While the dust of PAX Aus 2025 might have settled for another year, we’ve still got some more things to spotlight. Among those is the special 30th anniversary of Catan. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or just recognise the game from a pal’s shelf, it’s quite the achievement. Having sold an estimated 45 million copies worldwide, it shows that the game’s done more than just been played; it’s become a staple for board game fans.
Now I’m on the newer side of Catan. I’ve played a few times but not enough to really understand the game past the broad strokes of strategy. Every game offers a unique experience as players set up and build a colony while trading or even robbing each other blind.
Now on its 6th edition, Catan’s had a bit of a facelift with newly refreshed art, quality-of-life changes and long-requested card trays!
Interview with Kevin Hovdestad, Catan’s Brand Development Director
At PAX Aus 2025, we had the opportunity to sit down with Catan’s Brand Development Director to hear more about the latest 6th edition of Catan and what’s next for the iconic game.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name’s Kevin Hovdestad. I’m the director of Brand Development for Catan Studio. It was originally developed by a German designer, Klaus Teuber. His sons still own and manage the brand from Germany. But the games publishing rights belong to two different companies. Cosmos in Germany manages all of the non-English rights. Catan Studio, which is a subdivision of Asmodee, manages the English language rights. So for all of Catan we get to produce and sell in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, places like South Africa, even India. Really anywhere where English is either an official or predominantly spoken language, those are the territories that we work on Catan for.
What actually is Catan?
In Catan the way the game is played, you’ve got a board of hexagonal tiles, each representing a different resource. Onto each of those hexes, you place a number disc reflective of a number that you can roll with a pair of 6-sided dice. When you roll the dice, everyone who has a settlement or a city on the intersection of that hex gets the appropriate resource. So if you roll a 6, and the 6 is on a brick hex, every player who has a settlement on that hex will get a brick card. You then use those resources to build new settlements, roads, all the things that you need to make progress in the game towards the objective of winning with 10 victory points. As a general rule, because of the math within the game no one has perfect access to all the resources. So a lot of the game is not necessarily the generation of those resources through dice rolls but trading and working with other players.
Catan is also celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. To celebrate we just re-released it in a new 6th edition. So there’s a bunch of new stuff kind of going on as far as the art and style, the way the rules are written. But fundamentally, the game has been unchanged since it was invented.
What does the 30th anniversary mean for a game like Catan?
It’s a wild milestone that not a lot of games get to celebrate. Even though it is such a well-established and well-known game, we really look at how many people don’t know Catan. In most of the markets that we sell in, we’re lucky if 1 in 5 people know what Catan is without some kind of prompting or support. So a lot of the thought that went into how we wanted to celebrate the anniversary, the work that went into the new edition, was how do we refresh this iconic game and make it approachable for a new generation of players.
The changes to the box, the art, the quality of life improvements, even the way the rulebook was rewritten. This version of this game is actually the first time that the rules have been written in English rather than translated from German.So you’ve got a rulebook that’s much more compressed. The rules have been condensed down to just a couple of pages, which makes it a lot easier to get a new player into the game because they can just pick it up and learn it much more efficiently.
We want people to recognize not just the one red box, but also that there’s a whole library of Catan expansions and standalone games. We put out on average 2 or 3 new games a year. And we’re also now starting to think about what could we do with the brand to expand it beyond just board games. We do have more merchandise and there’s the novels that have come out as well.
What’s been the most exciting part of the anniversary so far? What do you think current players are going to appreciate most?
So for people who are already familiar with the game, I think the improvements are all very much about just like the quality of the product and the experience you have when you pack and unpack it. Historically the game was great, very playable. But there were, you know, things that we could have done better. One of the things that I really like about the new one is the game now comes with a set of card trays included in the box.
It’s nice for two reasons. One, makes it way easier to keep things sorted when you’re playing on the table. The other thing is some of the work that went into this game was about how do we make it easier to physically play for someone who has, you know, maybe a mobility limitation or disability. My dad has MS. He doesn’t have a lot of grip strength. He struggles to do things like pick up a card off a table, but it’s very easy to pick them up off a card tray.
We put a lot of thought into the building cost cards that are now player aids that help people remember what they can do on their turn and in what order. Card trays. It’s the first time the game has gotten new art on every single component. So previous refreshes of the game, like the 4th and 5th editions, they’d make changes to some art. Like they’d upgrade the quality of the art on the hexes, but they’d leave all the card art alone. In this one, every single piece of art is brand new.
So between that and the rulebook, the durability of the new box even. We also got rid of all of our single-use plastics. So everything that’s in there is either FSC-certified paper, cardboard, or wood, with the exception of the dice. People like plastic dice and the card trays because they had to be injection molded. But those are reusable. People will use them for, you know, many, many years to come.
For players who are new to Catan, what’s the best way for them to pick it up? Should they find a group to play with?
I think the nice thing about Catan is it is very learnable. If you are someone who hasn’t played a lot of games or you haven’t tried Catan historically, you don’t need to find a Catan expert to teach you how to play Catan. The game, if you really boil it down, you can explain the basic rules of this game in 4 or 5 sentences. So you can pick it up and just start and give it a shot. Obviously some familiarity with board games can make it easier, but in general, we hear a lot from people that in many cases this was their first board game or the first board game that they really loved. And it got them excited about, you know, playing games as a hobby, not just as a thing they did. I think I’m happy to have a version of the game that is, you know, brighter, more approachable, easier to teach new players as well
We touched on it earlier but is it difficult to expand the world of Catan?
I think a lot of people think of Catan as just this one game. I buy and play Catan and they say Catan the way that they would say ”I watched Star Wars.” And that’s a good comparison because Star Wars is not one movie. It’s not one experience. It’s a whole brand filled with all kinds of movies and television and comics and Catan is very much the same. We have something like 50 different games in print right now. People just don’t realize how much there is to the brand beyond the original game. We’re trying to sort of lean into that reputation of Catan being a gateway game, the thing that gets people into the hobby for the first time or excited about trying new games.
We want to double down on that and take advantage of how well-known our brand is in that space. But also, like I said earlier, we do want to get in front of new people. There are so many people out there who have no idea what Catan is, who don’t really think about board games or card games the way that you or I might. And if I have a job, such as it is in my role, it’s to get new people playing games. That’s the real challenge. Not to find – we’re at a convention full of people who love games. Most of them have played Catan. But you walk around on the streets of Melbourne, there’s lots of people who have no idea what you’re talking about.
What does the future of Catan look like outside the board game?
I think if you ask people, “hey, name a board game,” and you see what kind of answers you get, the brands that people will respond with, the names that they recognise, are often games that are not just board games
People will say, “Oh, you know Monopoly.” And they know Monopoly, but not just because of the physical game. Lots of people maybe have never played the physical game, but they’ve played Monopoly Go, or they know about the Monopoly stuff that McDonald’s does. There’s other touch points where they’re learning something about that game and all the characters and ideas that go with it.
That’s I think one of the things that makes really good games successful is they cease to just be games. There are people who have you know, we see people who have done Catan-themed weddings. We’ve seen people who have done, you know, their own custom versions of the game. We’ve seen people have Catan-themed birthdays for their kids. I would love to see us get into more spaces. Having the novels that came out was great because now someone who doesn’t necessarily play games, we can say, oh, well, here, read the book.
That is a place where I think you’ll see more emphasis from us in the future, trying to get people into games from outside because that is the hard part. So you’ve got to find creative ways to get in front of people outside of hobbyist enthusiast gamers.
Catan 6th Edition is out now.
