Links: Cracking the Cover on CATAN, Listening to Michael Schacht, and Unboxing Gordon Calleja

by W. Eric Martin

• CATAN: Der Roman, the first novel from game designer Klaus Teuber, will be released by KOSMOS in October 2022. A summary from the publisher:

Norway in the year 860. The half-brothers Thorolf, Yngvi, and Digur help the daughters of the Viking prince Halldor to escape, and Halldor’s revenge is not long in coming, pillaging the territory of the liberators and banishing them. With settlers who are willing to emigrate, the brothers set out for new shores and after an adventurous sea voyage, reach Catan — the land of the sun.

But the island presents the brothers with enormous challenges. Will they stand together to offer the settlers a brighter future, or will this task divide them?

Since CATAN: Der Roman is the first of a trilogy, I’ll go with “divide them” since Teuber will have more pages to resolve these issues. You can read a sample from the novel in German here.

• Designer Michael Schacht created electronic music in the 1980s under the name Metric System, and now he’s started to make music again, ideally (in his words) “creating music for game publishers, for their websites and videos”. You can sample work from Metric System on Bandcamp or on various other systems.

• In early October 2022, MIT Press published Unboxed, by designer Gordon Calleja. Here’s the publisher’s summary of this book:

In Unboxed, Gordon Calleja explores the experience of playing board games and how game designers shape that experience. Calleja examines key aspects of board game experience — the nature of play, attention, rules, sociality, imagination, narrative, materiality, and immersion — to offer a theory of board game experience and a model for understanding game involvement that is relevant to the analysis, criticism, and design of board games. Drawing on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, Calleja — himself a board game designer — provides the set of conceptual tools that board game design has thus far lacked.

After considering different conceptions of play, Calleja discusses the nature and role of attention and goes on to outline the key forms of involvement that make up the board game playing experience. In subsequent chapters, Calleja explores each of these forms of involvement, considering both the experience itself and the design considerations that bring it into being. Calleja brings this analysis together in a chapter that maps how these forms of involvement come together in the moment of gameplay, and how their combination shapes the flow of player affect. By tracing the processes through which players experience these moments of rule-mediated, imagination-fueled sociality, Calleja helps us understand the richness of the gameplay experience packed into the humble board game box.

I’ll note that I was interviewed by Calleja for this book, and I hope that said useful things. That happens sometimes, but is not guaranteed.

• In case you missed the final Fairplay poll at SPIEL ’22, here are the results:

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What’s surprising about these rankings is (1) the games seem a bit lighter than in earlier years, such as at SPIEL ’21 when the top three games were Ark Nova, Witchstone, and The Red Cathedral, and (2) Cat in the Box barely had a retail presence at the show, with Hobby Japan selling out its stock within 15 minutes on Thursday morning.

I happened to be in Hall 4 at the time, and the line of buyers swarmed quickly, then washed away once the supply dried up. My understanding is that the game is currently out of stock in Japan, so the publisher had a relatively small supply.

Licensee Bézier Games initially wasn’t going to have any copies for sale, but at the last minute it got permission to sell 250 copies, most likely because Hobby Japan didn’t have many itself. Those copies also sold out early on Thursday, so availability of the game was fairly limited, yet player interest was enough to land the top spot.

If you’re not familiar with this trick-taking game that lets players decide which color their cards are, here’s my overview.

In addition to those top-rated games that received at least 33 votes, Fairplay had an honorable mention list for games that received at least 10 votes:

• This InspiroBot image struck me as being ideal for some BGG users: