Unsettling Catan: Detached Design in Eurogames

Read Online

Buy Print

Unsettling Catan: Detached Design in Eurogames

by J. Rey Lee

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Paper: 978-0-472-03998-2

eISBN: 978-0-472-90520-1 (OA)

About the Book

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.

About the Author

J. Rey Lee is the author of Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play (2020) and several articles on board games. He teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell.

Reviews

“J. Rey Lee's thoughtful discussion of Catan deals directly with its longstanding position at the center of board gaming culture and highlights why this means that it is also an excellent representative for critical tension within the genre.”

— Esther MacCallum-Stewart, American Journal of Play

Unsettling Catan offers a thorough look at Catan as a case study for the colonial play within eurogames more broadly. This is an important contribution to the field and helps open up the conversation in new ways. The book will appeal both to academics and the engaged board gamer who understands that games are more than mere entertainment, and is looking for a book to engage in this idea.

— Shelly Jones, SUNY Delhi

“Unsettling Catan is an excellent study that builds a substantive cultural critique from a touchstone in the boardgame world that extends to other eurogames and beyond. I benefitted from reading Professor Lee’s work and recommend Unsettling Catan without reservation.”

— Curtis Frye, Technology and Society, Incorporated

“This book is a fun, eye-opening deep dive that unsettles the classic Settlers and other contemporary board games with detailed, thoughtful analysis. If you love board games, it’s an essential read!”— Mary Flanagan, Dartmouth College