Catan (The Settlers of Catan) Rules and History — From Klaus Teuber's Island to 45 Million Copies

Catan is a board game in which players build an island from hexagonal tiles, collect resources with dice, and trade with one another to grow their settlements and cities. It was released in Germany in 1995 as Die Siedler von Catan (The Settlers of Catan), and today it is counted among the best-selling modern board games.

This article takes a close look at this one game. We follow how Klaus Teuber, a dental technician, came to design it, its 1995 Game of the Year award, the core rules, its expansions and two-player and card versions, its digital editions, and its spread as seen through sales figures. Finally, we consider the fun that negotiation and probability create.

Klaus Teuber and the Birth of Catan

A Dental Technician Who Made Games in His Basement

Klaus Teuber was born in 1952 in Rai-Breitenbach, a village in Germany's Odenwald region. According to an NPR interview, at the age of eleven he was given a board game about the war between Rome and Carthage, and he played it alone, moving armies across a tabletop landscape he had made himself.

As an adult he worked at his father's dental laboratory, but he did not enjoy the job, and from the 1980s he relieved the stress by making games in the basement of his home. His first game, Barbarossa, won Germany's Game of the Year award, the Spiel des Jahres, in 1988, and Adel Verpflichtet in 1990 and Drunter und Drüber in 1991 won the same award. In 1995 Catan became his fourth winner.

An Idea That Began with Viking Voyages

Teuber began to plan Catan around 1991. He was drawn to the history of Vikings crossing the sea to find new lands such as Iceland, and the thought that the first people to reach an island would need wood to build houses and grain to eat became the starting point of the game.

The first design was much larger than today's game. According to German Wikipedia, the island was meant to be hidden at first and revealed through exploration, with a conflict over the island at the end. Teuber split this up and turned the middle part, "settling," into Catan, and unused ideas later went into Entdecker and Löwenherz. From 1993 to 1995 he refined and simplified the rules together with the publisher Kosmos.

The biggest turning point was switching the land to hexagonal tiles. Because every side of a hexagon meets a neighboring tile in the same way, placing a settlement on a corner where three tiles meet naturally creates a structure in which one settlement receives resources from three kinds of land.

The name has a story too. Teuber originally planned to call it Die Siedler (The Settlers), but in 1993 Blue Byte had already released a computer game with the same name. So he showed family and friends a list of invented words and added the most popular one, "Catan."

1995: Game of the Year

Catan was published in 1995 by Kosmos (then called Franckh-Kosmos), and that year it swept Germany's major board game awards.

• Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year): an award given by a jury of German-speaking critics to a game that families can enjoy together
• Deutscher Spiele Preis (German Game Prize): 1st place
• Essener Feder (Essen Feather): an award for a game with well-written rules

The game's page on the official Spiel des Jahres site lists it as a game for 3–4 players, ages 10 and up, about 75 minutes long, and praised it for including both a short summary of the rules and a detailed, dictionary-style rulebook so that players could start right away.

This success let Teuber become a full-time game designer in 1998, and in 2002 he founded the family company Catan GmbH. Today his two sons, Benjamin and Guido Teuber, run the company. Teuber died on 1 April 2023 at the age of 70.

Core Rules: Hex Tiles and Dice-Driven Resource Production

The goal of the Catan base game is to be the first to reach 10 victory points.

1. Build the island: Shuffle the 19 land tiles (4 forest, 4 pasture, 4 fields, 3 hills, 3 mountains, 1 desert) to form the island, and place number tokens on the 18 tiles other than the desert. The rulebook also includes a recommended layout for first-time players.
2. Collect resources: The active player rolls two dice. Each settlement touching a land tile with the rolled number receives 1 resource, and each city receives 2. Forests give lumber, pastures give wool, fields give grain, hills give brick, and mountains give ore.
3. Trade and build: Exchange resources, build roads, settlements and cities, or buy development cards.

A settlement cannot be built on a corner right next to another settlement, so good spots disappear quickly. The 25 development cards include 14 knights, 6 progress cards and 5 victory point cards. Two special scores are added on top of this.

• Longest Road: a card worth 2 points for the player with the longest continuous road of at least 5 segments. If an opponent builds a settlement in the middle of the road, it is broken.
• Largest Army: a card worth 2 points for the player who has played the most knight cards, at least 3.

Both cards change hands when someone pulls ahead, which works as a way to keep the leader in check.

Probability and the Robber: What Happens When a 7 Is Rolled

The number tokens carry small dots that show the probability, and the most frequent numbers, 6 and 8, are printed in red.

A 6 or 8 tile produces resources five times as often as a 2 or 12 tile. But if you chase only good numbers, you may miss a resource type you need, so you have to weigh probability, resource variety and port locations together.

The most frequent roll, 7, produces no resources; instead the robber moves. The player who rolled the 7 moves the robber to another tile and draws 1 resource card from a player touching that tile. A tile with the robber on it produces nothing. In addition, anyone holding 8 or more resource cards must discard half of them (rounded down), so players tend to spend resources as they go rather than hoard them. A knight card also lets you move the robber, and in that case no one discards.

Trading and Negotiation: Why You Stay at the Table Even When It Isn't Your Turn

The most distinctive part of Catan is trading.

• Trading between players: The active player exchanges resources with others at any ratio they agree on. Players whose turn it is not cannot trade with each other.
• Trading with the bank: Give 4 of the same resource and take 1 resource of your choice.
• Port trading: With a settlement on a port, you can trade at 3:1, or trade a specific resource at 2:1.

Trading between players is often better than trading with the bank, so the bargaining never stops. But handing the leader the resource they need could cost you the game, so who you trade with and what you trade always takes some calculation. In the NPR interview, board game writer Erik Arneson pointed to the fact that everyone stays involved during other players' turns and no one is eliminated as Catan's strengths. Because dice results give resources to everyone, waiting is never boring. Teuber himself cited the balance between strategy and luck as a reason for its popularity.

Expansions, Two-Player Versions and Card Games

According to German Wikipedia, Catan was the first Spiel des Jahres winner to receive an extension for more players and expansions adding new content. The main products are as follows.

The exploration from the original plan returned in the Seafarers expansion. Because the base game is for 3–4 players and hard to play with two, Teuber published a two-player variant in which the players also place roads and settlements for two imaginary neutral players, and this variant was included in Traders & Barbarians. For the 20th anniversary in 2015, the series name was simplified, and The Settlers of Catan became just Catan.

Digital Editions: From Online Play to the Switch

• Catan Online World: an online service announced in December 2002; the base game was free and the expansions were paid.
• Xbox Live Arcade version: made by Big Huge Games together with Teuber and released in May 2007, but pulled without notice in mid-2014.
• Mobile versions: developed by Exozet Games and released for iOS in 2009–2010 and for Android in 2011.
• Catan Universe: a cross-platform version launched in April 2017; during the COVID-19 pandemic, new players flooded in and at times overwhelmed the servers.
• Nintendo Switch version: released in June 2019.

Teuber is said to have personally built an Excel spreadsheet laying out the effects and probabilities of each action to help with video game development. On the other hand, the augmented reality game Catan: World Explorers shut down in 2021 after a year of early access, without a full release.

The Worldwide Spread in Numbers

According to NPR, Catan's sales rose sharply after its release in the United States in 1996, and unlike Teuber's earlier award winners, sales did not fall off after a few years. In 2020, as more families stayed at home, the company said sales rose 144% in the first five months of the year.

The first World Championship was held in 2002 in Essen, Germany, and since 2008 it has been held every two years, alternating between the United States and Germany. Players from more than 40 countries took part in the 2018 championship. In 2010, The Washington Post called Catan "the board game of our time."

Closing: The Fun of Negotiation and Probability Together

Catan's fun can be summed up along two axes. One is probability. The moment you decide whether to place a settlement next to a 6 and an 8, or to take a mountain that yields ore even on a rare number, you begin calculating expected value. Yet the dice don't always follow the math, so beginners can beat experienced players, and every game tells a different story.

The other is negotiation. Who to sell resources to and where to place the robber are all decided through conversation between people, so the same board becomes an entirely different game depending on who you play with. If it's your first time, start with the recommended layout and simply focus on choosing spots with good numbers and a variety of resources.

References

• Catan - Wikipedia
• Die Siedler von Catan - Wikipedia (German)
• Klaus Teuber - Wikipedia
• Die Siedler von Catan - Spiel des Jahres
• About Us - Official CATAN website
• Families Stuck At Home Turn To Board Game Catan - NPR
• Settlers of Catan: Creator of board game dies aged 70 - BBC