More on Settlers of Catan and Klaus Teuber

[thewayne]

I knew Ars Technica would have a write-up on the passing of Klaus and how much Catan means around the world.

Monopoly is/was held as a pinnacle of board games. I hate it with a deep and abiding loathing reserved for things that I deeply and abidingly loathe. It is a horrible game. This article quotes a statistic that says the average Monopoly set is played ONE POINT FIVE TIMES. Now THAT is a truly horrible game! It isn't FUN because you're constantly getting screwed, people are eliminated one by one. It is a runaway winner game: once someone gets certain properties and has hotels on them, game over.

There are house rules that can slow this down, but the progression is largely going to be the same.

Catan, and other games like it, brought cooperation into competitive board games. And you can feel like you're in the running until the very end, so you have a reason to pay attention to what's going on. In the case of Catan, you are encouraged to cooperate and trade resources with others in order to complete your personal goals. The infamous "I have wood for sheep" became a part of gaming vernacular because of Catan, in this case, someone wanting to trade wood for needed sheep.

I didn't hate Monopoly when I was young, but I never liked it. It just wasn't fun. Now, this was back in the '60s and '70s, Euro Games hadn't really been invented yet and we were stuck with what we had. As I grew older and experienced a wider panoply of games, I saw the flaws for what they were: eliminating players/zero-sum, and runaway leaders. And now, I don't know of any games that I own that have these characteristics. When I get a game like Monopoly, or someone gives me a set, I harvest the money and the pawns and consider keeping the board, all for repurposing for game designs that I work on. It never gets played.

Last year my middle niece got married, and their registry asked for board games. I looked at that list and said 'Nope, no way. They're getting some QUALITY intro board games from me!' And among them, I gave them Carcasonne, a brilliant tile-laying game about building castles and towns in medieval France. Every game is completely different, you play to the end and it's a lot of fun. You score points every turn, which helps you feel like you're accomplishing something. My nieces, sister, and parents already had a lot of experience playing Quirkle, a color/shape tile-laying game, where, again, you score points every turn and there are a couple of twists that can really boost your score! AND you draw tiles from a bag, which is cool.

Now, Catan itself, I'm not a huge fan of. Perhaps if I played it more some of the deeper strategies would sink in and I'd do better at it. But it's a good enough game and I have a couple of copies including some expansions that I bought when game stores went out of business. But socially, an infinitely better game than Monopoly. Everyone participates, even when it's not your turn: while only the turning player can make trades, you might have extra sheep you can offer up and better your own position while helping someone else.

Even if I'm not a huge fan of it, Catan is a great game and well worth people's time. It is not hideously complex, and it's a fast game to learn and play, it typically finishes in about an hour. When was the last time you were able to play multiple games of Monopoly in an evening and enjoy it?

RIP, Klaus. Ya done good and made a huge number of people happy.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/klaus-teuber-made-catan-and-it-changed-the-worlds-expectations-for-board-games/

The comments on this Ars article are excellent and a recommended read. You really get a feeling for how many people his game touched.

And one last comment. While Klaus did a great job, he is just one of the great game designers out there. Reiner Knitzia is right up there with an insane number of games to his credit, as is Friedman Frisch with the great game Power Grid. Both win awards. There are far more out there than I'll ever be able to name.

Comments

[thewayne]

Piggy-backing off another discussion with Ysbette Wordsmith, critical thinking is a major flaw in our current society.  I certainly didn't think about the more abstract lessons that could be learned from Monopoly as a kid, I just recognized that the game went downhill fast.  It isn't remotely marketed as an educational game, just as 'good family entertainment'.  So sadly the lessons it could teach are largely ignored and lost. I never played any of the themed versions of Catan, like ST.  Sounds like it could be interesting.  It makes me think of the ST version of Castle Panic, which is tremendous fun.  The theme really (mind) melded well with the original, we've had lots of fun playing that.

[silveradept]

The ages at which someone plays Monopoly are generally too young to get into the critique of monopolism and capitalism, and by the time that the critiques would be useful, everyone has already figured out the game is terrible and doesn't want to play it. If we played it with the alternate rule set that was cooperative, that might help keep it relevant enough to see how the game becomes terrible when you play by the monopolist's rules.

My board game childhood included Payday (where we learned about the compounding of interest and the ruinous effects of loans) Careers (which I could rarely win because I couldn't predict which of the three major resources I would have an abundance of and which I would never get enough of, and Go For Broke, a game that was about trying to shed all your money on a world that wanted to give you all the money that it could. It was fun to try and have to get rid of resources rather than hoard them.

[thewayne]

That Go For Broke sounds amusing, sort of Brewster's Millions: The Board Game.

[silveradept]

Yes, you lose the money doing things like playing the stock market, roulette wheels, or betting on horse races that can just as easily give you big payouts if you're unlucky. So it would probably be within the rules of Brewster's Millions.