Chapter Four: What a Wonderful World

Even though the registration was in German, I utilized my online translator and persevered. I couldn’t find United States as an option for my address, even though it was there, quite obviously as “Vereinigte Staaten.” I mean, really, how stupid am I for not catching that!?? It was obvious to you, right? Still, the program took my credit card information even though I chose “Deutschland” as my country of origin, and I was happily playing online with a group of friendly German-speaking players who were (just like on the ronaldschmidt.de site) shocked to see an American online.

An announcement was made on the website that it would soon be available in English. Like many electronic games and their promises, it took an additional four or five months before the English version was up and running. But when it was, the COW was flooded with newbies needing guidance. Since I had already been playing the game online for seven months, and this was before the very handy Introductory Game was available, I found that my help was in high demand every time I logged in. The Forum for World Village became the place for English-speakers to ask questions and find comfort in this strange new world. Since I had spent many hours playing with the already-established German-speaking community, I felt it was my duty to help bridge the cultural and language gap that always looms and threatens to separate people just because of misunderstandings. My forum posts nearly always addressed this issue.

I just hope I don't meet these two in real life.

While I was engaged in helping newbies navigate through the World, I received a very nice letter from Gavin Allister who invited me to become a moderator. It also involved a free Premium account as compensation for being an active member in the COW (doing pretty much what I was already doing), so I quickly accepted. I even offered to help proofread the translations and suggested changes. Gavin didn’t just welcome the suggestions, he actually gave me access to the COW text files so I could make the changes myself!

An invitation to join Guido Teuber (Klaus’s son in case you didn’t know) at GenCon in August 2008 to demo the Catan Online World followed, so I quite happily did that also. And the following year, while helping out with the 2009 GenCon, Guido mentioned that he might have a job for me. Wow! How did I get here? I mean really, I get addicted to this game and just because I’m looking for people to play against, I get a free online account, followed by a job offer? And I can work from home? And I can set my own hours and the end goal is to support and promote something I have a passion for? Are you kidding me? So I played it cool – I casually nodded and said we should talk about the details later.

My “day” job kept me busy for the next few months after GenCon. After moving back to Indy in 2001, I had gone back to school and received a second degree and became a licensed teacher in January 2007. After working for a little over two years at a public middle school teaching eighth grade, then sixth grade, I was transferred to another middle school to teach seventh grade in Fall 2009. Ugh! So I didn’t have too much time to wonder what was happening with Guido’s job offer as I was struggling with creating a new curriculum for my third consecutive year. Did I say “Ugh!” yet?

Mr. Plane's students fall victim to his gaming obsession and help playtest Settlers of America.

Needless to say, Guido did call with the job offer in October, just as I was hitting my stride at school. Along with my new responsibilities managing the COW community with Gavin, I got a cool-looking caricature made for me (notice the plane on my t-shirt representing my nick Aero, along with the Catan sunrise colors?) and the fancy-looking Catan GmbH logo next to my Forum posts.

Jim Plane = Aero

I now do a lot with PR for the COW, handing out free coupons to reporters and bloggers to encourage press for our rapidly-growing site, and I’m one of those gatekeepers who prohibits offensive nicknames from our World. To make life even better, my wife has recently joined the Catan team and is helping in the same areas I am.

Of course, we’re the envy of our friends and family for having such cool part time jobs. And to think all this happened just because I wanted someone to play with me. Go figure.

Jim Plane

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Chapter Three: Aero Discovers the “World”

Since I had all but given up on real-life opponents, I searched the web for other boardgame sites. I found a few, most notably BrettspielWelt (Board Game World), which featured online boardgaming, but I found their German or poorly-translated-English interfaces difficult to navigate. Actually, BrettspielWelt’s interface for Carcassonne was quite good, so I used to play that game instead of Catan, which had a not-so-intuitively designed interface. I then tried an unlicensed site that allows Cities & Knights to be played for free with cheesy graphics. But I found the people there to be rude, the interface boring and soulless, and it left me with an overall feeling that I was ripping off the person who designed this wonderful game in the first place. I may have played five times on that not-so-brainy site.

I have no excuse for this excess of games I own now.

In 2001, I moved my family from New Jersey to my home town of Indianapolis. On a trip during July to visit old friends in New Jersey, my son and I stopped along the way at the Origins convention in Columbus, Ohio. Wow! That was fun. My first major game convention. A year later (if I recall correctly), GenCon, an even bigger convention, moved from a location just north of Chicago to Indianapolis. Wow! That was even better! My gaming thirst was thoroughly quenched during these long weekends. And even though I still struggled to find real-life opponents, I optimistically purchased several games, Catan and non-Catan, hoping to entice others to play with me.

This was a true labor of love. About 2-3 hours spent per tile and I'm not done yet.

Still, the quest for viable online gaming continued. I found the Days of Wonder site where I could play Ticket to Ride to my heart’s content, and that was a lot of fun for a while. But the game lacks the depth, complexity, and strategy that makes Catan so replayable (is that a word or did I just make it up?). Also, the program relied on A.I. opponents to finish games when people jumped out, so I finished several games with one or more A.I.s. After a while, Microsoft came up with a playable Catan base game available online for an annual premium. I stopped playing Ticket to Ride almost immediately, and spent way too many hours on this site for a couple of years.

Sheep on the custom board

Then, in July of 2008, I checked out a Professor Easy tutorial for Domaine, and at the end of it a strange blurb popped up that said something like, “Thanks for completing the tutorial for Domaine. To find like-minded people, go to www.playcatan.com.”
Since I’m always interested in finding “like-minded people,” I took the plunge and discovered the Catan Online World. Base game, Seafarers, Desert Raiders, Domaine, Hoity Toity, and oh my God it can’t be, but it is. Yes! Cities & Knights!! Very few people I had played with wanted to take Catan to that level. Can you hear the music? Sounds like a walk through heaven and Paradise while experiencing Nirvana all at the same time. AAAaaahhhhhh. Heart pounding. Drooling. Money’s tight. Can I afford the premium membership? More importantly, how can I pass this up!? Within a few hours of playing the base game with my free account, I was ready to open my wallet.

In part four, I’ll explain how I met some influential people on the site and how that led to my dream job.

Jim Plane

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Chapter Two: Hopelessly Addicted

Being unaware of the American gaming market, I had no idea that Mayfair had been publishing The Settlers of Catan in English for years. So, I had my brother do some shopping for me in Karstadt before he returned to the states in the spring of 2000.

Catan - Cities & Knights - 1st German edition - Scary-looking Catan

Deciding that maybe the game wasn’t as scary as the box was, I asked him to purchase Städte und Ritter (Cities and Knights), plus the PC versions of Die Siedler von Catan – Das Kartenspiel (Catan Card Game) and Sternenfahrer (Starfarers) for which I used Babelfish (at altavista.com) to translate into English. I even scanned and Photoshopped the SuR rulebook and reprinted it with my color printer in English just for my own use, and continued begging my family and friends to play with me.

Cities & Knights Almanac translation: Lots of work with Photoshop here.

My nieces and nephews were getting older, so I found a few more opponents, but it still wasn’t enough – especially since I lived in New Jersey with my wife and son, and they were in Indianapolis. I invited friends and relatives over to play the game, and took it to family reunions. I bought a movable poker table top (an octagon, very similar to a Catan hexagon – see photo below) that was covered in green velvet so I could move the game bodily from the dining table to the coffee table, then back to the dining table when the meal ended, and I recall my wife throwing around the word obsession during this time.

New collection: Städte & Ritter (Cities and Knights) and the PC version of "Die Sternenfahrer von Catan" (Starfarers) became part of my collection.

A highlight of the German PC card game was the online site where people could meet, share IP addresses, and play together. I wrote a favorable review of the game at boardgamegeek.com, and someone who read the post sent me an email, telling me that he had translated much of the game to English and then sent me the file. By this time, I had found Mayfair Games, so I took this file and improved it by using the actual text from the English version of the card game. This file was eventually used as the base for the current English version of the card game on the COW. My new friend also told me about a fan’s website where the PC game, Catan – Die Erste Insel (Catan – The First Island), could be played for free. For the first time I had plenty of opponents to match wits with!

PC CD Collection: The electronic Catan collection (at the time)

I happily played the card game and the PC game on these sites for several months, filling my days while being temporarily unemployed and between careers. I found the people online to be very friendly and accommodating to my faulty German, and I even fooled a few by writing responses in the little bits of German I knew: getreide (grain), strasse (road), ja (yes), and so on. Of course, I had to reveal myself as an American as soon as someone wrote a complete sentence in the chat window and then waited for a response, which I couldn’t deliver in German. After confessing, I was usually met with, “What are you doing on a German website?”

The answer was one they could relate to: “I’m hopelessly addicted to this game, just like you!”

Around December of 2002, the partly fee-based Catan Online World was launched as a joint venture between Klaus Teuber’s company Catan GmbH and the German Internet provider T-Online. I would have paid the fee, but the money for it was attached to and pulled from German phone bills. I even asked one of my brother’s German friends if I could send him money every month for the fee, but he didn’t like the idea. The number of opponents on my beloved free website shrank more with each passing day until I finally gave up. Again I had to suffer with begging my family to play whenever we would get together for holidays, and to fill in with the much-overplayed computer game and card game. My quest for opponents began anew.

Jim Plane

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As many gamers know, finding opponents isn’t always easy. Family members are often our favorite foes, but let’s face it: if you’re into gaming, you just might be a little more aggressive than they are, and they just might get tired of playing with you because of it. Ring any bells? It is exactly this situation that compelled me to become the only English-speaking Catan player on German websites before any were translated and available in English. This led to a position as a moderator for the Catan Online World, then to demoing games at GenCon in Indianapolis, and finally, I’m happy to say, to employment as a community manager for the COW. It has been quite a journey, and it all started with my brother, who in December of 1997 introduced me to a really cool game that was quickly gaining popularity in Germany, which he called “Die Siedler.”

The Settlers of Catan - 1st German edition

In early 1997, my brother’s wife, Erin, visited a close friend who had recently brought “Die Siedler von Catan” (“The Settlers of Catan”) back from Germany to his home in Oklahoma. When Erin visited Germany later that year, she brought back a copy of the game, too.

The English translations were made by scanning and altering the original with Photoshop, then sticking the revision to the originals' backs.

Then while visiting our family for the holidays, she and my brother Mark introduced the game to all of us. I won our first match, a six-player game, much to the surprise and dismay of my very competitive brother.

“How did you do that!?” he exclaimed.

“I just built settlements by numbers I didn’t already have.”

“That was your whole strategy?” It sounded simple then, and it sounds simple now. When we got together, my family played the game on and off for the next couple of years, but I was the one who became hopelessly hooked, trying to get all of them to play more often than they wanted.

In fall 1999, I visited Mark and his family in Dortmund, Germany, where Erin was teaching literature on a Fullbright scholarship. When he asked if there was anything I wanted to do while I was there, I said that I wanted to bring home my own copy of “Die Siedler”. Much to my surprise, I found an entire section devoted to the game in a department store called Karstadt. They stocked a computer game, a space-themed game, a card game, a seafaring game, and even a scary-looking spiel with advancing armies on a dark orange background, titled “Städte und Ritter.” I left with “Die Siedler von Catan” (“The Settlers of Catan”), “Die Seefahrer-Erweiterung” (“Catan Seafarers”), the five-six player extensions for each, and the “Catan – Die Erste Insel” (“Catan – The First Island”) computer game.

This is what I came home from Germany with.

Of course, I spent most of my time with the computer game, which featured opponents who played, argued, and traded in German while word bubbles floated above their heads. Armed with a pocket German-to-English dictionary, I learned a few key German phrases which would come in handy later.

Jim Plane

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