2023 presented both heartbreaking challenges and new opportunities for the perennial tabletop favorite CATAN. In addition to the usual challenges that popular brands face over the course of the year – new games, new cross-collaborations, and prepping for what should be an exciting 30th anniversary in just two years time – the group that makes CATAN and manages the overall brand also had to grapple with the loss of CATAN’s beloved creator Klaus Teuber. Earlier this month, ComicBook.com had the chance to sit down with Guido Teuber, CEO of CATAN GmbH, and Kelli Schmitz, CATAN Studio’s director of brand development, to discuss everything from how the brand handled Klaus Teuber’s death to the unique challenges posed by stewarding CATAN into the future.
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Klaus Teuber published CATAN (then known as Settlers of CATAN in 1995) and the game’s success eventually allowed him to move on from his career as a dental technician and move to creating games full time. Teuber founded CATAN GmbH (GmbH is a German abbreviation for a type of business entity, similar to LLC or Inc. in the United States) and would turn the game and its expansions and spinoffs into a family business, with his sons Guido and and Benny joining the company. Guido is now CATAN GmbH’s CEO, while Benny is the Managing Director of GmbH. While CATAN GmbH owns the CATAN IP and designs the games themselves, it works with publishers such as Asmodee subsidiary CATAN Studio and Kosmos (who handles the German language publication) to actually publish and distribute the games.
Our conversation with Guido Teuber and Kelli Schmitz opened by discussing Klaus Teuber’s death and the unique impact it had on CATAN Studio and CATAN GmbH. “It was really a shock, obviously to us,” Guido Teuber said of his father’s death. “The personal and the business, they’re so inextricably linked, and so we were paralyzed at first.” Teuber credited his partners and the team at CATAN Studio to allow the family some time to mourn and grieve. However, since his father was a public figure, Guido and the studio also had to deal with the PR of Klaus Teuber’s death as well, making sure that everyone understood that CATAN would continue even after his passing.
“Obviously as a designer, our dad shaped the brand,” Teuber explained. “At the same time, he had dedicated much more time to writing and passed the baton to my brother Benny. Benny and my dad, they worked on the games, but for the last two or three years, my dad started to become a little bit more of an advisor. So in terms of the brand development and the new games, new content and everything, it’s something that we were able to continue is something we do very strongly.”
Teuber noted that he, his brother, and his father had a strong personal relationship that proved to be a strong foundation for CATAN Studio. “It’s sort of weird with a family company, it’s interwoven so you don’t know where the business starts and where the personal ends and vice versa,” Teuber noted. “And that’s something we loved to live though. It was like our family lifestyle.” Teuber mentioned that when he and his brother were kids, his father would bring his games to them to try out. If the game had flaws, the two sons’ interest would wane (“If I, as a teenager didn’t like it, I saw my guitar and I’d grab it, while my brother started to read his Mickey Mouse books,” Teuber mused.) However, if their father brought them a good game, they’d become fully immersed in it.
Teuber mentioned that after a grieving period of a month or so, the Teuber family returned to CATAN Studio and “took the reins” as collaborators. “Right now, what we’re trying to do is just to live our dad’s philosophy and it was always marked by collaboration and by teamwork and just to allow all other stakeholders to have an impact and help growing and maintaining the CATAN brand,” Teuber said.”In that sense, the business is like CATAN itself. It’s very win-win oriented. Maybe some clever people have 10 points and when publishing partner maybe holds the head sometimes or another, but everybody has victory points.”
CATAN holds a unique place in the tabletop space, with one foot firmly in the mainstream zeitgeist and the other planted in the space reserved for hardcore gamers. CATAN was responsible for the “eurogame” genre, defined by victory points and an emphasis on competition rather than conflict, growing immensely in popularity outside of Germany and created an easy gateway into the deeper world of tabletop games. However, Klaus Teuber didn’t rest on his laurels even after Settlers of CATAN first won the coveted Spiel des Jahres, a German prize for tabletop game of the year. Instead, he continued to innovate CATAN with numerous spinoffs and expansions, with new releases every year.
For instance, CATAN had a busy 2023, with the release of several new expansions (Soccer Fever for the base game of CATAN, CATAN: Hawai’i for CATAN – Seafarers, and New Encounters for CATAN – Starfarers) and the announcement of a Starfarers Duel, a revamped version of Starship Catan. This led to the discussion of how CATAN GmbH decides when it’s time to “bring back” a classic CATAN game back for another run, as CATAN Studio also re-released The Settlers of the Stone Age as CATAN: Dawn of Humankind in 2022.
“We have annual meetings, we call them CATAN Conclaves, where we come together and we talk about what we’d like to see three or five years down the line,” Schmitz explained. “Is it a brand new standalone game? Is it a new expansion? Is it something that we bring back from the past?” In the case of Starfarers Duel, the decision was made 5 years ago to bring back the full CATAN Starfarers’ line.
Part of the reason for bringing back older CATAN games is that the brand is so popular, it’s always picking up new fans and gamers. “The original Starfarers came out in 1999,” Schmitz said. “If you think of how many gamers have picked up the hobby since then who would never have been exposed to a Starfarers because the original game went out of print 15 years ago.”
Schmitz mentioned that while they occasionally receive negative feedback about bringing back older games, she noted that CATAN – Stafarers is her family’s favorite game. “My daughter can’t get enough of it,” Schmitz said. “And we added on the New Encounters expansion this year, which is new content, and now she won’t play without the expansion. She loves it.” To Schmitz, it’s important to make sure that the earlier CATAN games have a chance to make it back to the table, because they are still relevant to modern gamers.
Our conversation then moved on to the wider challenges of CATAN brand management, specifically the story side of CATAN. Klaus Teuber, before his passing, had written several CATAN novels that explained the history of the island and how it came to be colonized. ” My dad, the way he invented or designed games, he would sit on the train and daydream,” Teuber said. “Eventually it would find its way into game form because he wanted to tell that story. So all of his game designs were always born out of the story, whether it’s Barbarossa, his first game of the year, or with CATAN.” For CATAN, he was inspired by Vikings, specifically the ones who went to Iceland and were “more traders and agrarians rather than raiders.” Teuber wanted to explore the concept of moving to a place with more fertile lands and how a culture went about settling it.
While the story of CATAN began as a game, Klaus Teuber started to write novels about Catan Island about five years ago. The second Catan novel was released in October, albeit only in German, and Teuber was in the process of writing the third novel when he passed. “He was always an avid reader and that always informed his game design,” Guido Teuber said of his father. “He had so much still going on and so much in his head that he wanted to create and make happen, and unfortunately he wasn’t able to.” Aspects of his father’s stories continue to appear in the games, such as The Helpers expansion featuring characters that would go on to appear in the novels.
Another challenge faced by CATAN Studio is the prospect of cross-collaboration and balancing the potential for profit with respecting the underlying message and ethos of the game itself. CATAN has released several licensed spin-offs that have been very well-received, including CATAN games set in the world of Star Trek and Game of Thrones. “We get approached by other IP and brands everyday,” Schmitz noted. “Asmodee has an entire licensing division. What I’m told is they are usually asked about CATAN first before anything else and I totally understand why.”
Schmitz also added that they’ve taken a very strategic and thoughtful approach to licensing, in part because CATAN is a story-driven brand and game. “You can’t just slap any IP on CATAN,” Schmitz said. “I mean maybe technically you could, but it wouldn’t be good and it wouldn’t be up to our standards. It wouldn’t have that necessary storytelling element that goes through everything we do.” She noted that the Star Trek IP worked because of the discovery aspect of that franchise, while Game of Thrones made a lot of sense because of the story-driven elements of the series. “But other IP, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Schmitz said. “It’s not going to be what I think of as “fast games” in the fast fashion sense, where you grab onto whatever IP is trendy right now, put it on a game and put it out and it’s manufactured and it’s hot for a year and then it goes away and no one ever sees it again. That is very antithetic to our ethos as a brand.”
Tueber added that finding the right IP to partner with CATAN was a bit like playing a game of CATAN itself. “With Game of Thrones, we thought it would be so cool, but the universes are so different with the tonality and the topics,” Teuber said. “But we found that overlap of the war collaboration and the idea of cities and knights where there’s an external threat to work together towards. So we’re just like CATAN that is so much about that balance of cooperation and competition The ‘coop-petition’ and walking that line and finding that balance.”
Although it seems that licensed versions of CATAN will continue to be a rarity, we did ask if there’s any dream IPs they’d like to partner with. “I’m literally the only person in the world who wants this. I want My Little Pony Catan,” Schmitz said jokingly.
A My Little Pony CATAN might not be on the cards, but we did ask what CATAN had planned for the future. In addition to Starfarers Duel, which will be released in February 2024, CATAN plans to release one more title in May or June before shifting gears and looking towards its 30th anniversary celebration in 2025.
In addition to the games, CATAN GmbH and its partners are also working to build the brand, with a robust organized play program that will culminate with a new World Championship in Germany in 2025, marking the first time in three years that a new CATAN World Champion is crowned. CATAN has also worked with licensing partners to develop everything from official cookbooks to lottery scratch tickets (the latter of which is currently only available in Western Canada.) Even these expansions of the CATAN IP aims to stay true to the “CATAN values,” as Teuber put them. CATAN has also been working with artists to develop official CATAN Murals in cities across North America with seven murals appearing as public art across the Eastern United States and Canada.
While CATAN is approaching its 30th anniversary, CATAN GmbH and CATAN Studio aren’t looking to develop any new game concepts outside of CATAN. “Honestly, there’s just so much still with CATAN that we want to explore,” Teuber said. “The base game, there’s a simplicity to it, but so much can still be spawned from it all. And this tension of collaboration and competition, it just offers endless opportunities.” Teuber noted that even when his father and brother designed other games, CATAN was a “magnet” that just seemed to draw them back, with more facets or stories to explore within the game’s constructs.
CATAN, a game that carefully balances cooperation and competition, seems to understand that balance is a key to the franchise’s continued success. Balance between looking to the past and innovating for the future, balance between preserving its brand with growing it into new areas, and balance between satisfying the longtime fans with new gamers. Teuber pointed to the music industry for an example of how he hoped CATAN would be viewed as it approaches its 30th anniversary. “I would add on a personal note, I would love to see Catan as the Red Hot Chili Peppers for board games,” Teuber added as our conversation finished. “Because yes, we used to play in the small clubs and it took a while until it took off and touched the mainstream. But it seems that we still have some of the core fans who appreciate it.”
