Colonist Con 2023

Colonist Con is an annual live stream where you can meet the Colonist team, hear about the latest updates for the platform, and watch some of the greatest Catan players ever battle it out in an exhibition game.

Colonist.io was founded by two brothers who wanted to connect with their family by playing Settlers of Catan online. There was no good way to get their fix back in 2017... so they built it themselves.

Since then, brothers Demi “Demiculus” Yilmaz and Goktug “Esqarrouth” Yilmaz have built the company to over 10 full-time team members, and over one million active monthly users.

Colonist provides a platform for casual and professional players alike. Our leaderboards are the most important way that the best Catan players across the world measure their skill.

Our mission is to continue to be the industry standard for online Settlers of Catan, as well continuing to build the Catan community.

Meet the Team

Colonist Con was hosted this year by Jack “Ushpuppy” Usher. Ushpuppy is a long-time member of the online Catan community , and often ranks highly on the Colonist leaderboards in his own right. We even got a glimpse of the ‘real’ Ushpuppy!

This year’s stream gave the Colonist community an opportunity to meet the team behind the game. Co-founders Demi and Goku gave us an insight into the history of the company and how it grew from a black and white prototype to now facilitating up to 100k games a day!

We met Rob Schwartz and Devyesh Tandon, who are leading new platform development for Colonist. Later on we met the lead developer Jeff d’Eon, who is so dedicated that he builds Colonist on weekends.

We also caught up with London-born, German-speaking Florida man Paul Lorenzen who leads recruiting at Colonist. Paul hinted at future openings to watch out for and shared his thoughts on working at Colonist.

Goku spoke about the main focus of the company this year: growing the playerbase. His mission for the platform is to make it as accessible to new players as possible. At Colonist, every aspect of the development process is centered around making the experience better for players.

The Exhibition Match

Enter the most anticipated event of Colonist Con: The star-studded Exhibition Match.

We assembled some of the best players to ever play Settlers of Catan and pitted them in a match to the death (or 10 victory points, whatever comes first).

Introducing the one and only Dylan “Dylighted” Lu. Dylighted is currently the biggest Catan content creator, and has worked closely with the Colonist team to improve the product for years now. The community has affectionately dubbed him the “slowest man to take a turn” in the history of Catan.

Against him was recently crowned US National champion Griffin Burstyn aka 'Griff1n', Brazilian National Champion Felipe Maranha aka ‘Shanks’, and Australian Champion Elliott Yap aka ‘Cooldool’.

To see who came out on top in the much-anticipated Exhibition Match, you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QZL6VrKS0E

We Know How Important the Colonist Community is

The Colonist team knows how important the community is. We always want to hear your suggestions. Join the Discord to connect with our team directly: https://discord.onl/colonist-io/

If you think you have what it takes to join the colonist team, we are now hiring: https://colonist.io/careers