Interesting Facts about Catan

Catan, was first published in 1995, and was a new type of board game. It created something new in the market and there are many interesting facts about Catan.

Catan is a board game set up to encourage resource gathering and different board variations; where players interact with each other to trade resources, but with a focus on winning rather than eliminating your opponents.

Here are some interesting facts about Catan that you probably didn’t know about before.

• 1. Catan has become one of the world’s most popular board games. It has gone on to win awards and become the first German board game to sell outside of Europe.
• 2. The game was first published in German with the title “Die Siedler von Catan.”
• 3. Catan has sold more than 25m copies in more than 30 languages. If you look at 1995 to 2022, that is roughly 2500 copies per day, every day, for 25 years. Settlers of Catan won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres in 1995.
• 4. Catan is popular in the United States where it has been called “the board game of our time” by The Washington Post.
• 5. In Germany, Catan sold very well in the first few years after it was released, then sales flattened.
• 6. In the U.S., Catan started in a niche gamer crowd but gradually became more popular. College students took it up, as did their professors
• 7. Five years ago, there were 100 entrants in the Settlers of Catan US Championship. This year, there are 10 to 15 times that number, spread across 32 qualifying events.
• 8. Including all the spinoffs, expansions, and special editions, there are about eighty official varieties of Catan — more if you include electronic versions — and Teuber has had a hand in creating all of them. Paraphernalia in the online Catan shop includes socks and custom-designed tables.
• 9. A short film titled The Lord of Catan was released in 2014. A husband and wife find themselves thrust into an apocalyptic rivalry over a game of Settlers of Catan.
• 10. The most people playing Settlers of Catan simultaneously is 922 and was achieved by Mayfair Games (USA) in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, on 16 August 2013. The event took place during the trade show Gen Con Indy 2013. The game was set up as one continuous Seafarer’s expansion board with all 922 players, with the final winner being the first to reach 25 points.
• 11. The game is based on the concept of a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean named “Catan.”Teuber believed that if anyone were to find the fictional island of Catan, it would have been the Vikings, so he based the look of the game on inspirations from the Vikings.
• 12. In the eighties, Klaus Teuber was working as a dental technician outside the industrial city of Darmstadt, Germany. When Klaus Teuber developed The Settlers of Catan in the 1990s, board game design was just a side hobby for him.
• 13. Teuber’s dentist lab stayed the source of income till 4 more years until he realized that he could earn sufficient from his game. The game had more rigid rules at first but they changed over time.
• 14. You can read Catan, Rebecca Gable wrote the book on Catan that was published in Germany in 2003.
• 15. You can play the game online where there are more than 1000 active members. You have to play anonymously though so you don’t know how much experience the other player has.