Have you heard of Catan?
not long ago, reid hoffmanco-founder of LinkedInmade an unexpected statement during an interview with financial times. The billionaire said his inspiration in the business came from an unusual resource: the table games. He is not the only one who experiences business as a game or vice versa. For a long time, billionaire entrepreneurs, businessmen, and CEOs have talked about this entertainment more as personal training than as a recreational activity.
“One of the reasons why board games are gaining new momentum and success is that technology has forced people to isolate ourselves more and more, and interact through a device. However, human beings carry in the essence the taste for relating more personally”, says Vesselin Raynov, country manager of Devir Mexicothe firm that distributes some of the most popular strategy games in the world in the country.
Catan, the CEO game
One of those games is Catan, the same thing Reid Hoffman referred to in the aforementioned interview. “It’s a game that has won many fans. Hoffman refers to this as the board game of entrepreneurship, but he also has other equally famous fans like Mark Zuckerberg, who has declared himself a big fan of the game along with his wife, ”says Raynov.
For the manager, the great attraction of Catan is the way in which it forces players to think strategically, forming a thought that can be transposed to business. Catan introduces people to a story: players arrive to explore an uncolonized island, a territory rich in resources. From there, the issue is how to grow and take advantage of these benefits of the place.
“The players (at least three) are building certain elements: roads, towns, cities. The more you build, the more points you can get, and whoever reaches 10 units is the one who wins”, summarizes Raynov.
So far it seems simple, but as the game progresses, the players find themselves in resource supply dilemmas and find it necessary to start negotiating, in order to build and continue their colonization process. But beware, the game may end up exposing those who don’t have much of a fang to get good deals, or it may be the first glimpse of the next great entrepreneur: the great colonizer.
“The lack of resources to negotiate means that the moment is not always in your favor and generates a healthy rivalry at the table. The competition intensifies, but at the same time you have to think about collaboration with the other players”, explains the manager.
The person who collaborates the least on the board will have little chance of getting ahead, while the one who negotiates the most and shows the greatest ability to interact at the table is the one who usually takes the lead.
Why so many entrepreneurs love this game
Perhaps it is a reflection of the search for power (the winner becomes the conqueror of the island) or the fact of maintaining strategic thinking even in free hours, but the game created by Klaus Teuber in 1995 has been a powerful pretext for return players to a physical board. For sample are the more than 20 million boards sold worldwide.
Zynga CEO and psychoanalyst Mark Pincus has also declared himself a Catan fan. In the same way, it was implemented a long time ago as an integration game between the Green Bay Packers of the NFL, ”says Raynov.
The Belgium soccer team also uses the game within its concentrations. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Catan also has high-calibre representatives, although they are few. One of them is the soccer player Javier Hernández known as ‘The chicharito’.
However, the most important national player of Catan is called Quetzal Hernandez. At the end of 2018, Quetzal became the world champion of the specialty. In his path, which culminated in the title held in Cologne, Germany, Hernández dispatched more than 60 Mexican and foreign players, to survive a final tournament that included 76 participants from 46 countries.
It was Plato who said that “in an hour of play you can discover more about a person than in a year of conversation.” The Greek genius most likely did not refer to business matters, but Catan puts a new perspective on the phrase. Would you play it?
