It is with a heavy heart that Devir has informed Fayer Wayer of the death of author Klaus Teuber at the age of 70.
“On behalf of the entire team, we want to convey our deepest condolences to the family and friends of the German author. The gaming community around the world loses a benchmark and a pioneer in the sector, whom we will miss”, they added.
The story of the creator of Catan
Klaus Teuber, born in Rai-Breitenbach, Germany, was the creator of the famous board game Catan (originally published as The Settlers of Catan). With more than 22 million copies sold worldwide, translated into more than 35 languages, more than 40 expansions and special editions published, and numerous international awards, Catan has become a global phenomenon over the past decades.
Teuber was also the first author of an internationally recognized board game, changing the paradigm of attribution of authorship in the world of board games.
How was your love for board games born?
His story goes back to the 1980s, when he worked as a dental technician on the outskirts of Darmstadt, in his father’s practice. In his spare time, Teuber took refuge in fantasy literature and board games.
A lover of miniatures, models and puzzles since he was a child, he wanted to capture everything he was passionate about in a game. By day he assembled dental prostheses and at night he locked himself in the basement workshop of his house and gave free rein to his true vocation.
“If you really want to know someone, play with them,” Teuber said in this interview published in The vanguard. Convinced of the power of the game, he developed a first prototype, Barbarossaa game in which each participant molds a small sculpture and tries to guess what the figures of their opponents represent.
This is how Catan was born
Teuber waited seven years to submit his game to a publisher, but ended up winning the 1988 Spiel des Jahres, the most prestigious award given to board games. That success stimulated him to continue designing games, an activity that he would combine with his full-time job in his practice and his family life.
In 1991 Klaus Teuber began to cultivate a small obsession with the Vikings. He devoured books about his history, his lifestyle, and the legends about him. In particular, he was fascinated by the idea of a group of bearded warriors landing in the distant, cold and deserted Iceland with their families to colonize it. He thought it was an ideal theme to base a board game on and that’s how he planted the seed of Catan.
Four years later, in 1995, he already had a prototype ready to show the publisher. He had worked on an ingenious system of hexagonal tiles that, once joined together, formed the board. Each of those tiles showed a different landscape in which players could gather resources: from the forests, wood; from the mines, stone; from the hills, clay; from the pastures, wool from the sheep; and from the cereal fields, wheat.
With these resources, players build roads, settlements, cities, and various forms of development. All this with the aim of reaching 10 victory points. However, Teuber’s proposal put limits on the hoarders: at any time a thief could appear and remove half of the stored resources if there were more than seven in the possession of a player. This makes cooperation and negotiation between rivals essential.
Catan was a new success for Teuber, which from then on began to reap awards and income at a dizzying pace. The benefits that he obtained thanks to the game allowed him to leave the practice and be able to live from his true passion. Teuber closed a family business that had belonged to his father, but started another with his children: managing a product that seemed to have no ceiling. Expansions that increased the number of players, thematic versions, rights management to other countries and even a line of commercial promotion that includes shirts, socks, mugs or stuffed animals.
Catan’s Cultural Revolution
All in all, the Catan revolution has not only been commercial but also cultural. Klaus Teuber’s design is the spearhead of the so-called modern board game, a reflection of society at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
An explosion of creativity, both in the game mechanics and in the graphic design of the proposal, which seduces millions of people around the world. A growing phenomenon that, like Catan, has yet to find a stop.
In fact, the game has even reached the world of video games.
In 2019, the author stated in this interview that you can see on Devir TV that “I love that people enjoy playing Catan and that thanks to it many people have entered the world of board games. When people decide, for example, to start negotiating with each other so that everyone wins and can progress, it is the best thing that can happen and it is something that I love to see”.