John Van Nostrand: Your escape is at your dining room table

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Apr. 6—"Monopoly, 21, checkers and chess...."

from the 1992 R.E.M. song "Man the Moon."

My family said thank you and goodbye this week to a friend we have never met.

Klaus Teuber, creator of the Catan board game in which players compete to build settlements on a fictional island, died Saturday after a brief illness, according to a family statement reported the Associated Press late Tuesday.

If you have played Monopoly, you should like Catan as there are similarities. You have to acquire needs to build those settlements and take over your opponents.

The board game, originally called The Settlers of Catan when introduced in 1995 and based on a set of hexagonal tiles, has sold tens of millions of copies and is available in more than 40 languages. It has spawned dozens of spinoffs and new editions, including electronic versions, not to mention products related to the game.

Another family we know who has an interest in board games told us of Catan. They invited us over one night to play and we were hooked and we got our own Catan. It fit as board games were a regular way to spend an evening when our children were growing up in school. A closet in our guest room is dedicated to our board game collection as it grew over the years. A board game for our two children is a traditional Christmas gift. When the kids were in high school, they gave us hints of what game they liked.

Downtown Maryville, Missouri, had the Board Game Cafe where for a minimal cover charge you could play any of the bajillion games the store had stacked on shelves like books in a library. Our kids went many times with friends and came back with reviews. Our daughter even had a birthday party there. The cafe closed in 2021.

Teuber was born in June 1952 in the German town of Rai-Breitenbach. He was working as a dental technician in the 1980s outside the industrial city of Darmstadt when he took up designing board games in his basement, he told The New Yorker magazine in 2014. "I had many problems with the company and the profession," he said. "I developed games to escape. This was my own world I created."

What a great way to explain board games; escape. We all seemed to have our favorites, probably because we were good at them. Son Grant plays Catan aggressively and wins. Wife Jennifer doesn't take much time to win at Clue; the who done it murder-mystery game. Daughter Kari introduced us to Throw Throw Burrito, a card game with some physical exertion involved. We all get high anxiety and edge-of-our seats over Tummple which is a twist on Jenga, the wood piece stacking game.

A special New Year's Eve in Florida with friends playing Left Center Right will never be forgotten. (It's not political.)

I'm not sure what game I liked most, or what I was good at. Other friends showed us Sequence which I have enjoyed. Rummikub is one the more I played the more I liked. I like to think playing cards are in the same category as board games. I have never played solitaire. My grandmother played it. I watched people play it years ago on personal computers. But for some reason, I never focused enough to try it myself. I do need someone to show me how.

For years, the family has invited friends and played pigeon pitch on New Year's Eve. Intended as a party game we learned from others, pigeon is loosely based on the card game hearts. Each hand has different rules. You have a partner as you're one of four at a table but change partners as you move to other tables. It got to a point where our children asked in October if we were playing pigeon New Year's Eve as they invited their friends over. Oh, how they grew from their Candy Land childhood.

In the multi-player Catan, competitors use five resources to build their colonies, or settlements: wool, grain, lumber, brick and ore. Teuber never thought his game would become so successful; he finally left his dental technician job in 1998 "when I felt like Catan could feed me and my family," he told the New Yorker. The game became a family business.

Catan gave us an escape many nights. Catan and our dining room table was our world that Teuber gave us. Thank you. Rest in peace.