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This parallels the historical realities of the (White) settlement of North America in relation to indigenous North Americans: European settlers moved inward from the coasts, and later, along major rivers, while indigenous peoples as a whole occupied the interior in addition to the coastal lands. The island of Catan is open to its indigenous people occupying its hinterlands, but forces the invading Settlers into the liminal spaces. This creates visual contrast with the Settlers, who cannot penetrate the interior of any hex tile, but instead are limited to building their roads along the edges of the tiles and their settlements at intersections of roads. Rather than playing on the edges and corner of the game’s hexagonal tiles, as the Settlers do, the First Nations inhabit the center of each tile, signaling their centrality to and initial presence on the island. 4 These semi-nomadic people have the same goals as the Settlers (earn 10 victory points by building settlements, cities, and buying development cards), though they accomplish them in different ways. In First Nations of Catan, one player (of the possible four that a standard Settlers of Catan set allows) plays as the First Nations, the indigenous inhabitants of Catan. Primarily in order to counter this troubling aspect of Settlers of Catan, and to create a game that I feel comfortable playing, I have designed a variant of Settlers of Catan titled First Nations of Catan.įirst Nations of Catan: Introduction and Summary Thus, Settlers of Catan, when played in the U.S., is complicit in continuing to make indigenous communities invisible. 3 Settlers of Catan, by allowing its settlers to find the island of Catan in a similarly edenic state, reifies this myth, which helped to render American Indians invisible. American character, to mystical forces contained in the “empty” and thus edenic American West. in the late 19 th century, and the specificity of the U.S. Consider the “frontier myth,” a phrase that describes the work of Frederick Turner Jackson, whose 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” attributes the rapid development of the U.S. creates a link to the real historical settlement and concurrent genocide of indigenous peoples. While the game does not root itself in any historical reality, playing it in the U.S. Settlers of Catan, both by its title and its thematic elements, situates itself as a game about settling new land.
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So I decided to come up with a new game, based on Settlers of Catan, but one that would bring to light the things that had so troubled me about the game.Īn 1872 representation of “American Progress” associated with the Frontier Myth. But this response seemed inadequate: while it might solve the problem for me, it would not equip anyone else to wrestle with these troubling issues, and would put me in some awkward positions whenever Settlers of Catan came up as a possible game to play. in the early 2010s, that every game of Settlers of Catan re-tells the American myth of White European settlers stumbling upon a fertile land that was theirs by right, encountering no meaningful resistance, and acting on behalf of God and Country to develop economies, settlements, and cities in this “New World.” My first thought was to never play Settlers of Catan again. It became clear, at least to me, a white person playing this game in the U.S. Whose wheat was I harvesting when I rolled a six? Whose land was I altering when I built my roads and settlements? And with what entity was I trading when I shipped two wood in exchange for one resource of my choice at the port? 2 I played on, though not without pushing down even more pointed questions about the narrative that I, as a settler of Catan, was enacting. It was during a game of Settlers of Catan that I began to wonder why, or even if, Catan was uninhabited. The game has achieved critical acclaim (winning the Spiel des Jahres in the year of its release) and popular success, especially in the U.S.: a 2010 Washington Post piece called it “the game of our time.” 1 Board Game Geek, a popular international board-game hobbyist website, ranks Settlers of Catan 168th out of 79,923 games (as of 8 October, 2015) on its “hotlist.” This paper situates Settlers of Catan in its context as a popular game in the U.S., and proposes a subversive gameplay modification that addresses that context.
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The game pits players against one another in an economic civilization-building race as they build structures and gather resources on the hexagonal tiles that compose the game’s board. Settlers of Catan is a German board game by Klaus Teuber, first published in 1995.