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War Story on the Honor Roll, CATAN on the Court, Amabel Holland on Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ

tonyheth November 29, 2025

Time to catch up on a handful of announcements from the past month:

▪️ In early November 2025, San Diego Historical Games Convention, a.k.a. SDHist, gave its fourth annual Summit Award to War Story: Occupied France, a 1-6 player game from Dave Neale, David Thompson, and Osprey Games that debuted in late 2024.

The Summit Award is intended to “recognize historical board games that broaden the hobby”, and you can read about the game’s creation in David Thompson’s designer diary from October 2024.

▪️ The second SDHist award was the second annual Bobby Nunes Memorial Award, which aims to “recognize exceptional gaming media published in the prior calendar year”. That award went to designer Amabel Holland for her video essay “Vonnegut’s Board Game: Preservation, Annotation, Context”, which starts by talking about Vonnegut’s game GHQ — which developer Geoff Engelstein helped bring to print as he wrote in this November 2024 diary — then moves on to talk about the preservation of art, as well as the quest for understanding how that art came to be.

Youtube Video

▪️ KOSMOS celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Klaus Teuber‘s CATAN by introducing CATAN Connect, co-designed by Benjamin Teuber.

CATAN Connect can be played by up to six players simultaneously and can be combined with itself to allow any number of people at the table — something KOSMOS demonstrated by running a CATAN event at SPIEL Essen 25 that had 1,170 people playing at the same time. Fourteen-year-old Ben Machts won this event by playing a “Monopoly” card that let him steal more than 2,300 wheat, which he then converted into nearly three hundred cities thanks to a convenient port. At least that’s how I imagine things worked out, but don’t take my word for it.

▪️ Speaking of CATAN, in early November 2025, CATAN Studio and asmodee announced a partnership with the Minnesota Timberwolves, an NBA basketball team. From the press release:

As part of the partnership, CATAN will introduce interactive concourse activations at select Timberwolves home games during the current season, giving fans the opportunity to experience the excitement of CATAN firsthand. Fans can test their strategy, challenge friends, and take home exclusive CATAN giveaways and prizes.

Beyond the arena, CATAN and the Timberwolves will team up on community initiatives and events. The collaboration will include participation in select Timberwolves community outreach programs, connecting CATAN‘s mission of bringing people together through play with the team’s dedication to making a positive local impact.

▪️ And speaking of SPIEL Essen 25, fair organizer Merz Verlag reported that 948 exhibitors from fifty nations (including Philippines for the first time) filled its 77,500 m² of exhibition space, which attracted 220,000 visitors over its four sold-out days — with all four of those numbers being records for the event. The biggest change from 2024 was the use of Hall 7 as an exhibitor space instead of only being a holding cell for attendees before the fair opened each morning. From a Merz Verlag press release:

“Actually, I didn’t want to open a new hall this year,” says Carol Rapp, Managing Director of the organizing Merz Verlag. “But the demand for booth space from our exhibitors was so high that it was the only way we could fulfill the many requests — and we still had to open a waiting list after the registration deadline.” Another positive effect of the new hall was that additional visitors could enter the premises. “After we were surprisingly sold out for the first time last year, we wanted to make it possible for more people to visit SPIEL this year,” says Rapp. “With Hall 7, we were able to increase the number of available tickets. The fact that we were nevertheless sold out again on all days is absolutely impressive.”

220,000 people over four days is a new visitor record. The [Messe] again stayed below the maximum capacity this year. “It doesn’t help any of us if we cram people into the halls. We want traffic to flow in the aisles while at the same time allowing as many people as possible to visit us.” The combination of available tickets per day, wide aisles, and logically structured halls achieved the goal: it was crowded but not overwhelming at the same time.

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