Though there have been many European-style board games that have proved themselves successful in the American market and elsewhere around the world, few have been quite as significant as The Settlers of Catan. Arriving in the mid-1990s, Catan broke the mold of what a board game could be and introduced concepts to an international audience that many had not yet seen before. Much of the success of the contemporary board game industry can be credited to the accessibility and popularity of Catan.
The game was first published in 1995 in Germany as Die Siedler von Catan, and was a creation of Klaus Teuber. Catan is a game that puts its players in the role of settlers, who each try to establish the most successful colony on the island of Catan itself. Each settler must build up towns into cities, eventually connecting them by roads, and can do so by gathering and spending resources. The ultimate goal of the game is to end up with a total of 10 Victory points.
The game ends when one player has accrued 10 Victory Points and announces as such to the rest of the participants. Victory Points can be gained by the previously-mentioned Development card, by building up settlements (worth one point each) or cities (worth two), or by fulfilling Special Cards, such as “Longest Road” or “Largest Army,” which are worth two points each.
The unique balance of resource management, strategy, and occasionally cooperative gameplay struck a chord with audiences worldwide, and Settlers of Catan was an instant hit. The game picked up the 1995 Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year), and a year later won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Board Game.
The base game of Catan supported 3-4 players, and a year later, an extension was released to accommodate up to six players for the original release. Klaus Teuber immediately got to work on a proper expansion for the game, which arrived in 1997: Seafarers of Catan, which introduced a new scenario, a new resource (gold), and ships to the gameplay. A year later, Cities and Knights of Catan arrived, which added battles between knights and barbarians and commodities (paper, cloth and coin) in addition to the base resources. Further expansions have included Oil Springs, Explorers and Pirates, and Frenemies of Catan. Each of these have added variations on the basic gameplay and additional components to consider.
The full version of this article can be found in The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games, available now.