Catan ширээний тоглоом NHL зэрэг спортын лигүүдийн соёлд нэвтэрч байна

Over the course of my 20-plus years as a sportswriter, I’ve spoken quite a bit about my various non-sports hobbies and interests, with one in particular coming up quite often: I love board games. I loved them as a kid, was reintroduced to the hobby around the time when my daughter was born in 2006, and have never stopped playing them, collecting them (I own over 300), and writing about them. It’s been quite rare, however, to have my interests in sports and board games intersect.

Last winter, it finally happened, in a most unusual way, as I got a note from one of the publicists who send me updates from board game publishers that Catan Studios, whose namesake game is largely responsible for sparking our new Golden Age of Board Games, had struck a partnership with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Catan set up a stand on the concourse at select Timberwolves home games, giving away the new Catan on the Road portable game to fans, and had signage at the Timberwolves’ arena as well as a presence on the team’s road broadcasts. I thought there was a story there, because … why? What possible connection could there be between this delightfully nerdy hobby and an NBA team? The story ended up on hold because I couldn’t visit Minneapolis for one of their Catan nights during the season, but, of course, I wasn’t about to let it go.

Catan, which was originally called The Settlers of Catan, was designed by Klaus Teuber, a dental technician by day and game designer on the side, and has sold over 45 million units worldwide since its first release in 1995, including the original game, expansions, and numerous spinoff games. Players collect five resources to allow them to build roads, settlements, and cities, gaining victory points for the last two, with bonuses for having the longest road and the largest army. Every turn starts with a roll of two ordinary dice that determines which settlements or cities produce resources, so the game offers a blend of luck and strategy, while there’s a social aspect because players can trade resources with each other.

At the end of July, I attended Gen Con, the largest board game convention in the Western Hemisphere, which drew over 74,000 attendees to Indianapolis and took over downtown. While there, I had the chance to meet Kevin Hovdestad, the director of brand development for Catan and one of the people I spoke to last winter about the Timberwolves deal. I think I finally got my answer for why a board game publisher would be actively pursuing partnerships with sports teams, along with learning about Catan’s ongoing plans there and how Hovdestad views Catan’s place in the larger board game ecosystem. (Bold is me, everything else is Hovdestad.)

To take it from the top, how did the Catan-sports partnership thing begin?

I joined Catan in 2024. Right after I started, within days, I happened to get lucky, and I made contact with someone at Excel, the big sports agency out of California. We were able to place a bunch of copies of Catan in their NFL players’ spring training gift baskets. And a bunch of the guys really loved it. That teed up an opportunity. ESPN ran a story a couple months later about Josh Allen and the O-line on the Buffalo Bills playing Catan together. We reached out to the team. They had us out for a little meet and greet. So we got quite embedded in the space, just casually.

At the beginning of 2025, I’m still talking to Excel. And I went back to them and said that one of the things we’re trying to do is shift towards a younger audience. Who do you have for NIL guys that you have on your roster and do any of them like the game? They send back a list of guys, I pull up a couple of quick trackers, and I find that there’s a couple of these guys that are real likely NFL Draft prospects. So I reach out and we get a couple of them to agree to do sponsored content for Catan during the NFL Draft. Grey Zabel goes in the first round for the Seahawks. When they call him, he’s on screen on the NFL Network with the Catan box right next to him the whole time. It went viral – it just blew open the doors.

When I started, our brand awareness in the United States was only 18 percent, right? And you don’t feel like that when you’re at a show like Gen Con. As soon as I go out into the world, though, I say, I work on Catan, and people are like, ‘What’s that?’

I’m sure you get the “Board games, like Monopoly” question too. And I imagine that’s hard to overcome.

We’re just trying to figure out who’s not playing games and why. And my theory when I started was, there are a lot of people who have a lot of hobbies that involve getting a group of people together. And if I can find people who already have another hobby, another interest, where they get (together) in person with their friends and their family, those are the right people to get interested in a board game. They’re not all going to love it. It’s not going to be for everybody. …

I think that there’s a fundamental opportunity here for two reasons. One, these are colossal audiences that are not being spoken to by anyone in the games industry. Just full stop, nobody else is doing this. Two, when we are talking to sports teams, we’re a new category, right? They’re all so burnt out, like, it’s all sports drinks and car manufacturers and insurance companies. I’m like, great, okay. I’ve seen the Allstate logo at every NBA game for 20 years.

Now it’s all “the official betting partner.”

(Laughs) I don’t even want to get started on that. It was so heartwarming how quickly the teams that we’ve been speaking to are like, “Oh my God, this is so cool, games are great. This is novel. It’s going to be so much fun for our fans and for their kids.”

We just finished the season with the Timberwolves. Right away here, sometime later this month, we’re going to be announcing that we are partnering through (tabletop games distributor) Asmodee Canada with the Ottawa Senators in the NHL. We’re talking about having people come out in Catan themed costumes to work the concourse, we’re going to demo games. They’re talking about making us hex-shaped hockey pucks to give away.

So what’s the ultimate goal with being the ‘official board game,’ or whatever it may be, of various sports teams?

My job is to put the game in front of new people. It is exhausting to be advertised to. … But we have to still find ways to get this game in front of people where they can discover it and get excited about it … So getting to go and show somebody how to play a game, having games that we’re putting out that are lighter, faster, more frenetic, so people can have that high energy experience with the game in person while they’re at a hockey game. … And I will be really honest, the mandate is to sell board games to people who’ve never played a board game. It’s not sell Catan to gamers.

Because you’re saturated in this market. Everyone here at Gen Con has played Catan.

Right. I’ve got to get people to come in the door for the first time.

Every sports fan I know has a PlayStation, grew up with games, has made it part of their life. It would be weirder to go into someone’s house and see a shelf full of DVDs than a shelf full of games at this point, frankly. Games are great. Games are cool. And now I think we’re starting to see the crossover of like, all of these athletes and musicians, touring bands, who need things to do and they’ve all started picking up games. It’s a low cost thing they can do, they don’t have to go out, they don’t have to deal with paparazzi, they don’t have to deal with everybody (who) wants to get drunk. You just get to have a good time.

And you don’t have to be online – that’s one of the things I talk up when I’m evangelizing for the hobby.

It gets you away from being online. And Lord knows everybody wants that right now. I get it. I’ve gone to great lengths to cut back on how much time I spend on this little misery rectangle (waves phone vindictively). …

We didn’t come into this with some grand plan. We don’t have a bunch of people who have like 20 years of sports background or anything. We have a group of people who love games and understand games and are trying to figure out what do you do when you’ve got to go convince a new person to try a game? How do you find them? How do you get to them? What does that story look and feel like? And I think there’s other places that this can work, right? Like, I just came back from a couple weeks in Europe (at the) beginning of June. We had a meetup with Linkin Park. They love Catan.

Definitely not a band I would… I’m stereotyping, obviously. Definitely not a band I thought was going to finish that sentence.

The stereotype is really, I think, one of the things that is working for us because we just get to keep showing up in places that are unexpected, right? When we started doing this, nobody expected that we would go do a sponsorship with a basketball team. Nobody expects that we’re going to work with a nu-metal/modern-rock band, right? And if we can keep doing that, if I can keep finding creative ways to have the game pop up in these other pockets of culture and entertainment where nobody thought we were going, right?

All the stuff we’ve been seeing on social media with the Boston Celtics. We haven’t paid a dime for any of that exposure. They just love it. They’re using it as their rookie hazing ritual or whatever. One guy lost his copy of Cities and Nights (an expansion for Catan), and it was sold out everywhere, so I pulled a copy from my stash for reviewers, hand-wrote a note that said, “Don’t lose this one!” and mailed it to him.

We’re just having fun with it. It’s not advertising. It’s just genuine joy. They want to play. We want them to play. The fact that they’re also willing to joke about it as they’re getting on their private jet and hold the game up because it’s fun for them.

It’s organic, and more authentic than straight advertising.

I remember right after I met Josh Allen. We’re leaving, we’re flying home from Buffalo and there’s a little cardboard cutout of him holding up a Snickers bar or something in the airport. They could have photoshopped anything they wanted into his hand. I don’t think that man has ever eaten a Snickers bar. But I’ve got real, honest to God, photos of him with a pair of Catan boxes under his arm walking around because he loves it, right? I had one of my designers working on a custom baby onesie for him and his wife after they just had a baby, right? But we ran out of time.

It’s @settlersofcatan szn.#BillsCamp | #BillsMafia pic.twitter.com/VrzC4k9I0R

— Buffalo Bills (@BuffaloBills) July 22, 2025

So it sounds like the Timberwolves deal opened up the door for more sports partnerships?

They call us now and say, “Catan is an option? We didn’t know.” I’ll get outreach from a NBA, NHL, NFL, whatever organization, and they’ll come to me and they’ll be like, “We could do something, as well.” And every time I just have to turn around and be like, “Who on the team plays? Who’s already a fan?” Because if they don’t know… I have options where someone does. …

And this strategy of not taking ourselves so seriously anymore and starting to think about where are the growth audiences, who hasn’t seen Catan, who doesn’t know Catan. May this year, we announced our first license in a decade. We’re doing Bluey next year. We’ve done the Star Trek and Game of Thrones Catan games, and those are things for the Gen Con audience, right? You can walk around Gen Con and make Star Trek references in this crowd. But we’re trying to find new people outside of that ecosystem.

Catan has a reputation within the gaming world as a “gateway game,” something you play with new gamers to introduce them to the hobby and show them that there is more to the tabletop than Monopoly. It sounds like you’re embracing that by aggressively courting people who need that gateway.

We’re not oblivious. The best outcome for everybody is they come in, they try Catan, they enjoy it, and then they graduate to something else.

Right, they like it and say, “I want another game.” I did.

Yeah, right? I want to be their first game. But I want them to own a hundred games over the course of their lifetime. There’s so many great games. But we’ve got to get new people into the hobby. If I can do that, and I can make the group of people who want to have game night a little bit bigger every year, that’s a victory.

I’m hearing football, hockey, basketball. Have you talked to any baseball teams?

We did a minor league deal with the St. Paul Saints, since we’re right there (in Roseville, Minnesota). We’ve talked to the Royals a little bit, and they’re very motivated. They’ve got their own in-house design agency. One of their ideas for us was they were prepared to salvage all the broken bats all season and turn them into town pieces (Catan pieces have always been made of wood, not plastic). Hyper-collectible, hyper-exclusives.

The biggest barrier at this point for us is bandwidth. I only have four people working for me! But if this works and this continues to work and we post the kind of numbers we’re posting, we should grow the team. We should get a bigger budget. We should make more of these investments because I think there’s a snowball effect here waiting to happen. I think that once you get, like — the audience for each sport is different. The person who’s following football and saw the NFL Draft is not the person who saw the Timberwolves activation.

The people who came to the Catan night for the Timberwolves game, mostly are just Timberwolves fans. A couple of people, I saw a couple of people reselling their tickets online, or people who were posting and saying, I have season tickets, I can’t make it on that night. You can have my seat if you get me the free Catan. And as we get more sophisticated about this and we start to understand what these people want — we tried, like, here’s an unreleased game. They got Catan on the Road two months before it was on the shelf.

I know there are players in the Twins organization that play Catan. There are at least three in the Orioles organization. We’ll see if they’re all still there after the trade deadline. I’m pretty sure Adley Rutschman is one of them. He’s not going anywhere. (He was traded two days later.)

My sort of philosophy on it is that we’ve all reached that point for whatever reasons. Age, cultural shift, too much internet, pandemics, whatever, where everybody just wants experiences. That’s why everybody’s going to a sports game or going to a concert or getting game night together because we just want to do stuff with other people. Anything that grows the hobby is good for all of us.