Catan was many people’s first exposure to a strategic board game that isn’t elimination-based. When your idea of what a board game is is defined by games like Monopoly or Risk, Catan is revelatory in a way that makes you try to convince everyone to give it a try, and so it became relatively mainstream.
It also still has some stuff to munch on, despite the dice still playing a huge part. You can feel some sort of tactical positioning more or less impossible in a lot of classic board games.
