Henrik Mølmer

Henrik Mølmer has been playing Catan since 2010. Base game first, then the 5–6 player extension, Seafarers, Cities & Knights, Traders & Barbarians — somewhere along the way he stopped counting sessions and started keeping a spreadsheet of opening placements instead.

The problem he kept running into: every Catan night started with the same five-minute argument about whether the board was fair. He tried the official "swap one red number" rule. He tried random-but-careful shuffles. He tried apps that claimed to balance the board and then quietly produced corners with three red numbers in a row. Nothing worked the way he wanted — a generator that enforced the probability math, supported every expansion, and produced a shareable seed URL so the whole table could place from the same fair starting position.

So in 2025 he built one. The Cartographer's Almanac generator is what came out: a constraint-aware shuffler that enforces no-adjacent-reds, resource diversification, and pip-balanced corners across base Catan, the 5–6 expansion, Seafarers, Cities & Knights, and Traders & Barbarians.

The Almanac — the blog you're reading — grew from notes he was already keeping for himself. His favourite expansion is Cities & Knights. His favourite closing combo is the year-of-plenty lock at 8 victory points. He edits the Almanac with two principles: explain the math before the tactics, and never write a sentence a tournament player would roll their eyes at.

How rules content is sourced: every rules page and rules-FAQ Q&A on this site is written against the official CATAN rulebooks — the 5th edition base rulebook plus the official rulebooks for the 5–6 player extension, Seafarers (3–4 and 5–6), Cities & Knights (3–4 and 5–6), and Traders & Barbarians (3–4 and 5–6). Each rulebook section is re-read before the corresponding page is published. Where the rulebook is ambiguous on an edge case, the page says so plainly rather than invent a definitive answer.

How probability content is sourced: probability claims on the site are derived from the 36-outcome two-dice distribution — pip values, expected rolls per 36 turns, red-number adjacency probabilities, and the constraint logic the generator uses to enforce balance. The numbers are not borrowed from secondary articles; the calculation is shown rather than asserted. See the /catan-probability reference page for the full tables.

How corrections are handled: if something here is wrong, the contact form is the fastest route. The full correction policy — including how substantive corrections are noted on the affected page — is published openly at /editorial-policy.

Independence: this site is not affiliated with CATAN GmbH, Catan Studio, or any board-game publisher. No sponsored content, no affiliate links, no free product in exchange for coverage. The site is monetised exclusively through Google AdSense, disclosed in full on the editorial policy page.