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A statement from the family said Mr Teuber had “a brief and serious illness,” but gave no additional details. Mr. Teuber’s company, Catan GmbH, did not immediately respond to requests for additional information.
The success of the game, which debuted in 1995 as The Settlers of Catan, was made even more remarkable by the era in which it was created. A growing number of console-based video games released in the 1990s competed for player attention, and later game apps and other interactive distractions added pressure to the classic setup of boards, cards, and dice.
According to industry information, Catan has sold more than 32 million sets in 40 languages worldwide. (The company’s website reported sales of 40 million.) However, both numbers place Catan in the top 20 list of board games – well behind older brands like Monopoly and Scrabble, but ahead of venerable games like Risk and Stratego. Catan has spawned many spinoffs and re-releases, including digital versions, and a wealth of merchandise.
“I made games to escape,” Mr. Teuber told the New Yorker in 2014, saying he was unhappy with his job at a dental lab. “It was my own world that I created.”
Catan rewards the cunning and clever. The island – which intentionally has a Viking feel – has five basic resources: brick, wood, grain, wool and ore. Players draw cards to increase their holdings and build settlements, cities, roads and armies in a hexagonal area build while at the same time trading resources and potentially making deals with other players. Victory points are awarded. The winner is whoever crosses the point threshold first.
It is not necessary to destroy the other settlements to win. Sometimes one player’s success can benefit others. This is what separates Catan from winner-takes-all games like Monopoly, wrote author Blake Eskin in a 2010 Washington Post essay.
Catan “represents a world where resources are finite and fortunes are intertwined,” Eskin wrote, “and serves as a model for solving contemporary problems such as trade imbalances, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.”
Mr. Teuber seemed to be the paragon of consideration and careful planning. Even as Catan sales increased after its release in Germany, Mr. Teuber didn’t quit his job as a dental technician in Darmstadt, a town south of Frankfurt, until 1998, “when it felt like Catan could support me and my family.”
Catan wasn’t his first board game to hit the market.
In 1988 the guessing game Barbarossa went on sale. This was followed by Adel Obliged (distributed in the US as By Hook or Crook or Hoity Toity), in which players try to acquire the most valuable art object; and Drunter und Drüber (also marketed as Wacky Wacky West), in which players compete to rebuild a destroyed city. All three, plus Catan, were voted Germany’s game of the year.
The inspiration for Catan (usually pronounced Ca-TAAN) was Mr. Teuber’s childhood fascination with the Vikings and their voyages in the Atlantic. Catan was Herr Teuber’s idea of an Atlantis.
“I imagined how [the Vikings] reached Iceland,” Mr. Teuber told an interviewer. “You need wood. They need houses and other things. And so I developed Catan out of this fantasy.”
The name has no special or hidden meaning. For fans, however, Catan became a byword for friendly competition and togetherness. (But there is a card in Catan that allows a player to snatch all one type of resource from another player.)
Events with more than 1,000 players were held in Rotterdam and other locations. Unlike Scrabble or chess tournaments, where victory or defeat is at stake, the people on Catan try to cultivate a kind of feel-good atmosphere. A 2012 documentary, Going Cardboard, shows Mr. Teuber getting a rock star reception at game shows.
But not everyone found uplifting messages in Catan. The idea of ”colonizing” an island (even a fake one) was too colonialist for some critics. A game called Spirit Island, made partly in response to Catan, has supernatural powers that protect an island from newcomers.
“Some elements of Catan’s perspective have recently been ethically challenged,” wrote Marco Arnaudo, an Indiana University professor who studies tabletop games and military simulation, in an email to The Post. “We began to wonder if the game’s relatively peaceful handling actually concealed a colonialist and imperialist fantasy.”
Mr. Teuber and his family business have largely remained true to the original premise.
“The nice thing about Catan is that you did construct something in the end,” said Herr Teuber’s son Benjamin. “So in a way everyone wins.”
Karl Teuber was born on June 25, 1952 in the village of Rai-Breitenbach, Germany, about 40 miles southeast of Frankfurt. His father ran a dental laboratory and his mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Teuber only became interested in board games as a child until, at the age of 11, he was given a game about Romans versus Carthaginians. He began experimenting with various ideas of his own and developed the early concept for Barbarosa Conscripts in the early 1970s. After graduating in chemistry, he joined his father’s laboratory in Darmstadt and made bridges and other dental work.
“I wasn’t happy,” he said. In the evenings he worked on his board game ideas in the basement of his parents’ house in Roßdorf.
His family became the focus group. They played prototypes of his games, including Catan, and suggested tweaks or sweeping changes. As a boy, Benjamin kept a Mickey Mouse comic book nearby. It was a signal to his father.
“If the game was boring, he knew I would read it instead of playing the game,” Benjamin said.
In addition to Benjamin, survivors include Mr. Teuber’s wife Claudia; Son Guido and a daughter. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Like many families, they have been hiding at home and playing board games during the pandemic. But who has an advantage over Catan?
“My dad would probably say I’m the best player,” Benjamin told an interviewer.
“No,” said Herr Teuber.
“I’m sorry, dad,” said Guido. “Benny is the best.”