It may be the most popular leisure product to come out of Germany since Adi Dassler, the founder of Adidas, invented athletic shoes in 1920. Like Dassler’s footwear, it requires speed and agility – but only in terms of swift resource allocation, a nimble competitive strategy, and a brisk roll of the dice.
It’s a board game called “The Settlers of Catan,” created by 56-year-old Klaus Teuber of Rossdorf, Germany. Now available in more than 30 languages, and copious scenarios and versions – including Climate Catan, being developed and tested in the United States – it has sold over 15 million units worldwide since 1995 and is actually catching on in board-game-averse North America.
Teuber, a former dental artisan and game hobbyist, developed the “Settlers” in his basement and tested it on his initially reluctant wife and three children – continually revising it, until they actually clamored for a chance to play.
In some ways, the game is similar to Hasbro’s best-seller, Monopoly. “Whoever owns the most real estate has a good chance of winning. But instead of buying hotels in Atlantic City, four to six players build their own “settlements” on an island that is inhabited, but has no developed roads or villages.
Players compete for land, access to ports, and resources – including coal, lumber, ore, wool, bricks, grain, and even natural gas and oil in the “Climate Catan” version. The resources can then be used to construct roads and villages, which earn points. Every roll of the dice dictates the amount of resources a player can obtain. The strategies include where a player places settlements and to whom he or she trades resources. The first player to reach a certain point threshold wins.
To complicate things further, in “Climate Catan,” the resources that each player acquires have environmental consequences. For example, using oil would enable a player to upgrade his or her holdings more rapidly – but every use of fossil fuel turns a counter on the board that causes a random climate-related disaster once it hits five. Using enough oil would cause complete environmental devastation, such as coastal flooding, and almost everyone would lose when their settlements washed away.
Last year, Settlers doubled its sales on this side of the Atlantic, moving 200,000 copies in the United States and Canada – almost unheard-of performance for a new strategy game with nothing but word-of-mouth marketing.
Eric Assadourian, a researcher at the WorldwatchInstitute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental sustainability think tank, has co-developed “Climate Catan” with fellow gamer Ty Hansen. Overall, the pair said, they wanted to bring the costs of depleting environmental resources home. “When you frame something as ‘winning by growing,’ it’s a zero-sum game,” said Assadourian, pointing out that every player’s resource gains come at the expense of another’s and deplete the collective pool of materials. “The island of Catan is finite, and the planet is finite...We can’t keep growing at this rate on a finite planet.”
Hansen and Assadourian have submitted a version of their climate modification for “The Settlers of Catan” to the game’s developer, Catan-GmbH, and its distributor, Skokie, Illinois-based Mayfair Games Inc., and are working with them to make “Climate Catan” an official scenario.
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Cheryl Kaften is an accomplished communicator who has written for consumer and corporate audiences. She has worked extensively for MasterCard (News - Alert) Worldwide, Philip Morris USA (Altria), and KPMG, and has consulted for Estee Lauder and the Philadelphia Inquirer Newspapers. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
