![]() ![]() Read: The invasion of the German board gamesĪtop its design, Catan enjoyed the accident of good timing. Neither mechs nor monsters infect the game with sci-fi or fantasy particularities. Its box and tiles are bright and colorful, making it intriguing to kids and palatable to grandparents. It featured no caricatures of natives or claims of newcomer superiority. Despite the presence of the colonialist term settlers in its original title, Catan was never really a game about conquest. ![]() Forests and pastures host trees and sheep. The game’s innocuous theme neither inspires nor offends. That makes Catan less embarrassing for misanthropes like me, and also saves it from the isolation of a game like Scrabble, which is played mostly in your head. But unlike, say, Cards Against Humanity or Pictionary, the game’s social dimension is constrained: You’re not expected to be creative or performative, merely to persuade others to swap bricks or wool. It gives players something to do when they’re waiting for their turn, and encourages them to pay attention to what’s happening rather than zone out because, ugh, board game. Trading resources with other players can mean the difference between winning and losing. Their six-sidedness also distanced Catan from subcultural artifacts, such as Dungeons & Dragons: These are normal dice, the sort used for respectable activities such as Yahtzee and craps.Ĭatan is a social game, too. But luck also prevents an experienced player from dominating novices, and the dice provide a familiar board-game ritual of rolling to start your turn. ![]() The use of dice gives luck a strong role in victory, and purists prefer to win by reason. Read: The board games that ask you to reenact colonialismīoard-game aficionados-the kind who would insist I call their passion “tabletop gaming”-tend to find Catan insufficiently strategic. If board games are prisons, then the best ones offer mild sentences. A round can be played in an hour or two, which helps Catan avoid the common board-game fate of interruption and abandonment. ![]() That wasn’t too bad, actually! And it’s one reason Catan took off: It is not horrifyingly oppressive to teach or learn. (Unless a robber token has been placed there rolling a seven allows the player to move the robber.) The player can then trade resources and build roads, settlements, or cities to expand. On every turn, a player rolls two six-sided dice, and the corresponding land tile gives resources to the players with settlements surrounding it. Each bears a number, and the tiles are laid out differently for each game. Reading about how a game plays is almost as awful as listening to someone explain how to play it, but here we go: Catan’s board is made up of hex tiles representing different land types (forest, field, pasture, etc.). That’s the game’s secret: Teuber fell upon a design that every kind of player-geeks, kids, your mother-could stomach playing. Look, Catan is fine, but both connoisseurs and amateurs tend to tolerate it more than love it. Why did Catan become so popular? Not because the game is good. Teuber, who died this week at age 70, created a global phenomenon. All told, 40 million copies of Catan (as it was later known) have been sold worldwide, and the game has spawned dozens of spin-offs and expansion sets. It hit the United States and beyond soon after. In 1995, the German designer Klaus Teuber released the civilization-building strategy game in which players capture land to generate resources to build settlements to capture more land to generate more resources. Better, nerdier options have long existed (Diplomacy, Vector, Gettysburg-not to mention chess, go, backgammon), but the same few products dominated American rugs and tabletops for much of the 20th century, and thus defined board-gaming as a mainstream activity. Candy Land is stupid, Scrabble takes too long, Risk is how you learn your dad is an asshole, and Monopoly-let us not speak of Monopoly. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.Īnd yet, board games are terrible. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. ![]()
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