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. 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
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