Catan board game takes on the perils of the fossil fuel industry
The popular game is asking players and industry peers alike to start incorporating the price of fossil fuels in humanity's continual development. Read More
When world powers weigh the pros and cons of whether to invest in a natural gas plant or a solar plant, often direct cost and immediate impact take precedence. At least, that’s the assumption of the newest version of the popular board game Catan, New Energies, presented during Trellis’ recent climate tech conference VERGE.
New Energies expands upon the original mission of Catan — to develop the largest and most productive civilization while also building “the longest road” — this time, adding energy generation and its subsequent impact to the equation.
“The game itself has the thematic question of how are we addressing pollution, climate change?” said Kevin Hovdestad, director of brand development at Catan Studio, the central publishing hub for the brand.
Within the confines of New Energies, which moves on from the original game’s agrarian roots, players build cities and subsequent power plants, requiring a certain amount of resources to finally transition from fossil fuel-based power to renewable energy.
But pollution is wreaking havoc on the island and players must make the decision: to invest in clean energy resources or choose cheaper fossil fuels, potentially causing disastrous effects for the island.
And it’s not just the gaming experience itself that operates under these choices, but also the subsequent production and distribution of New Energies itself.
“We want to make sure that what we’re doing is sustainable,” said Hovdestad, “and done with an eye to how [customers] can make informed choices when they want to go buy one of these vanity products.” To that end, Hovdestad explained that New Energies is comprised of sustainably sourced wood and pulp for the board and cards, and eliminated all plastic generally included in pieces such as the dice or in the shrinkwrap packaging used to deliver a new product.
“We’re always evaluating the trade off between what’s great for a player or a collector or a fan, and what can we be doing alongside that minimize the footprint of the game,” said Hovdestad.
Rolling the wooden dice
“We went to wood dice, which means there’s no plastic in the box,” said Guido Teuber, Catan’s CEO, “but that also makes the dice faster to wear [down] or get discolored.”
The board game industry isn’t well documented for its overall carbon footprint. For some context, Hasbro — the major manufacturer behind Monopoly and Connect 4 — stated in its 2023 ESG report that its annual Scope 3 emissions for that year totaled 1,032,294 metric tons, or the equivalent of almost 246,000 gasoline-powered cars.
Catan is focusing on eliminating as many transportation-related emissions as possible.
“The No. 1 thing that we are trying to think about right now really is distribution,” said Hovdestad, “the distance the game has to travel to get to a consumer.” And its that goal that is throwing a wrench in the sustainability system. “If we build a game [in the U.S.] and we have to send it to Australia, the game can be as sustainably sourced as we want now, it’s still going to sit in a shipping container to get all the way around the world.”
To combat this, Catan has publishers in major markets such as India, Germany, China and the U.S., cutting down the emissions of international shipping, but leaving the company more to the whims of the geographic impact on components. English-language versions of Catan are made exclusively from wood pieces, but other regions such as Southeast Asia and Latin America use plastic components to ensure the game remains affordable for the consumer demographic of the region.
“That tradeoff is hard to balance,” said Hovdestad, “do you make something that meets a certain standard and excludes a huge community of people by virtue of where they are on the planet or the language they speak?”
There is a light at the end of Catan’s tunnel, or, for those avid Catan players, Catan’s longest road. New Energies completely sold out its first run despite being sold at a higher-than-normal price — $69.99 versus the $26.99 for the original version — to compensate for the specific sustainability inputs, according to Tueber.
“That higher price point was not a barrier at all,” said Hovdestad.
UPDATED: This story was updated to reflect the name of the board game is just Catan, not Settlers of Catan.