Forget comic books or video gamesthe untapped future of IP mining is clearly in board games. And now that Netflix has entered a Euro strategy game like Catan, it is a gateway to the streamer that will make movies and series based on Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Everdell, Azul and Scythe, just wait.
Netflix announced on Tuesday that it is acquiring the screen adaptation rights to Catan, the wildly popular board game series created by Klaus Teuber and originally released in 1995 as The Settlers of Catan. The streamer bought – or traded, probably a move of some brick and wood or a lot of wheat – the rights to make movies, TV series and unscripted series all based on the board game.
Part of the reason we immediately thought of Netflix for Catan over anyone else is that Netflix has theirs game division that we so often forget. While it’s not necessarily the reason anyone signs up for Netflix, the fact that Netflix has a few free mobile apps tied to “Squid Game” or “Love Is Blind” or “Stranger Things” undoubtedly keeps a few people around. So adding a Catan app, letting people actually play the game online with other Netflix users while they’re Netflix and chilling with the show or the movie, is perfect for us.
But as IndieWire understands it, Tuesday’s deal does not also include game rights. So for now, that doesn’t mean Netflix can put out its own Catan game app. It’s already available for mobile in official form, but it hasn’t been supported or updated recently in the way that digital versions of some other popular games have. It also probably doesn’t mean we’ll get a “Wednesday” themed version of Catan or anything like that. Maybe you can play the game in person at Netflix House.
That doesn’t preclude Netflix from one day licensing the app and offering it to users that way. Netflix has a number of great mobile apps and games that it doesn’t own, like “Civilization VI” or “Hades,” to name just a couple. But not having some kind of playable Catan experience whenever a movie or series comes out could be a huge missed opportunity, especially one that Netflix itself would be uniquely capable of running.
Because we’re admittedly still skeptical of what a Catan movie would actually look like. Sure, there’s a fictional island of settlers and knights and robbers, with trade and road building and cities and other scenarios you can possibly imagine as backstory, but it’s ultimately a game with some hexagon tiles, a bunch of dice rolling, and friends and families turning on each other when you need to discard half of your stolen cards from your path.
Darren Kyman of game developer asmodee, Pete Fenlon of CATAN Studio (an asmodee studio), and brothers Guido Teuber and Benjamin Teuber of the Teuber family are all attached to produce, as is Roy Lee (“Weapons”) of Vertigo Entertainment.
Catan isn’t the only board game that Netflix wants to bring to the screen. It also has an “Exploding Kittens” project (also an asmodee game) and is developing a reality competition series based on Monopoly.
