Enlarge / Klaus Teuber, in 2015 at a games festival in Essen, Germany. Teuber created The Settlers of Catan (later just Catan ), along with other award-winning board games. (credit: Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

I was in my early 30s when I first played The Settlers of Catan . I had been at a bar with a small group one freezing winter night in 2012 in Buffalo, New York. One of us, eager to share his recent obsession, declared it was time for the outing's next stage. We went to his barely unpacked new apartment nearby. He pulled the game from a plastic tote, opened it on a wobbly dinette table, and laid out the board, apologizing for the moisture-warped edges. I took a picture (on my HTC Thunderbolt) because, having had a few, I wanted to ensure I'd remember this game with the wooden pieces and weird amount of sheep.

Settlers of Catan , as I saw it in early 2012. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

From a German basement to 32 million copies

You may have seen the news this week that Klaus Teuber, the German designer who created The Settlers of Catan ( now just Catan ), died on April 1 at age 70. Teuber developed Die Siedler von Catan in the early 1990s, playing with ideas of Icelandic settlements, tinkering in his basement while working full-time at a dental lab. He'd bring up new iterations for his wife and kids to test every weekend, he told The New Yorker . The breakthrough, he said, was using hexagonal tiles instead of squares.

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com .

The 2020 global pandemic might seem like an ideal time for new board game app releases, but the increasing development time for more complex games means we're going longer between initial announcements and final releases than we have before. Below, I’ve ranked my nine best new board game apps of 2020 based on app quality, play experience, and purchase price. I'll give a quick honorable mention to Lorenzo il Magnifico , which I tested out a year ago when it was still in beta on Steam and of which I thought highly—but which I haven't gotten to try in its newest version.

9. Viticulture (Digidiced)

Placing workers in the spring to plant vines and build buildings, but sadly no grape-stomping.

The first game from designer Jamey Stegmaier ( Scythe , Charterstone ) gets the app treatment from Digidiced, whose apps all have the same general look and feel. You're running a vineyard and placing workers in spring or in winter to plant vines, build up your farm, and run tours for money. It's a relatively complex economic game at heart, and the app works well, but the tutorial here isn't detailed enough; it might be better if you have some familiarity with the physical game.

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