Catan board game creator, Klaus Teuber, dies at 70

Ack! I spent many of night in the Student Union playing one of his earlier ones, Barbarossa. I've not been a board gamer for quite a while, but he will be missed.

We remember him for the ingenuity he left.

LTC Eugene Chu
..."Teuber was born in June 1952 in the German town of Rai-Breitenbach. He was working as a dental technician in the 1980s outside the industrial city of Darmstadt when he took up designing board games in his basement, he told The New Yorker magazine in 2014. “I had many problems with the company and the profession,” he said. “I developed games to escape. This was my own world I created.”

In the multi-player game, competitors use five resources to build their colonies, or settlements: wool, grain, lumber, brick, and ore. Teuber never thought his game would become so successful; he finally left his dental technician job in 1998 “when I felt like Catan could feed me and my family,” he told the New Yorker. The game became a family business.

In the first five months of the pandemic in 2020, sales skyrocketed as people played games in quarantine, the company told NPR.

The Catan studio team urged those mourning Teuber to “honor Klaus’ memory by being kind to one another, pursuing your creative passions fearlessly, and enjoying a game with your loved ones.”