Built to last: 30 years on, the legacy of Catan

The magic of the boardgame is that everyone stays invested, and must collaborate. New spinoffs are themed on fossil fuels, global warming, indigenous rights.

There wasn’t a lot going on in the world of tabletop gaming in the early 1990s.

The boardgame requires players to strategise but also collaborate, in order to make the most of their resources, as they build new settlements.

Most games seemed to fall into familiar patterns. Classics such as Scrabble thrived in social gatherings, yet at its core, this was a game of individual pursuit. Being a real-estate tycoon in the eternally popular Monopoly was exhilarating, until the hours dragged on and resentment grew. For a niche few, role-playing tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Darkness offered an escape into immersive storytelling. In miniature war games such as Warhammer 40,000, hobbyists meticulously assembled armies and battlefields from pieces that were first made of metal and later of plastic.

Around this time, frustrated by his exhausting 14-hour job, the German dental technician Klaus Teuber began to create boardgames of his own. Year after year he did this, with some of his games becoming cult hits, and three of them winning awards.

Then, seven years in, he came up with a game inspired by the Viking voyages from Scandinavia to Iceland. This became his passion project.

Die Siedler von Catan (The Settlers of Catan), launched in 1995, would go on to shake up the industry.

Klaus Teuber.

In the year of its launch, this game of resource collection and trading, where players build roads and settlements in a fictional world to reach 10 victory points, won the industry’s most coveted prize, the German Spiel des Jahres (or, Game of the Year).

Thirty years on, Catan GmbH has sold more than 45 million units of the game worldwide (for scale, Monopoly, one of the world’s best-selling boardgames, has sold over 275 million units in 90 years).

Catan is available in 40 languages (including Estonian, Greek and Slovenian). There are now six official versions of the game, several digital ones, a number of expansions. Scenarios featuring pirates, barbarians and knights have been released. There are numerous spinoffs too (more on those in a bit).

Teuber lived long enough to see the boom; he died in 2023, aged 70. His sons Guido Teuber and Benjamin Teuber now run the business.

“I was fascinated that they sailed the open sea and explored new lands like Iceland, Greenland or America,” Klaus Teuber told NPR in an interview in 2020. “In my imagination I considered: What will they do when they come to Iceland? They’ll need wood, they’ll need to harvest food. And this gave me the idea to create a game of exploration and of settling.”

GRAIN EXPECTATIONS

The game isn’t highly competitive but requires careful strategy.

Players collect some resources (bricks, sheep, wood, grain, ore) at the start of the game; more accumulate based on rolls of the dice, so luck plays a small role. The key is really collaboration. Everyone will need something from someone else, so the group must negotiate. While each player simultaneously tries to keep every other player from winning.

(A critical game element is the robber token, which forces players to part with too many resources or steal from others to slow their progress.)

The game prioritise skill over luck and cooperation over direct conflict, actively discouraging the hoarding of resources.

What made this trading of wood for sheep so appealing to so many?

Catan, it turned out, fit neatly into the genre of Eurogames, which are tightly designed tabletop strategy games that trace their roots to 1960s Germany, and games such as the real-estate-based Acquire (1964).

Eurogames typically require efficient resource management to mirror economic or agricultural realities. They prioritise skill over luck and cooperation over direct conflict, and actively discourage the hoarding of resources.

They were designed to keep all players involved on all turns, points out Greg Loring-Albright, an assistant professor of game studies and design at Harrisburg University. Eurogames were built on another key insight: losing is tolerable, but being eliminated from a game prematurely is worse. So they typically delay scoring until the end.

For Teuber’s generation of Germans (he was born in 1952), growing up in the wake of World War 2, games focused on building rather than warfare were considered more appropriate too.

As his new creation met with unparalleled success, Teuber responded by quitting his day job to become a rare full-time game designer, in 1998.

As Settlers of Catan made its way to Silicon Valley corporate retreats and networking events, it grew into such a benchmark that boardgame history is still spoken of, by fans of this genre, in terms of BC (Before Catan) and AC (After Catan).

In 2007, the game’s online platform PlayCatan.com (now CatanUniverse.com) was launched; by 2009 it was available for smartphones too. Merchandise became available by 2010: plushies called Catanimals, which were soft toy versions of the brick, wood, grain and sheep.

Plushies of sheep, wheat, ore, brick and wood.

HEX APPEAL

In keeping with the spirit of the game, Catan GmbH encourages independent spinoffs, under a generous fair-use policy.

Even today, the website states that “while Catan GmbH and Catan Studio will vigorously defend their IP ownership rights… we encourage our consumers and trade customers to employ our IP freely for personal use.” This has led to several variants.

Catan Scenarios: Oil Springs (2011), designed by sustainability researchers Erik Assadourian and Ty Hansen for the Worldwatch Institute, introduced oil as a tradable resource, adding the risk of environmental damage and natural disasters among the consequences of such trade.

The First Nations of Catan (2015), designed by game-studies researcher Loring-Albright, aims to decolonise gameplay by drawing attention to issues of indigenous sovereignty. This variant introduces a nomadic, indigenous player who moves their tribe across the board, rather than building a fixed network of settlements. “As someone who lives and grew up in the US on land that was stolen from its indigenous population, I couldn’t help but connect the actions of players in Catan to the history of my location,” he says.

(Incidentally, the original game was rebranded in 2015 too, and is now simply Catan.)

Sam Illingworth, professor of creative pedagogies at the UK’s Edinburgh Napier University, co-designed Catan: Global Warming in 2019. The idea came from a wish to move beyond one-way climate messages, he says. In this version, the island is destroyed if greenhouse gas levels breach a certain limit. Players must decide between boosting production, letting land lie fallow or paying a green tax.

“This forces a real conversation about collective loss versus individual victory,” Illingworth says. “Players talk about how small choices snowball, why shared rules matter, and how the rising target on the greenhouse gas tracker mirrors rising difficulty over time.”

NEW GREEN DEALS

The official makers have taken some steps in this direction too. Catan: New Energies was released last year, asking players to decide between investing in clean-energy resources or opting for cheaper fossil fuels.

As in real life, the most sustainable player isn’t guaranteed a win and, as in any game of Catan, there are multiple paths to victory. However, if the game ends in catastrophe caused by extreme pollution, the player who invested the most in renewable energy is declared the winner. Meanwhile, to mark the game’s 30th anniversary, a redesigned edition was released this year.

So many resource-management games have followed in its path.

Carcassonne (2000) lets players place tiles to build a map of cities, roads and fields. Ticket to Ride (2004) uses a card set to build train routes. Concordia (2013) uses a card-based system to allow players to build trade networks.

Like Catan, each aims to be a safe social space where people can experiment with ideas and choices, talk through consequences, practise (or learn) the art of dialogue.

Perhaps most vitally, “the power of such boardgames is that their pieces, parts and stories are accessible to anyone,” as Loring-Albright puts it. “No special skills required.”