Hey and welcome to Episode 135 where we explore the game that
opened the door to an entire world of tabletop adventures.
We will dive into the hex shaped classic that started it all for
generations of gamers. Today, I sit down with the CEO
of Catan Studio to explore the legacy and ongoing impact of one
of the most influential board games of all time.
Catan didn't just change how we play, it changed who we play
with. For three decades, it's simple,
yet strategic gameplay has connected gamers, fostering
friendships, family memories, and global communities around a
shared experience at the table. From trading sheep for wheat to
building settlements that sparked conversation, Catan has
become more than a game, it's a cultural touchstone.
Join me as I traverse its origins, evolution, and the
vision that continues to guide this modern classic.
Can you build the longest road and avoid the robber?
Joining me is Pete Fenland, CEO of Catan Studio.
Pete, thanks for being on and it's good to see you.
Thanks for having me on PJI. Appreciate it.
It's wonderful to be able to join you and your community.
Thank you. Love to have a conversation with
someone who loves games so much. Yep.
So this is incredible, 30 years this year, what, what has that
been like? What has that experience been
like for you? Well, it's been a great ride.
It is. I'd like to say it's been a
great start. I like to think that we're just
getting started on this wonderful journey with Katan.
It has been the better part of a long career for me, which has
been a labor for love. I've been making games for 45
years and discovered Katan about 1/3 of the way through that.
It's been joyful to try and grow the gaming culture, the culture
I love so much that I live in so much sort of organically with
this, with this wonderful story on this wonderful game and share
more and more every year. So I can't tell you how many
times, and I'm sure you've experienced this as well, every
time I have a guest on and I talk to them, I always ask them
the same question. So be prepared.
I'm going to ask this question of you as well, but your answer
is going to be different. What is the game that got you in
this hobby? And it is always, almost always
Catan. And so you have a very different
answer because you've been gaming before.
Yeah, I, well, yeah. At at age 70, having been in
this hobby for actually as a professional game publisher for
45 years, I have a little bit longer shadow, I guess to to to
look back on. I think I've been a gamer since
I can remember. I started out in life as a
military brat, moving from place to place.
Games were always a way to meet new people and find friends.
You know you have to make new friends every two or three years
when you are a military brat. I really love all kinds of
games, particularly physical game, sports and the like.
And I love to play outside. But when I was about 8 years old
or so, we moved to Germany, I noticed that it was harder to
play outside because the weather wasn't quite as good as I was
used to in the base before, which was near Washington, DC.
So when we got to Germany, I certainly was playing a lot of
sports, running around a lot when I could.
But when it got rainy and Gray, which is, you know, a little too
often for my taste, and we're sort of trapped inside, board
games became the best kind of fun.
And that's true at night as well and in the winter and all that
stuff. So I was lucky that I had a dad
who liked games. He and I played checkers and
chess, but he also had a whole set of these wonderful bookcase
games from and the Minnesota Mining Manufacturing Company.
These were kind of a gift that he had received from friends who
knew he liked the games. He was kind of a competitive
guy. Anyway, he shared those games.
We started playing those when I was eightish, 9:00-ish years
old. And they were Twix, choir,
stocks and bonds, games like that.
And in addition to that, we, you know, he, we're living on
military bases. My dad was an Air Force officer.
We like to explore history a lot.
And there were games that he went out and bought because of
that. And so we got US Milton Bradley
games, Dogfight Broadside, some of these very early war games
that then led me through to Avalon Hill games, which were a
revelation. Again, these were all basically
tabletop strategy games of different kinds, the three more
abstract, little, you know, less, you know, competitive
military type things. But all of them were great board
games. And, you know, I like this.
That's how I discovered gaming, how I got into the hobby.
Yeah. And of course, as we played
them, you know, they're always house rules.
And well, get enough house rules, you you get, you start
game designing, you know, Right. Yeah, right.
Yeah. So anyway, that's that's that
was entry point circa late. OK, so that's that's in the 60s.
You had told me when we had met Ajen Kano, you had dived into
early D&D in the 70s, right? Is that right?
Yeah. So I, I, yeah, as, as we, as, as
we moved, we ended up moving from Germany to Illinois, where
I discovered a sports game. So I was heavily into sports,
baseball player, football player, you know, all that
stuff. I discovered Stratomatic
baseball and football. They, they were obsessions in my
middle, middle school years. And then we moved through
Oklahoma and then to Northern Virginia outside DC and I ended
up in my final three years in high school, a very special high
school. I had a wonderful game club and
I had a planetarium. So, you know, it's pretty,
pretty damn cool. High school and the game club,
you know, was pretty magical. I really enjoyed, you know, that
pursuing more board gaming, tweaking this and that.
But the real key, real interesting thing about that
high school was my program. I was in a special program where
the second-half of my day, every day for the last three years of
high school was one class. And it was a class taught
through time by team of people. They would teach you the art,
the music, the politics, the sort of historical background,
you know, all the stuff, you know, the liberal arts or human,
human arts of a culture, culture by culture through time.
So we started with Mesopotamia as a sophomore in high school.
We ended running a mock election for mock presidential election
for the whole high school at the end of our senior year.
And so at the end of each segment, Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Rome, whatever it may be, Greece, Rome, we had
role-playing that we wrapped up this this segment by kind of
role-playing the, the, the historic culture and that, you
know, you ended up in the French Revolution, for instance, And I
was, I think I was a cardinal, you know, and, and swept up and
all of that, you know, and, and, and sure, mark election, you end
up, you know, have being essentially a political
operative or press person or whatever it was that you were
role-playing. So I actually learned about
role-playing that way. And, you know, and I of course
also, you know, had learned about a kind of storytelling
around campfires through scouting.
And I've done a ton of that. And so between those things and
the fact that I grew up in a military family where both
parents had served in multiple wars and were themselves
storytellers, was kind of immersed in different angles,
different aspects of, of, of storytelling and, and then
role-playing. So I then came to the University
of Virginia 1973 with a little bit of background on that.
Now, I had also been backpacking as a, I'm an outdoors guy, been
backpacking in Yosemite to the summer prior to college.
And I had let I read Lord of the Rings while on that backpacking
trip and that affected me in a big way.
I really love that story. Reading it in in the High
Country, you know, it was doubly inspiring, particularly, you
know, given the fact that you somebody sort of inspired
Rivendell. And when I got to the university
and I count to the game club there, I kind of went in
thinking I'm going to be playing some, you know, war games or,
you know, strategy games that I was sort of used to.
And I saw a bunch of people sitting around playing deep and
they're playing DND in an environment set.
Well, they're playing DND in Middle Earth and that's what
first attracted me was the, the Middle Earth side of it and left
the, the D&D side of it. But once I saw they were
role-playing and I knew how to role play, I thought, gosh, this
is really cool idea. And they were having a lot of
fun. And so I, you know, I sat in
and, and, and eventually became part of the game.
And this would have been 1974, not long after the indie had
come out with some white rocks. Yeah, That's, that was my, I
guess that that was the my next entry into a deeper type of what
we called adventure games. Sure.
Yeah. So here you are in college.
You're equipped with an upbringing throughout the world
as a military brat. Yeah, you've learned strategy
games, starting with checkers and chess, through through war
games, role-playing in high school.
Now you're playing DND. Fast forward 20 years.
How did you end up? How did you discover Catan and
be one of the key individuals to bring it to the world?
Yeah, so I, I ended up inheriting the role-playing game
that I was playing in at, at the University of Virginia only a
year after I started playing, when the professor that was
running the game had to take off to teach it at West Point and
kind of handed the keys to me. And I said to the guys that at
at the time and at the time, it was all guys, sadly, you know,
hey, I, I really love this game. But you know, Dick, who was
running the game, didn't know that much about Middle Earth and
and and actually the game system kind of sucks.
So my and it wasn't because DND wasn't brilliant, It was but
right was it what had been evil? It had evolved out of a
chainmail and and it wasn't quite yeah, the D it wasn't
anywhere where like the D&D of today, the really, you know,
well evolved D&D of today. So I resolved that we would have
to start changing parts of the game to reflect the Middle Earth
and also to reflect the kind of the physics of the real world.
Cuz I again, I'm an outdoors guy.
I know a lot about history, this and that and it D&D just didn't
make any sense. So we I, you know, we embarked
on a kind of new journey and I would introduce new game systems
over the course of the next few years and evolved that game that
we were playing into a game, a wholly new game called Role
Master. And it was OK house role-playing
game. I found ended up founding a game
company out of that when my wife, Manel wife, who had become
a player and a principal play tester and a contributor to the
game, Olivia Johnston, convinced me to talk to her sister about
starting a mail order company. Because her sister knew that I
designed this game and that we we had a team of folks that were
playing the game and the kind of a kind of a team that might go
into, you know, perhaps into business together.
We've been talking a little bit about the idea and, you know,
and she knew I might want to do a mail order thing sort of like
Spia company that had been making game simulations
publications and she was a mail order specialist.
She had come out of college and and said, you know, I've got the
skills to to maybe do the marketing or the mail order
stuff if you want to start a company.
My and that was that was kind of the spark that, you know, the
final spark. And I went and I said, yeah, I
think I will start a company. And I went and talked to my
players at the time we had about, we had pretty big group
of of up to 18 players in my game, but.
Wow, that's a that's a lot. Big game, but at the time I
announced that there were 11 in that particular gaming group
because, you know, sometimes we met together, sometimes in
separate groups. And yeah, about nine of them
were enthusiastic about joining me on the, on a new journey.
So I found a company called Iron Crime Enterprises, which was
short, it was called ICE. And it has nothing to do with
the US government. And, and we, we started
publishing Role Master and some other products in 19.
In fact, we actually also published the official
Battlefield game for the Battle of Manassas because one of the
guys joining us happened to design A brilliant Manassas
game. But anyway, that's how I started
and we became a, you know, you know, a start up in a, in a very
small world, a very small pond of adventure game publishers.
And about two years after that, we acquired the rights to The
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, all of the gaming rights
as part of a play that I made after TSR had lost those rights.
And TSR was the publisher of DND and that kind of put us on the
map and we then embarked on a building, Middle Earth
role-playing and a whole world of Middle Earth.
And we then became a one of the bigger players in the small
adventure game business, I should say small but growing
adventure game business. And we sort of helped that
business along the course of the next years.
The following years, we began to do a lot more of our own
original game publishing. We went branched into game
interactive books, game books, we branched into board games.
We discovered some really amazing European design while I
was at Frankfurt Book Fair and then later Essen Game Fair and
also at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. And, and we began importing Big
Bad Wolf's Flying Turtle games, which was a line from Belgium.
Brilliant games from my friend Chauvinist's and and a number of
other great designers. And these were games that were,
we're actually debuting at the very earliest of the Essen
fairs. And we were then beginning to
connect, you know, across the ocean.
We were also designing our own board games, some of the Middle
Earth games based on designed by my friends, particularly Coleman
Charlton, who was my big biggest partner, who's my principal
partner at ICE. He was head of our design team
and and Coleman had designed some really cool Middle Earth
games and some of our other guys also designed some cool stuff.
Rick Britain and designed Cleric, another board game,
Cleric's Revenge. And so we had our own board
little board game line. We were importing board games
and this would have been in the East by now and early 90s, late
80s, early 90s, we discovered some of the brilliant games from
our friend Chris Burme and brilliant abstract game designer
in Belgium and Roland Segers. And so we knew some of the
players, we'd heard of some of these designers.
We knew a little bit about, you know, the, the, the, the German
game culture as well, from going to Frankfurt Book Fair,
Nuremberg Toy Fair, and then Aston.
And I was going to Aston every other year and sending somebody
else every other year at this point.
These were the very earliest of the Essen Fair, right?
So in 1995, this amazing game came out, it debuted and and was
spotlighted at Essen and that was Qatar.
Now, coincidentally, I was not there, but I, I was whole.
I'd gone to Frankfurt Book Fair that year and and my friend Kurt
Fisher had gone to Essen, but he came back and talked, talked a
little bit about, you know what, what was hot there.
And a friend of another friend, Keewa Cheeves, who always went
to Essen and who's ultimately was somewhat of a a legend in
his own name. All right, A number of key games
were later named after him. Keywood brought, you know, a
number of his favorite games to our happy hour.
And this was right after that year.
And one of them was Qatar. And we had this wonderful happy
hour and iron crown that occurred every Friday night
where we brought all the British families in.
They could have food and music and gaming and kind of start the
weekend in a in a fleisual away and then go off and explore the
downtown of Charlottesville because we also had outdoor
music at that time and well, still do.
And it was just a really good way to to bring the community,
the ice community together. We played Katan the day that he
would brought it, not a week or so after he got back from
medicine. It was an immediate hit and I
played it a couple times saying this is as good as any board
game I've ever played. And my take away from my own
experience and the experience of everybody there, many of whom
are fantastically experienced gamers.
It was this is as good again game as they had ever played or
anybody had ever played. And if we wanted to really grow
game culture in the, in the board game through the board
game, a community which is really at the heart of the
gaming community, the analog gaming community, period, this
might be the way. And, and I thought, well, you
know, I've always wanted to grow gaming.
I love it when people play games because they have fun and it's
great to share the joy and it's good for everybody.
And really, it's good for the culture.
Would it be wonderful if when people think of a board game,
they don't think about Monopoly, but they think about something
really good, like like the time? And so I, being a guy deeply
rooted in fantasy, fantasized about that a little bit and and
then resolved. And I wanted to call the
designer Klaus Toiber and see if he might give us the rights to
publish Katan at least in English and perhaps even English
worldwide. And of course, when I did call
him, I had very halting German, my my kinder Deutsch from my
childhood. And Klaus had very primitive
English at the time, barely, barely communicated.
But it was clear from Klaus that he had already licensed another
company to do English language Katan.
In fact, he had licensed them at right, right at at the Essen
Fair that year and it was Mayfair Games.
Mayfair Games was a, a game company, another adventure game
company in Chicago, IL run by my friend Darwin Bromley.
And I, I said, I know that's too bad.
Darwin, you know, like Darwin and respected him.
And I thought, you know, at least it's in good hands.
And was that for a time, You know, there was then.
Sort of a, a little bit of a hiccup in time before I, I
actually received the rights that I had sought that year
because it would be another year and change before.
Yeah, a little over a year before Darwin called me and
said, hey Pete, we're about to close Mayfair Games.
We'd had they'd had a big disaster with the SIM City
Collectible card game and you know, largely because, you know,
the companies run or owned by a family trust and we want to
preserve that trust for our descendants and rather than, you
know, endanger that we're going to close or sell Mayfair games.
And we thought, given the fact that you guys have just made a
ton of money off the middle of the collectible card game,
right, you guys might be a good white knight here, particularly
given the fact that I know Darwin, this is Darwin speaking,
paraphrasing. He knew that I love Katan and he
knew also that I loved a lot of the things that he had been
doing and train games and the like.
My grandfather, my mother's father had been an engineer on
the railroad. I'd love train games.
So he knew, he thought, OK, this, you know, this would be
good haven for it. And I know he knew me well.
My mother knew his mother. And that felt like a felt like a
great opportunity. I responded by saying, Darwin, I
will, we will buy your company if we strike a good deal.
I'm sure we can. If Klaus Troiver will allow us
to publish Qatan, he's going to have to agree to transfer those
rights to the new owners. And if he'll do that, then we'll
buy made for games. And we agreed.
Let's, you know, let's try that. So I contacted Klaus, so did
Darwin. We arranged I arranged to meet
Klaus in Nuremberg that that early January of 1997 went and
saw him. I expressed my vision that the
Catan should be the thing that people think about when the word
board game comes out or words board game are expressed.
No, I need to. I need to ask a question about
that conversation. Sure, How?
How was his English and how was your German this time?
It was not any better than on the phone, but the fortunate
thing was in in the Nuremberg setting, we had translators and
so we. Had you?
Know friends. And so when I met Klaus, you
know, I was also meeting some of the folks around him, Reiner
Mueller, you know, Fritz Gruber, some other guys that Fritz knew
English a bit better, and some of the folks from the Cosmos
publishing team. And then of course, I had German
friends, you know, particularly a friend was a publisher,
publishing partner in Germany, a guy named Gunter Doyle.
And Gunter was one of the founders of a, a major kind of a
multifaceted German publishing, retail and distribution company.
And Gunter Translate was our principal translator that day.
And he, he's kind of helped us strike, strike a friendship,
really. And yeah, we warmed to each
other even though we, we couldn't understand each other
perfectly. And Klaus told me, you know,
when I told him I I think that we can make, I think Katan
someday can be the game people think about when first when they
hear board game. You know, when I told him that
and I said, I don't know that it'll be on on my watch or our
watch, but I think it was it'd be a good quest.
It would be a good thing to to try and and make happen.
He said to me more or less, I don't know that about that.
I don't know that that can be done.
But I think you think that that that's that might be done that
that it's worth trying. And I would be happy to to
partner with you, assuming that my son Guido, who happens to
live in the United States and can visit you and reassure me
that what you're telling me about your company and about
what you guys do is real. And so I said, well, I'd be
delighted to prove that to Gito. I'd be delighted to meet him and
be delighted to go through that vetting process.
And that's, that's what we what we arranged at that Nuremberg.
And it would be not six weeks or so before Gito and his then
girlfriend, now wife Emily, came to Charlottesville to see us and
check us out. And to say yay or nay to his
dad. And clearly he said yeah.
He did goodness, you know, this young guy, he he was been
exploring the New World, New Mexico and then the United
States fall in love with American was moving from New
York to New Orleans. His wife was going to grad
school. He was going to get a late start
as an undergraduate at the University of New Orleans.
And he was very, very curious guy, very adventurous guy.
And I hit it off with him right away.
Shared all kinds of common loves, you know, different music
and culture, you know, we were both curious souls.
And as witness as his wife Emily, and as is my wife, Olivia
Johnston, we we all found friendships that we still
cherish today. Catan, in a sense, was just the
glue that bound us. But yeah, initially.
But yeah. Yeah.
So here's a question, because the time period you're
describing is when I get introduced to the game myself.
It's like that 97 to 99. And I remember it was a
settlers, a Catan and we refer to it as settlers.
Are you guys you want to play Settlers tonight?
It was always settlers. Well, are we playing with the
City of Knights expansion? Yes, you know, right.
It was because and that conversation still is today.
Are we playing the game with such and such?
Whatever game you're talking about?
Are we playing with the expansions right?
When did we drop the settlers and just go with Katan?
Yeah, yeah. Well, that actually was part of
the early discussion about vision and mission, you know,
and part of the discussion about whether we made for games should
be playing with global rights or territorially, you know,
restricted rights. I told Gito and we had a long
good conversation about this. And then later through Gito with
Klaus that I, I wanted to do to publish Katan globally in
English and and step through a series of evolutions with the
brand to get to that, that vision of the future.
And that a game that was called De Siedlerfon Katan in Germany
and the Settlers of Katan in the United States and referred to as
Siedler or Settlers, was not going to grow as much as a game
that had its own name, just Katan, and had a global presence
as Katan rather than a regional or local presence as settlers.
So I said, you know, we're we we have right now the the reality
of today, which is Sigler or settlers.
And then and that's fine. People will always people who
play now, then then, you know, that was the late 90s.
People who play then, you know, will probably continue to call
it that. But in the future, we're going
to have to create a a community that that embraces this game as
Katan. And then to get there, we're
going to have to, we got a long way to go.
So we're going to have to go through various steps.
And, and we talked about it strategically charting the
brand. And at first, the first step
would be that de Seedler would have to become smaller than
Katan. And then the next step would be
that Katan, then we would get rid of de Seedler, it would just
be Katan. And then that the next step
after that was we would introduce an icon in addition to
Katan that the sort of graphic expression of the brand.
And in the next step, maybe that the graphic expression, the
brand would be as strong or stronger than the name itself.
But people could identify Katan very distinctly from its name.
You know, it's very unique name and it's very unique identity.
And, and that that actually was part of the architecture of the,
of the quest. You know, that was kind of the,
the, you know, the sort of the bones of the road trip that we
were about to embark on starting in 97.
I think you've succeeded in that aspect because no one calls it
settlers anymore. I don't even call it settlers.
We all know, although you have not corrected me, but I have
noticed, I say Catan, you say Catan.
This is a conversation that we have at the bar after, you know,
on a Thursday night at Gencon. We go to the bar, which is a
Catan. Catan.
Well, so do you have? Which is it?
Do you have the T-shirt that says it's pronounced CA Catan
CATAN? It's.
Pronounced. OK, it's a great T-shirt.
Now the reason is, you know, I'm OK if you want to pronounce it
rutabaga, it doesn't matter to me.
Although, you know, that may confuse people a little bit
more, a little bit. Everybody has their own sense,
you know, the, the potato, potato, tomato, tomato thing,
You know, Ant, however you want to look at it.
Klaus called it Katan. OK, I might know.
You know, when I refer to Klaus now, I have to refer to him in
the past tense because we lost Klaus on April 1, 2023.
And he's a dear friend and he's always with us.
So, you know, we, I'm saluting him now and I'll, we're saluting
him always. But he called his world Catan,
his island Catan. And but he didn't care if you
call the Catan. And in fact, this would became a
big discussion point because in certain cultures, the that CATN
is going to be pronounced differently and at least one
culture, it's pronounced Satan. But fortunately that culture
doesn't think of that. They don't refer to Satan as
Satan. So it doesn't necessarily create
a problem. You know, again, it's the
meaning behind the word, not the word itself.
But the fact is, you know, we had a big struggle inside the
brand at one point because the our French publishing licensee
Sublicensee, a localization partner, if you will, they had
added an E to Catan so that everyone said properly OK in
French. And, and we had to kind of
deconstruct that initiative. When we, when we became just
Catan, we had to explain, hey guys, that's not how you build,
right? Right.
It's always the French, isn't it?
Yeah, Yeah. Well, I work for a French
company, you know, Catan Studio is a part of Asthma Day.
And, and, and I have to say, yeah, we, we make a lot of jokes
about each other, you know, But at the end of the day, yes,
they're everybody's very proud of their culture.
And and just as we Americans like to think of ourselves as
the sun of the world, so do the Chinese think of themselves as
the middle king, and the French also think of themselves as the
place where the Sun King established the heart of the
world. So yeah, we have that thing
going. But anyway, at the end of that's
a long winded way of saying pronounce it however you want.
I happen to pronounce it Katan because I learned it from Klaus.
That's a fair OK, I'm going to do better.
I'm going to do better. OK, Yeah, OK.
Is that that's straight from the straight from the horse's mouth.
I. Live in the American South, you
know, Katan Studios in Charlottesville, VA Very, very
historic southern town and you know, you say aunt here, not
aunt right. So you're going to you you may
say you're you're never going to call it tomato here.
No, so Katan may not be the the the first way you might go here,
but in any case, that's that's the that's the.
That is how Klaus pronounced it. So guys, let's, I'm going to try
to do better. Guys, you try to do it as well,
right? My German accent's not as good
as his I. Love that, I love it.
What kind of individual was he? Did you get a sense of the man
himself through the years? Klaus was no Klaus was a dear
friend and I don't think I, I could, I could have published
well, I know I could not be publishing Catan today if if he
wasn't a very gentle and, and dear soul, a guy who who was
very empathetic, who stood by me through some very difficult
times, stood by our team through some very difficult times, was
very patient with us. Klaus was a like his son Guido,
like his other son Benny, his younger son Benjamin, who is now
our lead design guy, inherited the mantle lead designer from
club. He was very curious, an
adventurous guy. He liked, loved the outdoors,
loved to walk in the woods. I loved walking in the woods
with him and, and talking and dreaming and soaking up nature.
He he loved to explore, loved to explore maps and and history.
He really enjoyed, you know, always actively adventuring, if
you will, in his mind. He was a loved, you know, loved
good food, loved good music, loved, you know, a lot of a lot
of those things. He loved to love things just
like I do. And then of course he was a
fantastic family man. He designed Katan because he
wanted to share a game that his family loved with him.
And he had, you know, he designed a lot of games 'cause
he was a fabulous game designer. He won the Spiel Descharas award
4 times. You know, could have wanted
more. Perhaps he, you know, he'd been
a very accomplished designer by the time he got to designing
Katan. Everyone respected him as one of
the greatest design Dame designers in the world.
But he you know, a lot of his games were games that his wife
Claudia and his his kids didn't much enjoy or didn't enjoy as
much as he did. And so he his eldest son, Guido
is his younger kids, particularly his youngest son,
Benjamin. You know, it came from
different, you know, different, different angles, different
ages. His, you know, obvious Claudia
had her own her own interests and and tastes.
So Klaus wanted to create a game that would appeal to all of
them. And actually, it became kind of
a family experience. He designed this game and
actively play tested with the family, rigorously plays this
with the family and stripped it down from its original very kind
of deep design to the Katan of today.
Anyway, basically speaks to the family man that he was the the
love of his family and he loved community.
He loved his his home and the Odenvald near Darmstadt.
I loved that area. Rosdorf was his his home and
village and so he loved loved that region.
He was very rooted in that and he did travel.
I didn't like to fly much, but you know, he did travel a good
deal. He loved, you know, Italy.
He loved wine country. He loved, you know, the
Mediterranean loved, loved, you know, the the adventure of
visiting islands. Just like you might think he
loved Iceland. He loved that those cultures of
the north as well, the seafarers of the north.
So he, he did get out and venture about, but he always
returned home to a home that he had grown, grown up into, a
region that he'd grown up in, did most of his travelling in
his head. He was a very imaginative man.
So I loved all of that about him and I loved the fact that he was
a kind man. He, you know, he's loving
father, loving husband, an amazing marriage.
Claudia is incredible. Again, he recognized he couldn't
do what he did without her support, you know, without her
partnership. And similarly, he brought,
nurtured his sons in the business, shared with them the,
the journey and, and, and then fortunately was able to, you
know, create a family business out of it.
And, and that business thrives today.
They're the IP owner. Katanju BH owns the intellectual
property. That's what we call IP.
So anyway, it's a long winded way of saying, you know, got to
know Klaus starting in in January 1997.
I ended up going to his son's ghetto's wedding and and meeting
class again here for the first time in the new world in New
Orleans, where where ghetto and Emily got married in 1999.
I started, I went to Rossdorf and rode bikes with him for a
couple of weeks and hiked in the woods that spring of 99.
And we, we became closer and closer through time and, and,
and and became partners and, and you know, along of course with,
with the other folks that work on Katan.
Again, this is the team thing right now.
I became here, you know, part we established through class.
I established partnerships with Cosmos, the German publisher,
localization, the the non-english publisher, Katan,
the first publisher, and we became a family, an extended
family built around this wonderful brand.
I think I got that sense. So just when I was early for our
meeting and going into your business lounge there waiting
for a meeting at Gen. Con, I really got a sense cuz
you could hear other meetings that were going on.
Even our, our meeting was you and I, we sat down with Kevin
from marketing and then Ron the COO came by and I, I felt like I
was, I felt like I was at a family table with a really big
family who love each other. Yeah, I really got that sense
Earlier you were talking about, you were talking a little bit
about the vision, right? You wanted to drop settlers, you
needed to go. You wanted Catan to be the
keyword and some sort of a logo and you fell upon the sunrise
that that icon. Tell us a little bit about that
story. How did that get there, and how
much was Klaus involved in the transition to that logo?
Well, Klaus was actually, the sun was was there in the
beginning on the Original. It's always been on the box.
It was in fact, Klaus sharing that that emotion with his his
then partner Reiner Muller, who Reiner also contributed a great
deal to to the Katan that would be published in 1995.
Right. And with, you know, with his
family. Haas lives on the edge of a
forest and on the edge of a Meadow.
Beautiful nature there in the Odin evolved area.
And you know he. He loves nature.
He loves the idea of, of waking up and seeing the great sunrise
over the hills and wondering what's going on.
You know, you know, over the hill there same way as I love,
you know, the, the song somewhere over the rainbow.
You know, I also that idea of what what's going on over the
over the hill or over the rainbow.
So the, the sun for him was an expression of exploration, the
sunrise, You know, it's like when you wake up every day and
you explore the day, you, you want to adventure through the
day. And if you're out at sea looking
for a new home or on the land on a trail looking for a new home,
you know, that's a particularly moving, moving thing.
You know, Klaus, you know, looked at that, that sun rising
over the horizon and said, that's a great expression of, of
the, of the story That kind of inspired me to create this game,
which was the idea of going and going out with the, with the,
with the community of, of friends and family and finding a
new place to make a better life and a better world.
And that's really at the heart of Qatar.
Wow, that's beautiful. I don't know that I could put
that any better. Yeah, thank you for that.
I'm also thinking about listening to you talk about
thinking about all the different iterations that I mean, just
that I'm aware of that I've played Struggle for Rome, right?
It was Stone Age. Was it Stone Age of Catan where
you had to build Solomon's Temple?
No, that was that's you. It was a.
Little bit of a mash up there, but right, So we had we had
Settlers of the Stone Age. That was the English title and
it is now the dawn of humankind. It evolved quite a bit in
between those two titles. You know, at the core of the
same game design Ohio involved in the dawn of the current dawn
of God. But that was a these are stand
alone games, historical narrative, right, and or
prehistorical narrative. Then we had some other other
games that have, you know, sort of a more the, you know,
different types of themes, right way of science fiction of games,
the * fairs of Cortana being the greatest expression of yeah,
great standalone. We've also done some cross
branded storytelling with with Game of Thrones, The Game of
Thrones Guitar and and Star Trek guitar.
By far one of the best Star Trek board games that's out there.
Well, it's pretty. It was pretty fun.
And so Cortana is a dynamic collection of stories.
In fact, we like to think of it really as a as a lifestyle brand
built around a great board game, the red box, the the Catan, the
game being the core of right nucleus of of the brand.
So what if you can say what's next for Catan?
Wow. I'm sorry, Katan.
Katan. I said.
I was going to do better. Katan.
It's all good if you just buy a case of Katans every time you
mispronounce it. That would be so as far as
what's next, like I say, we're just getting started.
We've just brought out the new edition of Katan, the 6th
edition. It is referred to more broadly
as the next edition because in, in Spain or in Slovenia or in
any of the, you know, 40 some markets where there's a
different localization of Catan, you know, it's a different
number of editions, right? So it happens to be the 6th
English language edition, but that new editions out.
It's, it's the best edition yet by far.
It's the edition that we like to think will conquer the world.
So that's just, you know, that's just getting out into the world.
And we debuted it in spring with focus on the core market.
It'll be only appearing in the mass market in a lot of areas
this, you know, later this summer or really in the autumn,
although you can find it, say for instance, in Barnes and
Noble or Amazon, of course. You say?
What would you say to folks who already have a copy?
And what? Why should I buy the newest
version? Well, it really is substantively
the best product we've ever built.
It's first of all, the box has been fully redesigned so that
you can accommodate the expansion, so you don't have to
get around a ton of boxes and things like that.
It's really, really. So it's a smart design.
It does not involve a lot of plastic.
We've tried to get rid of as much plastic as we can.
It doesn't have shrink wrap, for instance.
It as a whole, you know, sensibility because it's more
sustainable and it, you know, we, we have lovingly revisited
every single component to make sure that the supply chain
reflects that We also, the new edition has new or all new art.
It's the best art, you know, of course, art is subjective, very
subjective. So it's a different type of art.
I would say it's the best art for the moment that that we've
ever had. Extremely vibrant art.
It's very beautiful art. It's also much more gamified art
there. There's a lot of storytelling in
the art itself. It feels more like Katan the the
game and the, you know, the hex. There's a hex theme in there.
There's the moving of of different resource, you know,
areas, different terrains in the, in the storytelling there.
So that's really super fun. There's the the homage to Klaus,
the Easter Easter egg. This Klaus is central to the the
picture on the Catan box now, and that homage is extremely
important to us. The pieces are, you know, there
are wooden pieces are updated in every way where we can't, where
we felt they need an evolution in the expansions there there
are a lot of really beautiful new wooden pieces.
And then they even in the core game, we beefed up the roads.
They're they're a little bit bigger so that you can pick them
up, play with them, manipulate them better so the game looks
better, it feels better. It's got a much higher level of
utility, but most importantly, the rules are fully evolved.
We thought after all these years that we had sort of perfected
the rules only to discover, no, we had not.
And so our, our team, our design team, you'd mentioned Ron,
Megan, who's our CEO LED the design team.
The rest of our creative team, certainly you know, the Katanji
Major guys, Benny Toiberg, Gito Toiberg, Arnben and that team,
we all revisited the rules. And our internal team, the
actual folks, editorial team, Morgan Dontaville on the from
the creative, from the arts side, from the visualization
side as Sperry, who actually did the grunt work of kind of laying
out all this game. And Ann Reynolds, who sort of
led the charge on rewriting rules, re editing things, though
they they did a an amazing job of deconstructing the whole rule
set and revisiting how you present rules, how you
communicate rules. And we ended up with a much
shorter, much better set of rules allows you to get into the
game much faster. Kind of reinvented our rules,
even though the mechanics haven't fundamentally changed.
They've, you know, clarified something, but such as a way
better rule set and if you want to share the game with friends
and family, it's just a lot easier to play Katan that way.
So it's just a it's a it's a better thing.
Plus on top of it, I guess I'm going to look for those who are
lifting. I won't see it, but for those
who are viewing it, you know, you can see now that everything
fits together covered in a modular way.
The the expansions are set up to be half of the the box.
I mean, the 556 extensions are set up to be half the the boxes
that relate to the core game is a little deeper and thicker, a
little deeper box, I should say, than the expansion boxes so that
you can right away see that, okay, that game is at the core
of it all. So physically it's a, it's a,
it's a more beautiful and and usable and storable set.
We did. This is a long digression from
what's in the future. But right now that's what's
that's, that's the most immediate future, right?
That's the fierce right. You know, the urgent, urgent
now. Yeah, from here we're going to
keep, you know, this, this is going to roll out.
Then we're going to begin evolving all of the other
products that are in the current portfolio to like the new
branding. You know the new, we have a new
brand, we have the new iPod, which has been introduced here
with this new edition. It is a fabulous graphic, you
know, expression, a hex expression of what?
Of Qatar. You can now see it on my shirt
here. So that's cool.
And so we'll do that with with those game games that are still
in the active portfolio. But we're going to be retiring
some things, a few of the titles and we're going to be
introducing a whole new set of gateway products.
Some will be revisions of older gateway games like Ketan Junior,
but there will be a whole host of other newer, newer designs,
particularly in the in say card game or whatever sense new card
games that will allow people to get into Katan in different
ways. As you know, to find a gateway
into the brand different ways and also just experience the
game in different environments. You know, they'll be more
portable or more, you know, more durable if you happen to be in a
bar or something. Not that you would ever drank
and play this game. Oh no, we would never.
So anyway, that's that's that's the immediate future.
But OK, like I said, we're just getting started.
We're you know, we're not that far down the trail.
We got a long SO. Here's here's the here's the $50
million question. It's been 30 years.
Yeah. That is a lot of content.
It's a lot of content, yeah. What is, if anything, what is
your favorite? Like, what is your favorite?
Whether it's a component, whether it's an expansion,
whether it's an element of an expansion.
Oh, good. What's your?
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, you know, that's
like asking me my favorite food or favorite music, and it varies
from day-to-day. It real.
I mean, I, you know, don't mean to be evasive, but you know,
the, the sure. It's true, though.
I mean, I love playing Catan, just in his purest form.
But I, you know, I, I also enjoy diving deeper in different
directions depending on the group of people I'm with, right?
If I wanted to dive deeper, you know, I might go and, and stay
in a sort of compact, portable environment.
I love cities and nights. It's a fantastic sort of
expansion into cultural development.
I liked a lot of the thematic games that we just talked about.
The standalone thematic games. I I love I certainly love doing
of humankind and and certainly love to explore space with
Starfare is a lot of really interesting new mechanics in
those games. They're particularly fun.
They're very fluid and and that's that's fine.
I love being able to roam around and a little bit more sometimes.
Settlers of America in that regard is my absolute favorites
because I love, well love building train tracks and and
connecting dots, you know, that way.
I think that's the the same impetus it makes ticket to ride,
for instance. So enjoy your experience.
But for Catan, it's always been about, you know, building,
building connection points, right.
And so the southern of America is particularly dynamic in that
regard. It's it's crazy fun and wild as
it accelerates through through the game.
So but I like that game a lot. I you know, I'm an and guy, None
or guy. Though, sure.
Yeah. Sure, I get that.
I get that. Is there any?
Well, I mean the answer is probably yes, but is there any
possibility in the future of could we see a legacy game?
I will say yes. Right.
Yeah. I think that's always a
possibility. It's it's a matter of when and
how. Sure.
I think I started to share with you when we met at Gen.
Con, my absolute favorite element in all of settlers was
from Dasbuch, which is it's the flood tokens, so.
Is. What the the flood or dot?
What was it? Is it Das Flute the.
Flood but. Yeah, Das Flute, right?
Is that? Yeah, for those of you who don't
know, because this is old. So whenever a hex is bordering
AC zone and it's number rolls, you put a flood token on it.
And when it gets 5 or 6 flood tokens, you replace it with
water to indicate that there's a flood.
But you could build levees to protect it, which I totally
identify with having grown up in Louisiana.
Yeah, on this, you know, so it was, it was crazy when you said
they got mad they went to New Orleans.
They were married in New Orleans.
Yeah, man, that's like, that's like my backyard right there.
They were. They were married at the
Beauregard mansion in French court.
Oh yeah, I know it well. I know it well.
Pretty core New Orleans there. Yep, absolutely.
Well, I think you're close to achieving your your goal and
your vision. Well, we're certainly we're even
if we're just getting started, we're well on down the road.
Let's predict, yeah. Absolutely.
I so I think the, I think the the demarcation line as it were,
is within the hobby. Everyone's first game is Katan
and it's synonymous. I think when you get out of the
hobby, it's still Monopoly and. Well, you know, it's interesting
that the hobby has grown to be part of the culture more and
more and, and, and I have to say, a lot of young people
joyfully coming into the hobby. A lot of people come into the
hobby every day. As it grows globally more and
more though, there are a lot of people that come into the hobby
and look at Katan as a 30 year old brand and they say wow, you
know, that must be, you know, dated or archaic or whatever.
Like Monopoly, because Monopoly is frankly A dated design,
terribly dated. Very much.
People get knocked out of the game and you know, it's a 0 sum
experience and all that other stuff.
Katan is not like that. Katan actually is to, at this
very moment as great a game, as preeminent a design as it was
when Klaus first, you know, gave it to us in 1995.
He it is a game that remains timeless, remains, you know, you
know, as good as any game you know, there is even now.
So it's it's sad but true that a lot of folks come into the in
the gaming community, in the hobby and ignore it when in
fact, you know, they if they when they do play it, they they
do say, Oh my gosh, you know, this old game is great.
It's right. It's like discovering a
brilliant old album or great old recipe for crab of, you know,
crawfish Etouffee. Yes.
It's it's timeless, right? It is.
Oh my God, you know, this is fantastic, even though it's a
little bit older in terms of years, right?
And those, and, and that's kind of good because, you know, you
think my, my, my grandmother, my God, my grandfather, they, they
could be, it's still pretty cool sometimes.
Exactly. They've got a lot of good
stories to tell and they may not run quite as fast and, you know,
but they, they're still as much fun.
So the, the, the fact of the matter is it that, you know, the
one of our big missions also in, in exploring communities and,
and connecting people with Katan is, is connecting people within
the game community who have not yet paid attention to it because
of its age. So sure, anyway, it's, it's a
part of just cultural development.
It's just normal. And we're excited about the fact
that there are so many people that we might bring new joy to.
I was prepared to before we met. I was prepared to ask you why
you think it on is so sustainable.
And like you know. As a core game.
But I really feel like anyone who's listened to this
conversation, they get it, you know?
Well, I hope so. I hope so.
I. So I didn't have to ask because
I felt like you answered it and I was like, no, I.
Do have AI do have a thought about that because you know, we
some years ago we were asked we we ended up a bunch of us
working to Co design the the game design merit badge for
scouting. And that was a joyful project
because I got to connect, you know, a lot of my my favorite
things in life, Katan and and scouting one at one shot and
also introduce a lot of young people to to games and and to
what makes games special. So Katan actually ended up being
central to that story because Katan does embody what we like
to think are all of the top 11 features in a in a great game of
the first two instantly are fun. That's why it's not just 10.
And of course, you know it dials up to 11.
It does. Yeah, always.
So we Yeah. But and it's hard, you know,
it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's time.
It's, it's temporarily short. It's, you know, it's not a
particularly long game. It's very excessive.
It's very time efficient. It's it's very social, extremely
social that allows you to interact with the other players.
It's highly interactive, which means it's highly you can
interact with the components of the game, with the game system,
right ways, right. And that's really, really good.
It has immense replay value, most of all that.
And that's because there are many ways to victory, many paths
to victory. Every board is different.
Every time you sit down and interact with Cortana, it's a
different island with different terrain and different places
with different probabilities of production and all that stuff.
So it is a fresh experience. It's a surprising experience
when you sit down and therefore it, you know, it is more than
any other game I've ever met, you know, a, a game I want to
play and play again. So it's, it's got incredible
replay back. You know, it's certainly
affordable. You know, these other things.
It has an interesting bit of serendipity.
It's not deterministic right? The the best best strategist or
the best mathematician doesn't always win much.
Experienced gamer doesn't always win because they're a dice and
that adds a certain bit of serendipity to the game.
So now that's cool. It is not a 0 sum game
experience. Everyone has shares joy through
the whole game. You're in the game all the way
to the end and you may not win, but.
You have fun, you build something together, right?
You're always, you're always are all building something.
You're always making something, always accomplishing something.
So it has all of those things. And, and there are many more
little victories and little defeats in Qatan.
So in a sense it's a positive game.
So yeah, that that tells you it's got special sauce whether
you knew it or not. That's right.
So, well, Pete, again, thank you
so much guys. If you have never experienced
the world of Catan, there's a 6th edition coming out soon in
English that you should be on the lookout for.
If not, and you still have a copy as I'm thinking about it
right now, we should that should hit the table this weekend and
revisit this beautiful world that has brought us all together
and not only nurtured but kind of sparked our community.
So thank you again, Pete. Fair enough.
Thank you guys. Make sure to hit the like and
subscribe. Make sure to hit that like and
subscribe button guys. And remember, be kind to each
other and play more games.