Catan GmbH is a shareholder in Mayfair, and Catan products make up a large portion of Mayfair’s revenue. (The model works a lot like the relationship between book authors and their publishers.) Catan’s relationship with Mayfair goes deeper than a typical licensing deal: the companies have grown together, and, at this point, their fortunes are thoroughly intertwined. Catan licenses the idea and prototype to publishers, who then produce and market the game and pay Catan GmbH about ten per cent in royalties. “Luckily, she loves Catan as I do,” Teuber said.ĭie Siedler von Catan is available in over thirty languages. (Teuber’s daughter is an actress although she’s sometimes roped in as an unofficial game tester, she’s not formally involved with the company.) Claudia is responsible for bookkeeping and testing new games. Teuber and his sons, Guido and Benjamin, each hold the title of managing director Guido focusses on the English-speaking market and Benjamin controls the international side and helps with game development. In 2002, they incorporated Catan GmbH and made it the family business. He and his wife, Claudia, have three children. Teuber left his dental lab in 1998, “when I felt like Catan could feed me and my family,” he said. “Going Cardboard,” a 2012 documentary about the board-game industry, includes footage of Teuber appearing at major gaming conventions, where he is greeted like a rock star-fans whisper and point when they see him-but seems sheepish while signing boxes.
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Almost all board-game designers, even the most successful ones, work full time in other professions Teuber is one of a tiny handful who make a living from games. “I never expected it would be so successful,” he said. Teuber is still somewhat baffled by the popularity of his creation. of Mayfair Games, said, “Our volume of sales will be such that, over time, Catan could, in terms of gross revenue, be the biggest game brand in the world.” Rebecca Gablé, a German historical-fiction author, has written a Viking-era Settlers of Catan novel. Paraphernalia in the online Catan shop includes socks and custom-designed tables. Including all the spinoffs, expansions, and special editions, there are about eighty official varieties of Catan-more if you include electronic versions-and Teuber has had a hand in creating all of them.
Big-box chains like Target, Walmart, and Barnes & Noble carry the game and its offshoots, such as Catan cards, Catan Junior, and Star Trek Catan. It was released in the United States in 1996 last year, its English-language publisher, Mayfair Games, reported selling more than seven hundred and fifty thousand Catan-related products. First published in Germany in 1995 as Die Siedler von Catan, the game has sold more than eighteen million copies worldwide. Teuber, now sixty-one, is the creator of The Settlers of Catan, a board game in which players compete to establish the most successful colony on a fictional island called Catan, and the managing director of Catan GmbH, a multi-million-dollar business he runs with his family. He started designing elaborate board games in his basement workshop. “I had many problems with the company and the profession,” he told me. In the eighties, Klaus Teuber was working as a dental technician outside the industrial city of Darmstadt, Germany.
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