Latest Catan board game adds new challenge: produce power without over-polluting

The board game Settlers of Catan gained a cult following when it was released 30 years ago, and remains popular. A new edition adds a 21st century twist: avoiding a climate catastrophe.

The premise of Catan: New Energies is similar to the original game. Players collect and trade commodities to build cities and roads.

The new twist is as players develop the island of Catan, they can decide whether to power it with renewable energy or fossil fuels. Those either increase or reduce the local carbon footprint. And they can trigger certain events, such as floods or air pollution.

Catan is produced by the French game publisher Asmodee, whose North American headquarters are in Lino Lakes.

The New Energies edition takes the Catan island out of the Vikings era and drops it in the modern day, said Kelli Schmitz, Asmodee's director of sourcing and innovation for games. Players still need to accumulate resources such as bricks and steel, she said, along with a new one – energy. 

“Really, one of our most valuable and important resources is electricity and power, and how are we generating that?” Schmitz said.

New Energies also adds a new element of cooperation to the competitive Catan. All players have to work together against the existential threat of climate disaster.

“If one person runs away and tilts it too far, it can end the whole game for everyone,” Schmitz said. “So there’s, I think, a lot of interesting ways that it reflects our current reality.”

The game doesn’t use the words “climate change,” instead using “pollution” or other terms to describe negative impacts of energy production. 

That was an effort to make the game more understandable to the wider Catan audience, which includes hundreds of countries and 40 different languages, said Kevin Hovdestad, director of brand development at Catan Studio.

“Not every language has a phrase or a term for climate change in the same way, but everybody has a term for pollution,” he said.

Clean energy advocates have praised the game as a fun way to start conversations and get people thinking about energy use.

Eric Fowler, a senior policy associate at the nonprofit Fresh Energy, said it highlights how individual energy decisions have ripple effects on everyone.

“Every time that you are contributing renewable rather than fossil fuel based electricity, you are opening the window a little bit wider to better possibilities for everyone moving forward,” he said.

Advocates point out that the game does oversimplify aspects of energy generation. In Catan, it’s easy to reverse environmental harm by swapping out a “dirty” power plant with a “clean” one, said Anjali Bains, managing director of transportation at Fresh Energy.

“Unfortunately, we have a very clear timeline in which everything we do now really matters,” Bains said. “The more we keep polluting from greenhouse gas emissions, the quicker the harmful effects of climate change will manifest. And we can’t actually pull that back on a one-to-one basis.”

Board games have long explored tough topics like war and economics. (Think Risk and Monopoly.) They allow people to take risks in a safe environment without real-world consequences, like actually destroying a planet, Schmitz said.

“It’s just one more way that we learn about our world through a board on a table,” she said.

Rob Davis, chief growth officer with M-RETS, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that tracks generation of renewable energy, has played Catan: New Energies with his two kids. He hopes games like it will help get more young people interested in energy-related careers.

“The more games we play that are related to thinking about climate and global and local emissions, the more we just become aware, and we see them in regular life,” Davis said.

Catan: New Energies was released in June, but copies can be tough to find. More should be available just after Halloween, in time for the holidays, Hovdestad said.

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