Death of Klaus Teuber, creator of the board game Settlers of Catan

Klaus Teuber, the creator of the board game Catania, one of the best-selling in the world, died on Saturday April 1 following an illness, his family announced on Tuesday

Death of Klaus Teuber, creator of the board game Settlers of Catan

Klaus Teuber, the creator of the board game Catania, one of the best-selling in the world, died on Saturday April 1 following an illness, his family announced on Tuesday. He was 70 years old. Mr. Teuber published the game Settlers of Catan in 1995, later renamed Catan. This strategy game in which each player embodies a settler arriving in Sicily quickly established itself as a classic resource management game and a huge commercial success.

Translated into forty languages, Catania has sold tens of millions of copies and has seen multiple expansions, alternative versions, and video game adaptations. "With Catania, Klaus Teuber has created a unique game universe," wrote his publisher Kosmos in a statement announcing his death, published on Tuesday. "He established and shaped the 'German board game' genre. »

Former dental technician

Born in 1952 in the small village of Rai-Breitenbach (Hesse), Klaus Teuber spent the first part of his life working as a dental technician near Darmstadt. In the 1980s, he began making games in his basement to “[escape],” he told The New Yorker in 2014. "I had a lot of problems with my employer and my job. With the game, I could create my own world. »

His first game, Barbarossa (1988), was a critical success. In the 1990s, he twice won the prize for German game of the year from the prestigious Deutscher Spielepreis, for Adel verpflichtet (1990, untranslated) then Der fliegende Holländer (1992, untranslated). But in the fragile economy of board game publishers at the time, he struggled to find a publisher for his Catania project: two publishers refused it, before it was finally bought by Kosmos, with whom he will sign an exclusive contract – a first in game publishing in Germany.

The success of Catane allowed him to devote himself full-time to board games from 1998, then to create in 2002 with his eldest son a company managing the rights of all his creations. “I never thought the game would be so successful,” he told The New Yorker in 2014, while explaining that he continued to play it – anonymously – online.