policies by Inferring Opponent Preferences | Heriot-Watt University | 2016 | https://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2016/pdfs/p1403.pdf | |
| Heriberto Cuayáhuitl, Simon Keizer and Oliver Lemon | Strategic Dialogue Management via Deep Reinforcement Learning | Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Scotland | 2015 | https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08099 | |
| Mihai Sorin Dobre and Alex Lascarides | Online learning and mining human play in complex games | University of Edinburgh, Scotland | 2015 | | |
| Takuya Hiraoka, Kallirroi Georgila, Elnaz Nouri, David Traum and Satoshi Nakamura | Reinforcement Learning in Multi-Party Trading Dialog | Nara Institute of Science and Technology / USC Institute for Creative Technologies | 2015 | | |
| Hassan Alsibyani, Tim Mickel, Willy Vasquez and Xiaoyue Zhang | Distributed Settlers of Catan | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA | 2015 | https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2014/files/07-alsibyani-mickel-vasquez-zhang-distributed-settlers-of-catan.pdf | |
| Markus Guhe and Alex Lascarides | Game Strategies for The Settlers of Catan | University of Edinburgh, Scotland | 2014 | | |
| Markus Guhe and Alex Lascarides | The Effectiveness of Persuasion in The Settlers of Catan | University of Edinburgh, Scotland | 2014 | | |
| Konstantinos-Panagiotis Panousis | Real-time planning and learning in the Settlers of Catan strategy game | Technical University of Crete (ECE) | 2014 | https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.18113 | |
| Anais Cadilhac, Nicholas Asher, Farah Benamara, Alex Lascarides | Grounding Strategic Conversation: Using negotiation dialogues to predict trades in a win-lose game | IRIT / CNRS Toulouse; University of Edinburgh | 2013 | https://aclanthology.org/D13-1035.pdf | |
| Markus Guhe | Trading in a multiplayer board game: Towards an analysis of non-cooperative dialogue | University of Edinburgh, Scotland | 2012 | | |
| István Szita, Guillaume Chaslot and Pieter Spronck | Monte-Carlo Tree Search in Settlers of Catan | Maastricht University / Tilburg University, Netherlands | 2010 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12993-3_3 | |
| Jeroen Geuze and Egon L. van den Broek | Intelligent Tutoring Agent for Settlers of Catan | Radboud University Nijmegen / University of Twente, Netherlands | 2006 | https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/19225046/Geuze06intelligent.pdf | |
| Robert Shaun Thomas | Real-time Decision Making for Adversarial Environments Using a Plan-based Heuristic | Northwestern University | 2003 | https://doi.org/10.1145/502716.502779 | https://github.com/jdmonin/JSettlers2 |
| Michael Pfeiffer | Reinforcement Learning of Strategies for Settlers of Catan | Graz University of Technology, Austria | 2004 | http://www.igi.tugraz.at/pfeiffer/documents/LAG-37_pfeiffer_2004.pdf | |
| Luca Branca and Stefan J. Johansson | Using Multi-agent System Technologies in Settlers of Catan Bots | Politecnico of Milan, Italy / Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden | | | |