YMMV / Catan

• Broken Base: The "Cities and Knights" expansion either completes the base game's vision, adds tons of strategy, and makes a more exciting game, or it's too punishing to be fun.
• Fan Nickname: Players will often rename resources and other items to their liking. Ore will be rocks, grain will be wheat, clay becomes bricks, and wool is usually sheep. The Barbarians are also commonly shortened to Barbs.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Aqueduct in the Cities & Knights expansion allows players to have production even when their resource numbers aren't rolled. Players who get this early usually have a huge advantage.
  • Getting at least two "monopoly" development cards and playing them well can pretty much set the outcome of one single game, but of course, it requires some luck beforehand.
  • A more minor example - players who manage to have lots of settlements or (especially!) cities on a particular resource, along with the "two-for-one" trading port for that resource, basically get a low-level version of "pick whatever resource you like when the right roll comes in".
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While Europe, Germany in particular, had games of its ilk beforehand, Catan was the first Eurogame to break into the US mainstream and remains popular to this day.
• Memetic Loser: Sheep, thanks to their relative uselessness in the game's early stages (if you aren't really trying to get development cards, they're mostly useless in the end stages as well). There are actually t-shirts that say "Nobody wants your fucking sheep." In the expansions, one greatly boosts sheep's importance (Seafarers), while another makes it an even bigger joke (Cities & Knights) as the "trade" tech tree is the weakest of the three.
• Memetic Mutation: "Wood for Sheep".
• Periphery Demographic: The Green Bay Packers and their fans. When word got out that this game was a locker-room favorite of several Packers players, sales for the game skyrocketed in Wisconsin.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In the computer game, trading with the computer players can be this way. If the computer wants a specific resource, you'll get a request to trade X for Y. No problem. However, sometimes when you say no, the computer will try every combination of possible products to request from you, such as X for Z, X for A, X for B, W for Y, etc. THEN it will possibly try offering X for TWO Z, etc. To add insult to injury, if you refuse all of these combinations, if it has sufficient resources, it will trade with the deck at the standard 2/3/4 for 1 exchange rate to get what it needs, and then start all over with the trade requests from square one AGAIN. There is actually an option to refuse all trade requests until your next turn, but that goes for every opponent, no matter that some may want to trade you for items that you don't mind giving up, or that you may receive additional resources in subsequent turns that change your trade desires. Why they didn't include an option to "Refuse all requests from THIS player until your next turn" is unknown. Trading in the real game with other human players is seldom so annoying.
• Spiteful A.I.: With a heavy dose of Gang Up on the Human and The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, the AI players literally throw their lives at the human player so that at least one of them can win. The resource dice will almost always land on wherever the AI has tiles occupied, and the "robber 7" will let the AI ALWAYS drop the robber in a manner that harms the player the most.
• Scrub: Since settlements must be at least two vertices apart, placing a settlement an odd number of vertices away from another will reduce the number of legal build-spots for everyone, sometimes sharply. Sometimes Scrubs arise who insist that this shouldn't be legal, and everyone should be required to place settlements for maximum density.

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