Thank you, Mr Teuber

Klaus Teuber 1952 - 2023

Damn.

Okay. I am going to say this first: While Teuber made many other games, some of them jolly good, the reason why people will still be talking about him a hundred years from now is Settlers of Catan. And people _will_ be talking about him as long as the world isn’t a post apocalyptic wasteland (which will not be nearly as fun as Gamma World or Max Max)

And let’s not kid ourselves. Catan had an impact on the gaming world like possibly nothing else. The closest thing I can think of is Magic the Gathering but Catan hit a much wider audience. It was the family game’s family game. And judging by its continued sales, still is.

Catan’s impact on the gaming world was like a naked man throwing petrol bombs in a department store on a late Tuesday afternoon. (Gaming buddy: that was disturbingly specific. Me: good, I was trying to disturb you) We would not have the gaming landscape that we have today without it and I don’t think the universe would have come up with an equivalent.

I know that it was where my transition from RPGs to board games started with Catan. And I still hold that, in this post-Catan world that we all get to live in, Catan holds up with an amazing level of engagement and interaction.

If I end up in an Isekai novel, I am introducing Catan to the fantasy world I am stuck in.

Thank you, Mr Teuber, for making my life better.

Elasund: first pit fight of Catan

 After the actual Settlers of Catan itself, my favorite Catan product might well be Elasund: The First City of Catan. (Settlers of the Stone Age is strong competition for that title, though)

Elasund is a tile-laying game where you are building a city on a grid with the first player to get to ten victory points winning.

The Catan part of the game is that the columns of the grid are numbered two to twelve (but no seven) You roll 2d6 and buildings within that column produce gold or influence cards. Sevens let the active player choose a column and players who have victory point cubes in that column lose resources.

Building buildings requires resources AND building permits, which are placed on the board. AND you can use someone else’s permit as long as you have more of your own. And larger buildings can knock down smaller buildings.

There are more details to the game, like spending lots of gold to build the church or building walls or covering up windmills for points. There’s a lot going on in the Elasund and I’m not going to go over the rules in detail. (Other folks have done that)

But here’s the thing. It is a knife fight in a phone booth. I think I have to play Reef Encounter to get more of a claustrophobic sense of confrontation. Elasund is very confrontational and things can get very nasty very easily. Conflict isn’t just taking a spot someone else wanted. It is stealing their building permits and knocking down their buildings. And conflict isn’t an option you might take. It is an integral part of the game and it will happen.

And, yes, I consider that to be a point in Elasund’s favor.

I do think that Elasund isn’t super intuitive BUT that might just be me. The end game tends to be brutal with lot of buildings getting bulldozed and I have never done well. AND a game being tough and having a real learning curve is NOT a negative.

For a group of my long distance buddies, Elasund was a standby. We’d get together and Elasund would hit the table after Notre Dame. I don’t think I’ve even played my own copy of Elasund but I still have it in storage because it is that good.

I know I can really enjoy non-confrontational games. (So many of them can be played solitaire without any changes) But I do like me some conflict and Elasund really delivers. 

Hoity Toity - so much more than Rock-Paper-Scissors

When I think of Rock-Paper-Scissors and board games, I think Hoity Toity (also known by a half dozen other names) by Klaus Teuber. It’s much more than R-P-S but that’s definitely something you’re going to reference when you teach the game. It’s also a reminder that Klaus Teuber can make some great games that don’t have anything to do with Catan.

Hoity Toity is about British nobles amassing collections of antiques for prestige and rubbing it in each other’s faces. As I’ve written before, it’s like a Wodehouse novel. And maybe an argument about why folks should eat the rich.

The core of the game is secret action selection. You can go to the auction hall or the castle. After you choose where you’re going, you choose what you’re going to do. In the auction hall, you can hope to buy one of the scarce antique cards or you can try and rob the till. At the castle, you can display a collection or steal from a collection or use a detective to catch a crook stealing from a collection.

(I find the scoring track very amusing. Not only does it track how far along you are but also how many spaces you can earn with your antique collections)

The end result of the Rock-Paper-Scissors/Hidden Action core of Hoity Toity creates a constant level of interaction that just keeps getting ratcheted up as the game goes on and the stakes keep getting higher. The game does a great job of keeping everyone involved and in everyone else’s business.

Hoity Toity is _far_ from the only game that uses hidden action selection but it does it very well. There’s definitely some meat behind your choices as you try to make a good antique collection and figure out what your opponents are trying to do. At the same time, it plays in less than an hour so it’s easy to get on the table.

While Catan is what set the world on fire, it didn’t come out of nowhere, either in the big picture of gaming or in Klaus Teuber’s designs. Not only did Hoity Toity win the Spiel de Jahres, I have been told it also attracted attention on this side of the Atlantic, back when German-style family games were practically unknown in the US.

Hoity Toity is an old game by modern standards, almost thirty years old. (Don’t look at me that way, Go. You’re forever young) But it holds up very well, particularly for its intended family audience.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120/hoity-toity