Practise against bots
One click opens a private table with two bots. Learn a map, test a strategy, or play when nobody else is around.
The quickest game on New Shores is the one you start alone. Practice vs bots on the home page makes a room, seats two medium bots and starts — no lobby, no waiting. Bots are driven by the server, so they play the same rules through the same engine you do, and they take about a second a move.
Three difficulties
| Easy | Loose placement and random-ish choices. For learning the turn structure without being punished. |
|---|---|
| Medium | Greedy heuristics: values corners by production and scarcity, builds toward what it is short of, accepts trades that help it. |
| Hard | Port-aware and diversity-aware placement, maritime bailouts when it is stuck, better use of development and progress cards. |
Ways to use them
- Learn a map. Try a seafaring scenario or Cities & Knights against easy bots before bringing it to friends.
- Fill seats. Three friends on a four-seat map? Add one bot. A six-seat board with four people? Add two.
- Keep a game alive. If a human drops out mid-game, their seat goes to autopilot after three missed turns, and they can reclaim it when they return.
What the bots will not do
- Propose trades. They answer yours; they do not open negotiations.
- Collude or soft-play. Each bot plays for itself.
- Finish every game on every map. On the tightest boards they can run out of ways to score and stall near the end — a known limit, not a bug in your game.
Common questions
- How do I start a game against bots?
- Press Practice vs bots on the home page. It opens a private room with you and two medium bots and starts at once. In any lobby you can also add bots seat by seat at easy, medium or hard.
- How good are the bots?
- Easy plays loosely. Medium uses greedy heuristics — it values spots by production and scarcity and trades when an offer helps it. Hard adds port-aware placement, diversity of resources and bank bailouts when it is stuck.
- Do the bots trade?
- They accept offers that help them, judged by what they are short of. They do not propose trades of their own.
- Do bots play the expansions?
- Yes, all of them: ships and the pirate, gold choices, knights, improvements, every Cities & Knights prompt. A bot never stalls the table.
- Do games against bots count on the leaderboard?
- No. Only finished games with at least two human players are ranked, so practising cannot farm the board.
New Shores is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Catan GmbH, Catan Studio, Colonist or any other game publisher. Other games are named only to describe what kind of game this is and to compare it honestly.