![]() ![]() Choose well, and you’ll reap the rewards with each roll of the dice choose poorly (or unluckily) and you’ll quickly be cursing those choices. When my family plays, we try to make the tile selection process as “fair” as possible, evenly distributing the resources as well as the number tokens. Overall, we found the setup process easy and enjoyable-similar to putting together a simple puzzle with multiple moving pieces. In fact, my teenage son Charlie says that after winning, it’s his favorite part of the game.Ĭatan tends to be competitive until the last point is won (or stolen, depending on your perspective). Rolling: Each turn begins with a roll of the two dice whose sum will correspond to the number token on a hexagonal tile. If your settlement is adjacent to that tile, then you earn the resource that it represents. Settlements earn one resource card each and cities earn two. So, for example, if you placed two cities next to a mountain tile with a 5 on it, you’ll get four ore cards every time a 5 is rolled. The game also marks the number tokens with the probability that they’ll be rolled using one to five small dots. While the global economy spirals downward, the company says sales skyrocketed by 144% for the first five months of this year.Five dots and a red-colored number means that it’s one of the most likely numbers to be rolled (both 8 and 6 have this designation). In my opinion, part of the success is that women play together in the family with their husbands and with their children."Īs families shelter in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, sales of Catan have climbed. I think these are actually factors that women like. Teuber has a theory about why the game became so popular. Catan sales surged after it was released in the United States in 1996 and continued upward, prompting him to quit his day job. Sales didn't taper off after a few years, as with his previous award-winning games. When it was released in Germany in 1995 - as Die Siedler von Catan - it was an instant hit. It took him nearly four years to reduce the game to a single island ready to be explored and developed by players (the sea exploration segment was later sold as an expansion of the original game). The first draft "was very big," he says, and it included multiple islands and ships filled with settlers exploring new lands. ![]() And this gave me the idea to create a game of exploration and of settling," he says. "I was fascinated that they sailed the open sea and explored new lands like Iceland, Greenland or America, and in my imagination I considered what will they do when they come to Iceland? They'll need wood, they'll need to harvest food. Then, in the early 1990s, inspired by the history of the Vikings and the Age of Discovery. His first games did well: He won three Spiel des Jahres awards, a coveted prize in the board game industry. It is a board game of trade and development where players compete for resources in a race to build settlements, cities and roads. "That was the very first step for the later development of Catan," he says.Ĭatan, once known as The Settlers of Catan, would become Teuber's masterpiece. He remembers playing it by himself, pitting one army against the other over a pretend-landscape of rivers, plains and mountains that he had fashioned at his family's home in Rai-Breitenbach, a German village located at the foot of a castle and surrounded by forest. "It was a tabletop game with wonderful painted figures, and you had to role the dice to fight against the others," Teuber recalls. It was a game of Romans versus Carthaginians. ![]() "Ah, so wonderful! There is adventure in this box!" "When I opened the box of the game, I liked the scent of the game," he remembers, inhaling deeply. In 1963, 11-year-old Klaus Teuber received a gift that would change his life: a board game. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the game's launch, the elder Teuber has released an autobiography, My Way to Catan. Klaus Teuber, creator of the popular board game Catan, with his son Benjamin Teuber, a managing director at Catan Inc. ![]()
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