What Island Guiding Island Plates Actually Are
Island Guiding Island Plates are the rule sheets and setup templates you use when you play a custom island map in Catan. They aren't a separate product anymore — the official Catan Island expansion came out in 2018, and the guide maps that come with it serve as Island Guiding Island Plates. You lay out the pre-printed island grid according to one of the published layouts, then fill in the hexes with the appropriate terrain tiles. The plates tell you which number tokens go where and how many cities, settlements, and roads each player gets at setup. The official PDFs are available straight from Catan.com under the Island expansion page. There's also a community-scanned version on BoardGameGeek if the official link is broken. I've used both, and the BGG scan is slightly higher resolution but includes some forum watermark noise. If you're printing at home, just do single-sided letter-size sheets, no scaling. I ran a set through a standard laser printer once without issues. If you want something more durable, laminate them or throw them in a sheet protector. They get folded and refolded constantly during a game, so flimsy paper turns into confetti after three sessions. The files are free. No account required. Just grab the setup guide and the island map variants from the expansion manual. The PDF contains six different island layouts, each with a fixed tile assignment and a pre-placed robber zone. There are also variant cards you can cut out, though I just keep those in a sleeve deck.
Setting Up an Island Game Step by Step
Start by picking one of the six layouts from the Island Guiding Island Plates. Lay the island baseplate in the center of the table. It has a distinct outer border — make sure the ocean side faces outward. The baseplate itself holds the 36 hexes in a specific pattern, with 12 gaps around the edge that become water. Each layout in the guide tells you exactly which terrain type goes in each interior hex. Follow it precisely. The whole point of the guide plates is that the distribution is balanced. Deviate and you end up with a map where one player has six wheat hexes and the other gets three rocks total. Once the terrain is placed, put the number tokens on the matching hexes exactly as shown. Then place the robber on the indicated ocean hex — yes, the robber starts off the main island during setup. That's intentional. The robber blocks a sea route until it's moved into play. Flip the robber to its pirate side if you're using the pirate variant, which is common in Island games. Set up the resources. Each player gets their starting dice, development cards, and building pieces from the main box. The Island expansion adds two new resource types: gold and ore chips depending on the variant. Keep those separate from the standard wheat, brick, sheep, wood, and ore piles. I learned that the hard way. I mixed gold tokens in with the ore during a casual game and spent ten minutes trying to figure out why someone could trade four gold for a road when the rules clearly say gold is a wild resource only usable in specific trades. Nobody noticed until turn four.
Place your first settlement. On an island map, every settlement must be adjacent to the coast. That means any interior hex that isn't next to water is a no-build zone. The guide plates mark these with faint outline graphics, but don't rely on them alone. Count the water-adjacent hexes yourself before placing anything. A typical six-hex coastal arc gives you maybe four valid placement spots in a row. Run out of space quickly if two players are settling on the same side.
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Common Pitfalls and What I've Learned the Hard Way
The biggest issue with Island Guiding Island Plates is that people treat the layout as a suggestion rather than a fixed template. The numbers on the board aren't randomly placed for flavor. Each layout is mathematically balanced around probability curves. If you swap a 6-8 corridor into a 3-10 zone because you think it looks better, you're breaking the statistical foundation of the game. The robber starting position is also critical. Move it even one hex and you're either enabling early long road dominance or creating a bottleneck that stalls the game for twelve turns. Here's a specific edge case I hit: playing the "Penguin Port" variant with five players. The guide plate assumes four. When I added a fifth player using the solo expansion rules, the starting resources didn't scale properly and two players ended up with duplicate settlement placement rights on the same coast segment. I resolved it by having the extra player start with one less resource card and place their first settlement after the second round of normal placement, using the remaining unoccupied coastal hexes. It wasn't in any rulebook. It just worked. I've used that workaround ever since for any five-player island game. Another thing nobody mentions: the isolation mechanic. Some island layouts have land bridges connecting two larger landmasses. Those bridges are one-hex wide and extremely valuable for the Longest Road. But they're also death traps if you settle too close to them. I once built a settlement right next to a bridge on a 7-8 hex configuration. Opponent rolled a 7 on turn two, moved the robber onto the bridge hex, and blocked my only outgoing trade route for the rest of the game. I lost by four points. Don't settle within two hexes of a bridge unless you control both ends.
When Island Guiding Island Plates Don't Work
These templates are designed for standard Catan rules. If you're playing with house rules, expansion hybrids, or custom variants outside the official Island set, the plates may give you instructions that contradict your variant. The pirate expansion, for instance, adds encounter cards that override some of the standard trading rules. The base plates don't account for that. Use the official variant supplement separately and ignore the conflicting sections of the guide. Also, the Island expansion assumes you have the base game and the Harbor variant. If you're missing the harbor tiles or playing a simplified version, several of the six layouts become unplayable because they depend on specific coastal hex types that don't exist in your copy. In that case, stick to the simpler three-variant layouts and construct your own guidance sheet. It takes about twenty minutes to draw one on graph paper, and you'll know the probabilities better than the printed version anyway. The files themselves are straightforward PDFs. No registration, no DRM, no activation codes. Print what you need, play the game, update your sheets when a new variant drops. That's the whole process.
