Creating the board game Catan
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1995, Klaus Teuber’s board game Catan launched in Germany.
The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, and it's a game about strategy and collecting resources.
It's since sold over 40 million copies and been translated into more than 40 different languages.
Klaus Teuber died in 2023.
Megan Jones speaks to his son Benjamin, who now runs the company, with brother Guido.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Picture: Klaus, Guido and Benjamin playing Catan. Credit: Benjamin Teuber)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously and then laughs at it. |
| 0:13.4 | This Christmas, forget about socks. We've got the best present of all. |
| 0:17.2 | Dead people! |
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| 0:21.8 | In our new family-friendly podcast series, dead funny history, historical figures come back to life |
| 0:26.8 | but just long enough to argue with me, tell their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves. |
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| 0:34.1 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.2 | Hello and welcome to Witness History with me, Megan Jones. |
| 0:44.0 | If you are one of our regular listeners, you can skip this bit. |
| 0:47.4 | But if this is your first time here, hello and welcome. |
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| 1:05.5 | notifications so you never miss an episode. But for now, let's get to the programme. In front of me is a hexagonal |
| 1:13.1 | board with 19 tiles, wooden roads and my first settlement. I've got cards stacked next to me, |
| 1:19.5 | dice ready to roll. I'm learning Catan, which is a board game about strategy and collecting |
| 1:24.9 | resources. Before I get into it, though let's pause here so I can tell you |
| 1:29.7 | the story of how it changed modern board gaming and became a gateway for millions of players. |
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