Over the course of my 20-plus years as a sportswriter, I’ve spoken quite a bit about my various non-sports hobbies and interests, with one in particular coming up quite often: I love board games. I loved them as a kid, was reintroduced to the hobby around the time when my daughter was born in 2006, and have never stopped playing them, collecting them (I own over 300), and writing about them. It’s been quite rare, however, to have my interests in sports and board games intersect.Last winter, it finally happened, in a most unusual way, as I got a note from one of the publicists who send me updates from board game publishers that Catan Studios, whose namesake game is largely responsible for sparking our new Golden Age of Board Games, had struck a partnership with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Catan set up a stand on the concourse at select Timberwolves home games, giving away the new Catan on the Road portable game to fans, and had signage at the Timberwolves’ arena as well as a presence on the team’s road broadcasts. I thought there was a story there, because … why? What possible connection could there be between this delightfully nerdy hobby and an NBA team? The story ended up on hold because I couldn’t visit Minneapolis for one of their Catan nights during the season, but, of course, I wasn’t about to let it go.Catan, which was originally called The Settlers of Catan, was designed by Klaus Teuber, a dental technician by day and game designer on the side, and has sold over 45 million units worldwide since its first release in 1995, including the original game, expansions, and numerous spinoff games. Players collect five resources to allow them to build roads, settlements, and cities, gaining victory points for the last two, with bonuses for having the longest road and the largest army. Every turn starts with a roll of two ordinary dice that determines which settlements or cities produce resources, so the game offers a blend of luck and strategy, while there’s a social aspect because players can trade resources with each other.At the end of July, I attended Gen Con, the largest board game convention in the Western Hemisphere, which drew over 74,000 attendees to Indianapolis and took over downtown. While there, I had the chance to meet Kevin Hovdestad, the director of brand development for Catan and one of the people I spoke to last winter about the Timberwolves deal. I think I finally got my answer for why a board game publisher would be actively pursuing partnerships with sports teams, along with learning about Catan’s ongoing plans there and how Hovdestad views Catan’s place in the larger board game ecosystem. (Bold is me, everything else is Hovdestad.)To take it from the top, how did the Catan-sports partnership thing begin?I joined Catan in 2024. Right after I started, within days, I happened to get lucky, and I made contact with someone at Excel, the big sports agency out of California. We were able to place a bunch of copies of Catan in their NFL players’ spring training gift baskets. And a bunch of the guys really loved it. That teed up an opportunity. ESPN ran a story a couple months later about Josh Allen and the O-line on the Buffalo Bills playing Catan together. We reached out to the team. They had us out for a little meet and greet. So we got quite embedded in the space, just casually.At the beginning of 2025, I’m still talking to Excel. And I went back to them and said that one of the things we’re trying to do is shift towards a younger audience. Who do you have for NIL guys that you have on your roster and do any of them like the game? They send back a list of guys, I pull up a couple of quick trackers, and I find that there’s a couple of these guys that are real likely NFL Draft prospects. So I reach out and we get a couple of them to agree to do sponsored content for Catan during the NFL Draft. Grey Zabel goes in the first round for the Seahawks. When they call him, he’s on screen on the NFL Network with the Catan box right next to him the whole time. It went viral – it just blew open the doors.Grey Zabel with Catan on ESPN’s 2025 NFL Draft broadcast.When I started, our brand awareness in the United States was only 18 percent, right? And you don’t feel like that when you’re at a show like Gen Con. As soon as I go out into the world, though, I say, I work on Catan, and people are like, ‘What’s that?’I’m sure you get the “Board games, like Monopoly” question too. And I imagine that’s hard to overcome.We’re just trying to figure out who’s not playing games and why. And my theory when I started was, there are a lot of people who have a lot of hobbies that involve getting a group of people together. And if I can find people who already have another hobby, another interest, where they get (together) in person with their friends and their family, those are the right people to get interested in a board game. They’re not all going to love it. It’s not going to be for everybody. …