Catan - Crop Trust
Designing a game that protects the world’s food supply through creative game play
Project Snapshot
01
Team & Timeline
October 2016 – October 2018
Role: Project Lead, communication design, copywriter, project management, game design
Team: Professional work with Crop Trust including Brian Lainoff (inspiration phase), Neil Palmer (copyeditor) and Catan Team including Benjamin Teuber (Managing Director, Game Designer, Catan GmbH), and Pete Fenlon (CEO, Catan Studio)
02
Problem
How might we communicate the importance of conserving and using the world’s crop diversity to global audiences in a fun and understandable way?
Photo Credit: Crop Trust, Crops in Color Southeast Asia
03
Overview
Catan is a multiplayer board game designed by Klaus Teuber in 1995 that’s sold over 22 million copies in over 30 languages. The standard Catan base game requires players to compete for resources like crops, fuel, and construction materials as they seek dominion over the fictional island of Catan. It features a main board with the option to add on different “scenario” packs to diversify the game.
Through a two-year partnership with the Crop Trust, a new scenario - Catan: Crop Trust - was designed, which challenges players to cooperate as well as compete by storing seeds from their harvests of rice, wheat, maize, beans, and quinoa in a vault resembling the iconic Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. All game proceeds go to the Crop Trust to support crop conservation efforts.
Defining crop diversity, conveying its value, and sharing the urgency of conservation efforts was my central role at the Crop Trust. Rather than focusing solely on traditional awareness-raising methods through written and multimedia content, I continually looked for creative campaigns and projects. Catan: Crop Trust was one of these that came to life. I was the project lead for this game, coordinating all aspects of our partnership through inception to launch.
04
Outcome & Impact
The game is currently sold internationally in English and German (available online at Amazon, Target, Walmart, and where other games are sold). Proceeds to the Crop Trust are over $50,000 to date.
How We Got There
Process
Throughout my tenure at the Crop Trust, I was the media liaison for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, - the world’s largest collection of crop diversity,- organizing and leading media tours to the Vault so that press could disseminate the importance of the Seed Vault to global audiences. On one such press visit, my colleagues and I were connected to representatives of Asmodee, a French international games publisher and distributor with Catan in its portfolio of games. Given the connection to crops and other natural resources in the game of Catan, we began to discuss creative means for partnership and were introduced to the Catan GmbH team. The idea of a Catan: Crop Trust scenario was born.
We were interested in developing a game that was equal parts educational, strategic and fun. While our primary goal was to educate global audiences and highlight the importance of seed banks worldwide, we also wanted to use the game as a fundraising mechanism to support conservation efforts.
Over the next two years, I served as the Crop Trust project lead for the development of this scenario. As the project manager, I presented the work of the Crop Trust and the global network of seed banks in extreme detail with the game designers Klaus and Benjamin Teuber, made trips to the Catan GmbH headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany to test prototypes, orchestrated a prototype test in Svalbard with genebank representatives to play the first versions of the game and managed our overarching contractual framework and relationship.
Photo Credit: Crop Trust, Crops in Color Southeast Asia
Nine versions later, after the game design was finalized, my focus shifted to designing the cover with the Catan team, drafting the almanac text to accompany the game instruction manual, drafting all press materials, and organizing launch efforts. We soft-launched the game in October 2018 at the Essen Game fair and had the official unveiling in May 2019.
Between the soft launch and official unveiling, I drafted a holiday letter from the Crop Trust announcing the new scenario and encouraging recipients to further support conservation efforts through donations, which was sent with a hard copy of the game to Catan’s list of celebrity contacts.
Plans to release the game in other languages and design a multi-country promotional tour with the Catan GmbH and North America teams were ongoing at the outbreak of COVID-19, which stalled further efforts.
A review of the Settlers of Catan expansion, Catan: Crop Trust in Grist