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 experime...
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| Ձևաչափ: | Online |
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University of Michigan Press
2025
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| Առցանց հասանելիություն: | ONIX_20251103T122749_9780472905201_6 |
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Չկան պիտակներ, Եղեք առաջինը, ով նշում է այս գրառումը!
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| _version_ | 1869524286166794240 |
|---|---|
| author | Lee, J. Rey |
| author_browse | Lee, J. Rey |
| author_facet | Lee, J. Rey |
| author_sort | Lee, J. Rey |
| collection | Directory of Open Access Books |
| description | 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 peaceful, neutral, and abstract. To ask the hard questions that eurogames often look away from, the book walks through each aspect of Catan’s gameplay (placing hexes, rolling the dice, robbing and trading, collecting resources, building and scoring) to explore how simple design decisions can play out, or play with, cultural ideas and ideals. As the first entry in the Tabletop Games book series, Unsettling Catan introduces key concepts for thinking about board games as a medium and offers accessible game analyses and personal reflections to help players, creators, and scholars reimagine what board games can be and become. |
| format | Online |
| id | doab-20.500.12854ir-168790 |
| institution | Directory of Open Access Books |
| language | eng |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| publishDateRange | 2025 |
| publishDateSort | 2025 |
| publisher | University of Michigan Press |
| publisherStr | University of Michigan Press |
| record_format | ojs |
| spelling | doab-20.500.12854ir-1687902025-11-04T05:20:30Z Unsettling Catan Lee, J. Rey Games, Board Games, Tabletop Games, Boardgames, Eurogames, Catan, Colonialism in Games, Capitalism in Games, Games and Culture, A Feast for Odin, Concordia, Castles of Burgundy, Lisboa, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Maracaibo, Play, Play and Culture, Game Studies, Game Design, Game Criticism, Analog Games, Material Play, Critical Play, Games as Media, Detached Design, Detachment, Glance and Glimpse, Resonance and Dissonance, Unsettlement thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games::WDM Indoor games::WDMG Board, table top and strategy games thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies 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 peaceful, neutral, and abstract. To ask the hard questions that eurogames often look away from, the book walks through each aspect of Catan’s gameplay (placing hexes, rolling the dice, robbing and trading, collecting resources, building and scoring) to explore how simple design decisions can play out, or play with, cultural ideas and ideals. As the first entry in the Tabletop Games book series, Unsettling Catan introduces key concepts for thinking about board games as a medium and offers accessible game analyses and personal reflections to help players, creators, and scholars reimagine what board games can be and become. 2025-11-04T05:20:29Z 2025-11-04T05:20:29Z 2025-11-03T11:31:30Z 2025 book ONIX_20251103T122749_9780472905201_6 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/108009 9780472905201 9780472039982 https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/168790 eng Tabletop Games open access image/jpeg Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/108009/1/9780472905201.pdf University of Michigan Press 10.3998/mpub.12769940 10.3998/mpub.12769940 b7359529-e5f7-4510-a59f-d7dafa1d4d17 9780472905201 9780472039982 218 open access |
| spellingShingle | Games, Board Games, Tabletop Games, Boardgames, Eurogames, Catan, Colonialism in Games, Capitalism in Games, Games and Culture, A Feast for Odin, Concordia, Castles of Burgundy, Lisboa, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Maracaibo, Play, Play and Culture, Game Studies, Game Design, Game Criticism, Analog Games, Material Play, Critical Play, Games as Media, Detached Design, Detachment, Glance and Glimpse, Resonance and Dissonance, Unsettlement thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games::WDM Indoor games::WDMG Board, table top and strategy games thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies Lee, J. Rey Unsettling Catan |
| title | Unsettling Catan |
| title_full | Unsettling Catan |
| title_fullStr | Unsettling Catan |
| title_full_unstemmed | Unsettling Catan |
| title_short | Unsettling Catan |
| title_sort | unsettling catan |
| topic | Games, Board Games, Tabletop Games, Boardgames, Eurogames, Catan, Colonialism in Games, Capitalism in Games, Games and Culture, A Feast for Odin, Concordia, Castles of Burgundy, Lisboa, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Maracaibo, Play, Play and Culture, Game Studies, Game Design, Game Criticism, Analog Games, Material Play, Critical Play, Games as Media, Detached Design, Detachment, Glance and Glimpse, Resonance and Dissonance, Unsettlement thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games::WDM Indoor games::WDMG Board, table top and strategy games thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies |
| topic_facet | Games, Board Games, Tabletop Games, Boardgames, Eurogames, Catan, Colonialism in Games, Capitalism in Games, Games and Culture, A Feast for Odin, Concordia, Castles of Burgundy, Lisboa, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Maracaibo, Play, Play and Culture, Game Studies, Game Design, Game Criticism, Analog Games, Material Play, Critical Play, Games as Media, Detached Design, Detachment, Glance and Glimpse, Resonance and Dissonance, Unsettlement thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games thema EDItEUR::W Lifestyle, Hobbies and Leisure::WD Hobbies, quizzes and games::WDM Indoor games::WDMG Board, table top and strategy games thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies |
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