RIP Klaus Teuber, the creator of CATAN

The German board game designer Klaus Teuber has passed away at the age of 70. He is best-known as the inventor of the board game Settlers of Catan (more recently, just Catan), often cited as one of the most important board games of all time.

Teuber was born in Rai-Breitenbach in what was then West Germany in 1952 and started designing board games in the early 1980s, whilst he was working a day job as a dental technician in Darmstadt. Inspired by Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, he created the fantasy board game Barbarossa (1988), which was a significant hit and won a coveted Spiel des Jahres prize.

Several more board games followed, with varying degrees of success. Teuber was inspired by Viking stories of colonising, farming and resource-gathering (rather than the more traditional stories of blood-letting) to create a game based around building a new civilisation on an island, both competing and cooperating with fellow players. This resulted in The Settlers of Catan, originally released in Germany in 1995 and the USA and  UK in 1996. The game was an instant, massive success, rapidly outselling all of his other games combined and garnering immense attention in the gaming press. In 1998 Teuber decided to quit his dental day job and incorporated a company to expand the Catan franchise further.

Since the late 1990s, The Settlers of Catan - since renamed just Catan - has sold almost 40 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling board games of all time. Catan has also been celebrated with being the game that jump-started the modern board gaming renaissance; despite its age, the game is still well-regarded as an excellent entry point to the modern genre. The game has seen numerous expansions, various enhanced editions and a whole ton of themed versions taking on franchises like Game of Thrones and Star Trek. A Catan World Championship is also held every two years, along with various online and physical tournaments at conventions across the world.

Teuber himself always seemed vaguely perplexed why the game took off as it did. Neither of the two board games he designed subsequently, Entdecker (1996) and Löwenherz (1997), did anywhere near as well. Teuber has spent most of the years since working on different editions and versions of Catan instead.

Teuber passed away on 1 April after a short but severe illness. He is survived by his wife Claudia and two sons, Guido and Benny. Klaus Teuber's impact on the global board gaming scene cannot be overstated, and he will be missed by everybody who's ever enjoyed rolling dice, dropped a hexagonal island tile down the back of a sofa or gotten into an argument over the value of wood versus sheep.