Settlers of Catan was designed by Klaus Teuber, a German dental technician who was so stressed by his miserable job and mounting financial debts that he created board games in his basement as a coping mechanism.

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Settlers of Catan was designed by Klaus Teuber, a German dental technician who was so stressed by his miserable job and mounting financial debts that he created board games in his basement as a coping mechanism. The game's brutal economy and cutthroat resource trading were born from the mind of a man trying to escape his own real-world economic despair. It is incredibly poetic that his personal stress relief tool went on to become the exact mechanism that has ruined countless friendships when someone violently refuses to trade their precious sheep for your desperately needed bricks