“I developed games to escape,” Catan’s creator, Klaus Teuber, told the New Yorker in 2014. “This was my own world I created.”
Teuber died April 1, but he leaves behind hundreds of millions of six-sided pieces — clean shards of his flat, colorful world, arranged neatly (or not so neatly) in a red box, to be pulled from under the bed whenever we get bummed out by the rigged, ragged rules of the real world. Since Catan’s birth 28 years ago, more than 40 million copies have been sold, according to the company. Translate that volume into albums, and Catan rivals the cultural penetration of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” or the soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever.”
I grew up in the 1990s, in a house without Nintendo, playing antique products of the Great Depression and the Cold War: Monopoly and Risk, with their 20th-century mandates of greed and confrontation. The exorbitance of Park Place, the alien sound of Kamchatka and Irkutsk — these were backward-feeling games that urged ravenous competition. The board game of my eventual adulthood, my pandemic, was being born around that time, but it would not become globally popular for several years.
In the ’90s, as I was fiendishly fortifying the Americas on a 1959 board of Risk, Teuber, a dental technician from a small village in central Germany, was descending into his basement to escape the doldrums of dentures and to craft a sort of utopia in the form of a board game. It would be a game of graceful simplicity, requiring both competition and cooperation, that would invalidate the zero-sum, total-war ethos of prior parlor pursuits. His invention was born of a childhood rapt by the beauty of an atlas.
“I loved the old, musty-smelling, ragged maps that were rolled out as lessons,” Teuber wrote in his 2021 memoir. “I loved travelling in them in my imagination. Over mountain ranges in brown hues, the green valleys, blue rivers and lakes.” In elementary school, he began making maps of his own. He was fascinated by the Vikings, pictured their arrival in Iceland, envisioned the materials they would’ve needed to build a settlement. Teuber loved geography, then history, then chemistry. You need the essence of all three things, he would say later, to create a good board game.
In his basement he made hexagons of wool, ore, wood, brick and wheat that would make up an otherwise characterless, mystical island (“Catan” had no special meaning, he said). Players would stake out initial territory and use those natural resources to build roads, then settlements, then cities. Catan’s genius is its intrinsic leveling dynamics. On a board of finite resources, it was impossible to succeed without working with your opponents; academics made it a metaphor for nuclear proliferation and then climate change. Dice added luck and chance to a game of strategy and bartering, which kept all players involved even when it wasn’t their turn to roll.
The Settlers of Catan, as it was first called, debuted in Germany in 1995 and the United States in 1996. In Europe it won prizes and filled convention halls. Its success allowed Teuber to quit the dental field in 1998, though he never lost the qualities of a man whose initial tradecraft was small, precise implements for delicate parts of the body. Among hobbyists and gamers he was revered like a rock star, but he looked and acted and sounded like a man who tinkered with stuff in his basement. He didn’t have the swagger (or the command of English) to fully engage with American praise or interrogation. He was, at heart, a hobbyist.
Teuber credited a 2009 story in Wired magazine — headlined “Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre” — for helping to mainstream Catan in the United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a fan. At one point the Green Bay Packers had a Catan obsession. During the first five months of 2020, as covid colonized Earth, sales of Catan climbed 144 percent, according to NPR.
I was one of the buyers. This sounds insane, but it was true in the darker months of 2020 and 2021: A game of Catan was a Brigadoon of cheer in an America gone rotten. Even now, a game of Catan at the end of a workweek — with all its slights, disappointments, imperfections and imbalances — settles a bit of the chaos. Or at least brings a gathering of friends together for more than repetitive gossip. It doesn’t require a cosplay fetish or a familiarity with specific lore. It takes skill, but not mastery; rookie players can win. It urges exuberant competition, not destruction. Players are in a race to accumulate points, and territorial disputes occur, but they are not truly at war.
“Monopoly has you grinding your opponents into dust,” gamer Derk Solko told Wired, years earlier. “If I could wave a magic wand and replace all the copies of Monopoly out there with Settlers, I truly think the world would be a better place.”
Teuber, despite his reserved nature, also viewed his creation as a kind of beacon. At the world championships of Catan, “I saw a lot of people from all nations sitting together and playing without hate, without, um — how do you call that?” Teuber said during a 2020 Zoom interview, fishing for the English word before offering up the German: “Vorurteile…”
“Prejudices?” said one of his sons, who was also on the Zoom.
“Prejudices,” confirmed Teuber, sitting in his plain studio in Rosdorf, Germany, looking like anybody’s grandfather who just came home from golf. “And it was a wonderful moment. And I thought, okay, would be [a] nice thing when statesmen of all countries would play more together and learn from each other that there are other ways to act.”
Maybe something was lost in translation here. It’s just a board game, after all, not evidence for a Nobel Prize. But if a man’s legacy is a simple, affordable, transportable device that brings people together, in any corner of the world, and then leaves them feeling better — well, I’d put that up against any cease-fire, invention or discovery. Klaus Teuber escaped to his basement to create his own world, and in doing so made ours a little bit better.
