A decade ago, you’d only find it in obscure game stores hidden in the corner of shopping malls or along low-rent streets. Settlers of Catan had a niche market. You had to hunt for it.
These days, much has changed. The German board game has become a bona fide social phenomenon. More than 18-million copies have been sold at roughly $50 a pop, making it the most popular new board game in a generation and pushing it to the verge of mainstream. This month, with a version for Android phones set to be released, The Atlantic magazine predicted Settlers would soon become “as American as apple pie.”
Settlers is the face of a board-game renaissance – a return to slow, measured pastimes in a smart-phone and video-game era.
“It poses a strong alternative to electronic media. It is actually an unplugged experience,” says Guido Teuber, 37, whose father, Klaus, invented the game. “All of a sudden it seems novel, having gotten used to being part of a computer screen. There is something to be said for having this very tactile, social and immediate experience.”
Settlers has a simple premise: Players collect and trade resources to develop an island. It’s interactive, there’s no war and no player loses or wins until the final turn. It’s the foremost example of an entire genre of “German-style” games.
Such games largely reject the confrontational mantras of traditional board games, such as Risk and Monopoly. Instead, they tend to be more constructive – settling an island, building a network of power plants (Power Grid), a train system (Ticket to Ride) a kingdom (Carcassonne) or farm (Agricola). The elder Mr. Teuber has spent 30 years developing board games, winning Germany’s prestigious Spiel des Jahres (game of the year) award four times, most recently for Settlers.
“All of those games are using ways to solve conflict in a non-violent way,” says his son, who lives in California and oversees the game’s North American expansion. “After two world wars, [and German] people realizing it’s time to do things dramatically differently, there’s definitely a wave of pacifism that’s reflected in the game culture.”
First invented in 1995, Settlers took hold among young professionals, students and what Mr. Teuber calls “techies” – the game is a favourite throughout Silicon Valley, where plugged-in employees of the world’s cutting-edge technology firms routinely break for a definitively low-tech game of Settlers.
It became popular because it had a unique design, was easy to learn and quick to play, said Ontario player Robin Baksh, who started playing a decade ago in university and was among three Canadians to earn a spot in last year’s Settlers world championship in Germany.
“A lot of people will win or do very well at their first game,” says Mr. Baksh, now 30. “Because of that, there’s the incentive to keep going.”
About five years ago, the game’s sales began to soar as it made its way to the kitchen tables of families.
“It’s huge. It’s absolutely huge,” says Cheryl Cameron, 52, owner of Edmonton’s River City Games. Once mostly a pool table vendor, her small chain has reinvented itself on the back of board games and Settlers. In two of her stores, board game sales now make up 70 per cent of revenue. Settlers has been the top seller for six years.
“One of the contributing factors has certainly been a great deal of concern with our children today, in that a lot of them lack social skills. I attribute a lot of that to [the fact] they’re plugged in and not interacting,” says Ms. Cameron, who plays the game with her own eight-year-old granddaughter.
The game has some high profile fans, including Black Swan actress Mila Kunis and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, the low-key founder of LinkedIn, a online networking site that netted him $1.7-billion when it went public last month. “It's a game that most approximates entrepreneurship,” Mr. Hoffman has said.
The game holds a special appeal in Canada and the United States, Mr. Teuber believes. “In North Americans, there’s this pioneer spirit. Building things, the idea of domesticating the wilderness. ... In a certain way, you almost play it out on that [Catan] island.”
