![]() ![]() Two large, well-known publishers turned him down. Once he was satisfied with the game - and once his family approved - Teuber began showing the game to publishers. ![]() That name would last for 20 years: Teuber and his publishers decided just this year to just start calling the game “Catan.” Those games have been marketed as rounding out the “Catan Trilogy.”Īs the game approached completion, Teuber started calling it “Die Siedler von Catan,” or in English, The Settlers of Catan. Some of the more complex ideas from early Catan prototypes were later worked into other Teuber games, particularly Löwenherz and Entdecker. At the urging of Reiner Müller, the man that had pressured ASS Altenburger Spielkarten into publishing Barbarossa years earlier, Teuber added player aids to make the game easy to learn. He also removed an element simulating discovery from the game: in early prototypes the tiles started face down. The big breakthrough moment came in 1993 when Teuber started using hexagonal tiles instead of squares. As Teuber slowly reduced the game to its essentials, it started to look like the game we know today. Another had a round of conflict at the end of the game.ĭevelopment lasted four years. One early version rewarded developing cities in clusters, permitting users to form a metropolis. Teuber’s playtesters - his wife and three kids - weren’t impressed by early prototypes. ![]() As he told Wired, “I felt like I was discovering something rather than inventing it.” But his initial versions were complex, despite only having three terrain types. Klaus Teuber thought the idea for this game was special from the start. Therefore, trade must have been the most important means for the Icelandic settlers to get the vital goods ore, grain, and lumber.” Grain was growing only sparsely, but sheep and horses thrived on the otherwise barren volcanic island. There were birch forests on this island in the far north when the first settlers arrived however, within a rather short period of time, the trees were lumbered for building longhouses and ships. He had been fascinated by Vikings since he was a child, and he had the first sparks of inspiration for Catan after reading about them: “When I developed the game in the early nineties, at first I envisioned Iceland, which during the Early Middle Ages was warmer than today. Teuber started experimenting with a game based on an uncharted island as early as 1991. ![]() He continued to work at the dental laboratory he had inherited from his father, designing games in his basement on nights and weekends. He was publishing at a rapid pace - he had nearly a dozen titles to his credit by the time Catan was released - but he still saw game design as a hobby, albeit a well-paying one. With more than 22 million products sold in more than 30 different languages, there is no Eurogame with as big of a footprint as Die Siedler von Catan.īy 1991 Klaus Teuber was Germany’s biggest game design star: he had won the Spiel des Jahres a record-settling three times and had sold at least a million games. The Washington Post has called it “the game of our time.” Wired described it as a “Monopoly killer.” The game has inspired songs and a novel, and there are dozens of references in pop culture.
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