Why I Love Settlers of Catan
(and Why Anti-Whites Hate It)

2,104 words

Settlers of Catan is one of the most popular board games in the world. A creation of the late Klaus Teuber, Die Siedler von Catan was first released in Germany in 1995, winning the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award as the best board game of that year. The game has sold over 40 million copies worldwide over the past 29 years. Settlers of Catan was renamed as simply Catan in 2015, and there are now expansion sets, numerous spin-off games, and even a biannual Catan World Championship tournament.

The game takes place on a fictional island known as Catan. The players can build settlements, collect resources, trade, and expand with the goal of building the greatest colony on the island. Expansion sets have added seafaring, military ventures, and more to the mix. Catan is the perfect strategy game. The gameplay is quite simple, yet allows for the use of a wide variety of strategies to attain victory. Strategies can include monopolizing specific resources, sabotaging one’s opponents’ efforts to expand, obtaining special event cards, and more. Games can last from 30 minutes to several hours depending on the number of players and the incorporation of expansion packs.

What better way to spend a rainy weekend afternoon with friends or a family game night than with Catan? In today’s world of technologically-induced atomization, I was pleasantly surprised to read that the board game industry is thriving. In the age of video games and streaming services, where the standard form of entertainment has devolved into staring at a piece of glass for three hours, it’s great to know that good old-fashioned cardboard is still bringing folks together in meat space. Today, one of the favourites is Catan.

It’s not only the captivating gameplay which makes Catan special, but something much deeper. Klaus Teuber was born in a small village in West Germany that is overlooked by Breuberg Castle, one of Germany’s best-preserved castles from the Middle Ages. As a boy, he was a fan of fantasy novels, history, geography, and table-top board games. He carried these passions into adulthood, taking up board game design as a hobby which would later become his full-time job following Settlers of Catan’s smashing success.

Teuber’s inspiration for Catan was the Viking settlement of Iceland in the ninth century AD. As a history buff, he had a particular fascination with the Vikings and designed the game as a way of playing out the adventures of those seafaring Vikings he had read about in his youth. Catan has an aesthetic style inspired by medieval Europe. The game’s visuals include bearded men with broadswords, axes, and scythes alongside beautiful maidens with long dresses and flowing hair, all of whom are very Nordic in appearance. These folks inhabit small villages with thatched-roof houses that are surrounded by deep-green forests, golden fields of wheat, or towering, slate-colored mountains. When I introduced my girlfriend to Catan last year, she not only found the gameplay enjoyable, but was also impressed by the game’s beautiful artistic style.

But it’s not only the game’s aesthetics which are steeped in themes from European history. The concept of Catan, a game about a small group of settlers putting down roots on fertile virgin soil and going on to build an empire, speaks to a burning desire deep within the European soul. Oswald Spengler referred to this as the Faustian Spirit: Western Man’s drive into infinite space. It was this drive which took Western Man across oceans, to the tops of mountains, to the bottom of seas, and into the stars. This is the spirit which brought our civilization to the vast expanses of North America, to the dry Outback of Australia, and yes, to the small island of Iceland to the northwest of Europe.

There’s something deeply satisfying about seeing your little figurines on a hexagonal board expanding out and reaching new and colorful six-sided tiles, multiplying, and then evolving into bigger figurines. Perhaps, in a minute way, it is akin to the feeling an Englishman in Victorian Britain must have had upon seeing another small piece of the world map being painted red after being incorporated into the Empire. It’s the feeling that you’ve taken another step into that infinite space which the Faustian soul longs to conquer.

I have no idea what Klaus Teuber’s political views were, and it doesn’t matter. Catan is not an assertion of a political ideology, but more of a profound expression of European identity. The game also has universal appeal. It’s available around the world in over 40 languages, including many lesser-known European languages such as Estonian, Bulgarian, and (fittingly) Icelandic, but also non-European languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. Non-Europeans can enjoy the game as well, but Catan is fundamentally a creation of the European mind, much like how a European can appreciate the virtues of a samurai warrior but could never become one. Only the Japanese can.

In a sane era, Catan wouldn’t be considered political in the least. Alas, we do not live in such a time. Professional anti-white activist Biz Nijdam of the University of British Columbia recently published an article about how Catan allegedly promotes the supposed evils of “settler colonialism,” and claiming that the board game industry needs to “decolonize gameplay” by incorporating contributions from “indigenous voices.” This isn’t the only anti-white attack on the beloved worldwide hit board game, either. Heather Tirado Gilligan likewise wrote an article about how board games “perpetuate racism,” saying that her family won’t be playing Catan given that it is a game which “re-enacts settler colonialism.” Anti-white author Lorenzo Veracini similarly penned a review of Catan in which he lambasted the game on the same grounds. To take matters even further, Professor Greg Loring-Albright of the anti-white Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery Coalition designed a modification of the game designed to insert the experience of white guilt.

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Now, this might seem like nothing out of the ordinary for the day and age we live in. How many books, films, songs, and historical figures have already been cancelled on the grounds that they offend the sensibilities of “indigenous people”? The attack on Catan may appear to be merely run-of-the-mill hostility from anti-white academics. But here’s the kicker: There are no indigenous people of Catan. Nowhere in the game is there any mention of inhabitants who lived on the island prior to the settlers’ arrival.

In fact, Klaus Teuber stated in a 2012 documentary that when he was conceptualizing the game, he imagined explorers discovering a totally uninhabited island, as was the case when the Vikings arrived in Iceland in 874 AD. The Māori, who arrived in New Zealand in the thirteenth century, are universally recognized as the country’s indigenous people. If we were to apply that standard consistently, the Icelandic, who arrived in their homeland about 400 years before, are most certainly the indigenous people of Iceland. Thus, the settlers in a board game based on their history should be considered as the indigenous people of Catan. Not to mention the fact that the extent of violence in the original game, without the addition of any expansion sets, involves knights scaring away (not even killing) bandits who are stealing their settlement’s resources. The island of Catan is thus about as peaceful as 98% white Iceland is today.

What crime are these fictional settlers of this imaginary hexagonal island supposedly guilty of? Even if we were to take the overly simplistic, one-sided, anti-white version of history which we are fed today at face value, who would the alleged victims of Catan’s colonization even be? On the surface, it doesn’t make much sense, but a deeper understanding of anti-whites — some of whom are white themselves — reveals what is really behind their seemingly bizarre hatred of the groundbreaking success of Catan.

When they say “racism” or “white supremacy,” anti-whites are not referring to the phenomenon of arbitrary racial hatred. They themselves are throbbing with racial hatred directed against white people, and they don’t seem too bothered about the distain different non-white groups often hold for each other. It’s not even about imperialism or the domination of one race over another. Again, they don’t seem to think the Turks, Arabs, Chinese, or Zulus should share the same self-flagellating guilt over their peoples’ histories of conquest as they prescribe for Europeans.

Simply put, “anti-racism” is the hatred of people of European descent. But it’s not simply the hatred of Europeans as a people, but the entire world we’ve created. My friend Morgoth has stated on several occasions that when anti-whites say “whiteness,” what they are referring to is not just white people, but the Faustian Spirit itself — Western Man’s entire way of being. This is why you’ll see articles about how classical music and even mathematics are “racist.” These might not appear to have anything to do with race, but they are products of Western culture, which has dominated the world for centuries. They are the product of white sensibilities, which often make members of other races feel uncomfortable.

None of these anti-white intellectuals would ever be able to articulate this, of course. They are mid-witted mediocrities at best and bumbling retards at worst. Rather, they can spot the slightest hint of the Faustian Spirit — or “whiteness,” as they instinctually call it — and like a spider who pounces at the slightest sense of vibration in its web, they attack the second whenever they sense it. Iceland is regarded as one of the safest, wealthiest, and happiest countries in the world. But I have no doubt that there’s a non-governmental organization somewhere in the world hard at work on crafting a narrative holding that Iceland is a “nation of immigrants” with a “dark history of racism” designed to smash this almost-perfect nation to pieces. The powers-that-be in the world today can’t allow such a place to exist.

It’s for this same reason that a number of anti-white academics can take one look at the groundbreaking success of a harmless tabletop board game inspired by the history of Viking exploration and scream bloody murder. Building settlements, collecting resources, trading, upgrading, and expanding outwards with the goal of establishing the mightiest colony on a mythical island is a miniature simulation of the spirit which the greatest evil of our time wishes so desperately to extinguish.

How many beloved classics of European literature have we seen butchered by politically charged, anti-white screen adaptations only in this decade? It’s been done to J. R. R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, and more. But none of these disgraceful attempts at passing off political indoctrination as entertainment have inspired viewers in the same way as the original versions or earlier adaptations of these tales. Even non-Western audiences aren’t impressed. Everyone, whether Western or not, can feel that the original stories were creations of an authentic culture and that these remakes are merely malicious bastardizations.

In our era of cultural stagnation, when people are reverting to consuming older forms of entertainment as an escape from the toxicity of the contemporary mainstream, Catan continues to reach new heights of popularity. When asked why he thought Catan was such a success, Klaus Teuber guessed that it was because the game is the perfect balance between strategy and luck. It’s certainly true that this is why the gameplay works perfectly, but is that the real reason everyone loves Catan? Teuber didn’t set out with the dream of creating the perfect strategy game through the finest tuning of mathematical equations. His dream was to see the adventures of the seafaring Vikings of old “going cardboard.”

Catan is not just a strategy game. It’s an authentic expression of European culture and heritage still unmarred by the sludge of hostile political propaganda. This unfortunately hasn’t gone unnoticed by those with a searing hatred for our civilization and its culture. As Catan’s popularity continues to rise, so will the number of voices wishing to “decolonize” the game by including the “lived experiences” of “indigenous peoples” in it.

We can only hope that Catan remains available with its original gameplay and enchanting medieval-inspired aesthetics and that it’s not “diversified” so as to look as if it had been designed by an artificial intelligence-powered image generator. But we know well that there are those who would like nothing more than to see it defiled, as has already been done to Lord of the Rings. Thankfully, however, if you get a copy now, family game night with Catan will continue to feel like an exhilarating Viking adventure and not a sadistic political re-education session.

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