Unsettling Catan

Most revolutions don’t start with nineteen cardboard hexagons, but Klaus Teuber’s game about settling a hexagonal island quietly revolutionized boardgaming. Catan’s commercial success selling over 40 million copies certainly catalyzed a modern boardgaming boom. More importantly, its playful experiments set a new tone for game design. By making its cutthroat gameplay feel peaceful and pastoral, Catan helped a fledgling eurogame tradition forge its distinctive style and was heralded by Wired for “changing the American idea of what a board game can be.” Although peaceful revolutions are usually the best kind, it’s worth questioning how these games cultivate peaceful feelings. Today, peaceful-feeling eurogames often settle into detached design—a mindset of making conflict feel peaceful by dampening conflicted feelings. Unsettling Catan questions how peaceful-feeling eurogames can make implicitly imperialist themes palatable by cultivating a detached mindset that imagines power as