"It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that the Teuber family announces their beloved husband and father Klaus Tuber passed away at 70 on April 1, 2023, after a short and serious illness," said the statement posted on the German-language Catan website.
Klaus Teuber, the inventor of the board game Catan, passes away at 70.
Catan is a popular multiplayer board game with over 20 million players worldwide. It was developed by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995 in Germany. Players in the game have the role of settlers that build their own colonies and can trade or acquire resources. The goal is to grow their settlements as much as possible.
The game board represents the Island Catan, and consists of different hexagonal tiles. The players use resource cards to build roads and cities on the tiles to grow or upgrade their settlements, or to get more resources.
Players can use five resource cards to build their colonies which may represent wool, lumber, grain, ore and brick. They gather resources by building roads to different hexagonal tiles, which gives different resource cards.
In the game, the players create and grow their settlements which can also be upgraded to cities. For each settlement, players earn one point and for each city they earn two points. They gain victory points as their settlements grow and the first player to reach 10 points is crowned as the winner.
Catan is available in over 40 languages for users to play globally. Some of these languages include Japanese, German, English, Spanish, Dutch and French.
The family and loved ones of Klaus Teuber have requested privacy during this difficult time in their lives.
The team posted on social media, "While Klaus' contributions to the board gaming industry are immeasurable, we will remember him most as a kind and selfless human being, an inspirational leader, and most importantly, as a friend."
Klaus Teuber was born in June 1952 in Rai-Breitenbach, Germany.
When he started designing board games in his basement, Klaus Teuber was a dental technician.
"I had many problems with the company and the profession," he said. "I developed games to escape. This was my own world I created."
Klaus Teuber did not anticipate the success of his game, and when it did, he left his dental job in 1998.
Klaus Teuber had a vision of his world and brought it to life with Catan, which also became the vision of so many more people.
The game is now a family business with multiple members running the company.
During quarantine, everyone played games to escape boredom, and sales of the game shot up during that time. They skyrocketed by 144% during the first five months of the year and sold more than 32 million copies.
“I developed games to escape”, Mr. Teuber informed the New Yorker in 2014. He was tired of his job as a dental technician and had a passion for designing games.
Catan is an award winning game, making it one of the top board games in the world. It won the Spiel de Jahres award, a prestigious prize in the gaming community. Once it was released in the USA in 1996, sales only kept on surging for the game.
The Catan Studios released a statement on the founder’s death to honor his memory.
"His legacy will continue to inspire and shape the gaming community for years to come."
In their statement, the studio stated, "We encourage you to honor Klaus’ memory by being kind to one another, pursuing your creative passions fearlessly, and enjoying a game with your loved ones."
