Built to last: 30 years on, the legacy of Catan

There wasn't a lot going on in the world of tabletop gaming in the early 1990s.

- Anesha George

Most games seemed to fall into familiar patterns. Classics such as Scrabble thrived in social gatherings, yet at its core, this was a game of individual pursuit. Being a real-estate tycoon in the eternally popular Monopoly was exhilarating, until the hours dragged on and resentment grew. For a niche few, role-playing tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Darkness offered an escape.

Around this time, frustrated by his exhausting 14-hour job, the German dental technician Klaus Teuber began to create boardgames of his own. Some of his games were cult hits, and three won awards.

Then, seven years in, he came up with a game inspired by the Viking voyages from Scandinavia to Iceland. Die Siedler von Catan (The Settlers of Catan), launched in 1995, would go on to shake up the industry.

This game of resource collection and trading, where players build roads and settlements in a fictional world to reach 10 victory points, won the industry's most coveted prize, the German Spiel des Jahres (or, Game of the Year), in 1995.

Thirty years on, more than 45 million units have sold worldwide (for scale, Monopoly, one of the world’s bestselling boardgames, has sold over 275 million units in 90 years).

Catan is available in 40 languages (including Estonian, Greek and Slovenian). There are six official versions, and numerous spinoffs too (more on those in a bit).

Teuber lived long enough to see the boom; he died in 2023, aged 70. His sons Guido Teuber and Benjamin Teuber now run the business.