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I have been playing catan for at least 6 years, following a trip to the Netherlands where I encountered the game. For the whole time, I have played that, on a role of 7, the player cannot build or deploy dev cards, in addition to the robber business.

Recently I have checked the rules site and been disabused of this notion. Have the rules of Catan been changed at all since its creation?

I have a strong recollection of checking the rule book and verifying that one could not use dev cards on a 7 role, but I could well be delusional.

I enjoy playing with this set of house rules, but it is useful to be familiar with the RAW when you play with new people.

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    While there have been a few various changes; the rule you describe was never a rule. It is not uncommon for Catan to be played with various house rules; so it could just be that the people who taught you the game taught you their own house rules as well.
    – GendoIkari
    Commented Jul 26, 2018 at 21:49

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I think this is worth an explicit answer, but I agree with @ConMan and @Gendolkari in the comments of the question and @JoeW's answer.

Yes, there have been many minor changes in the rules.

No, you have never been restricted from taking other actions following a roll of a 7. You always get your turn as normal.

One possible source of confusion in this area is the limit on playing 1 development card per turn. Using a knight before your roll in many ways replicates the actions of rolling a 7 (excluding the hand size based card loss). It is possible these two things have been conflated in a house rule.

Annotated Rules From the linked annotated Rules from 1st Edition.

(3) After discarding occurs, you also steal 1 Resource Card at random from a player who has a settlement or city adjacent to this new hex. The player who is robbed holds his Resource Card hand face down. You then take 1 at random. If there are 2 or more players with buildings there, you may choose from which one to steal.

The robber must be moved. You may not choose to leave the robber in the same hex. After moving the robber, your turn continues with the trade phase.

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    I think I may have misread the above rule as skipping the build phase, as we always explicitly allowed trading. Thank you!
    – Dent7777
    Commented Jul 31, 2018 at 15:56
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Yes, there has been many updates to the rules over the years and they are generally updated each time a new version was released and they have made notes of that in the rule book. For reference there is a question on this site asking about changes for 5th edition as there was a note in the rule book about them but not what they where.

What are the rules updates for Catan in the 5th edition? Are there any?

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    While it's true that the rules have been updated, as far as I can tell there has never been a rule stating that rolling a 7 means you don't build or trade. The main change from 3rd edition to 4th was allowing the robber to be placed on the desert.
    – ConMan
    Commented Jul 26, 2018 at 23:28
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    Yeah I've never heard of that rule, at least as far back as 2e
    – The Chaz 2.0
    Commented Jul 27, 2018 at 0:10

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