Another possibility of a board game becoming a movie (or a TV show), but this time, it's one with a little more to it than say, Battleship. It was announced today that producer Gail Katz (The Perfect Storm) has acquired both the film and TV rights to The Settlers of Catan, a boardgame built around competitive multiplayer strategy, as gamers build and develop settlements while trading and acquiring scarce resources.

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The game, designed by Klaus Teuber was released in 1995 in Germany, and has since then sold over 22 million sets in over 30 languages. It was also the first German-style board game that made us realize that the Germans are just better than everyone else at creating strategy and puzzle games (which is why I could really use some help with The Legends of Andor right now …)

The Settlers of Catan has become a pop culture phenomenon as well; in addition to being profiled in everything from The Washington Post to The New Yorker, the game is a big hit on college campuses, and even the locker room of the Green Bay Packers.

Katz said of the acquisition in a statement,

I’ve been wanting to see an adaptation of the game for years, ever since my Catan-obsessed college-aged kids introduced me to it. The island of Catan is a vivid, visual, exciting and timeless world with classic themes and moral challenges that resonate today.  There is a tremendous opportunity to take what people love about the game and its mythology as a starting point for the narrative.

In other words, there is more to it than an adaptation of, say, Hungry Hungry Hippos (although if Syfy developed that, I might watch it).

What do you think of Catan possibly being made into a TV show or a movie? Which platform would serve it better?  And what other games would you like to see make the leap to the big or small screen?

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