Play Cities & Knights online: free, 2 to 6 players, with bots

Where you can play Cities & Knights online

Four places run Cities & Knights in a browser or an app. They differ most on who pays and whether the computer can fill a seat.

Colonist has the biggest crowd for ranked games and CATAN Universe is the official game. If you want to play tonight without paying, or you want the computer to sit in for a friend who cancelled, Hearthsea is built for that.

What’s in Hearthsea’s Cities & Knights

It follows the 2025 sixth-edition rules. Everything the box does, the table does for you:

• Knights in three strengths, basic, strong and mighty. One grain wakes a knight, and only awake knights defend.
• The barbarian ship on a seven-space track. The event die moves it, and when it lands every city on the island counts against the knights.
• Commodities. Cities on forest, pasture and mountains give paper, cloth or coin as well as a resource.
• Three improvement tracks, science, trade and politics, each five levels high, with a metropolis for the first to level 4.
• All 54 progress cards in 25 kinds, from Alchemy to Wedding, the merchant and Defender of the island points.
• City walls, up to three, each letting you hold two more cards when a 7 is rolled.

You play on 27 islands: the Classic maps, where you race to 13 points, and eight Seafarers maps with ships, where the target is two above the map’s own. Fog stays off in this mode, because the barbarians come in clear weather.

Playing with friends: a room code

Open Online, make a room and choose Cities & Knights as the mode. You get a four-letter room code to send to your friends; on the same Wi-Fi they can scan a QR code instead. Seats nobody takes can go to bots, so a group of three still gets a four-player island.

Five and six players take paired turns: after each turn, the player sitting three seats on takes a build turn alongside, so the wait between your turns stays short. Two players roll the production dice twice a turn, so the island keeps producing with only two of you on it.

Rated quick match

If you’d rather play strangers, Quick match seats you at the fullest Cities & Knights table that is waiting and opens a new one when none is. Quick match games are rated from the mode’s first day and count toward your rating like any other mode.

Practising against bots

Cities & Knights has more to keep track of than any other mode, and the first barbarian attack punishes anyone who learns that late. A game against bots is the quickest way to learn when to wake your knights. Choose Play solo, pick the mode and seat Settlers, Merchants or Veterans.

The bots play the whole ruleset: they recruit and promote knights, build walls, climb the tracks, race for metropolises and play progress cards, Sabotage included. The board at the top of this page is a bot game.

Is it really free?

Yes. Cities & Knights is free on every Hearthsea account, today and after the free month: it was never behind a pass. You need a free account, so the game can keep your rating, your trophies and your games across devices. We earn money from cosmetics, such as houses, dice and characters, and none of them changes the odds.

Questions people ask

Sources

Facts about Hearthsea come from the game itself. Facts about other sites come from their own pages, listed below, checked on 15 October 2026.

1. CATAN – Cities & Knights, catan.com
2. Colonist store: membership tiers, expansions and bot support
3. CATAN Universe FAQ: free download and CATAN Gold
4. Board Game Arena: CATAN game page

Keep reading

• Cities & Knights rules: everything that changes
• Cities & Knights strategy: tracks, knights and timing
• We simulated 10,000 games of Cities & Knights

CATAN is a registered trademark of Catan GmbH. Hearthsea is an independent game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Catan GmbH or its publishers. Other game names belong to their owners and are used here only to describe and compare.