Or a TV show, perhaps?
It's been 20 years since the award-winning smarter-than-your-average board game The Settlers Of Catan was first unleashed on kitchen tables by one Mr. Klaus Teuber, and since then it's sold over 22 million copies in 30 languages, and, more recently, joined the exclusive "board games set to become films" club, after producer Gail Katz has officially bought the movie and TV rights.
“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,” said Katz, veteran of such projects as Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and, um, Bicentennial Man. “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.”
For those not already in the know, the game itself doesn't scream "mythology" or, more importantly, "narrative". The Settlers Of Catan, as Wikipedia succintly puts it, sees "players in the game represent settlers establishing colonies. Players build settlements, cities, and roads to connect them as they settle the island. The game board representing the island is composed of hexagonal tiles (hexes) of different land types which are laid out randomly at the beginning of each game. Players build by spending resources (brick, lumber, wool, grain, and ore), represented by resource cards; each land type, with the exception of the unproductive desert, produces a specific resource."
But before you get too cynical, remember that they make a joyfully silly film out of Cluedo (called Clue), not forgetting Battleship, which was... less joyfully silly - or joyful generally.
The Settlers Of Catan is still very much in its embryonic stages, and whether it ends up a movie or a TV show remains to be seen. Fingers crossed the fan-favourite phrase "Got wood?" turns up in the script somewhere.
from Empire News
