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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Have I entered some sort of time warp? I was introduced to this game at the gaming club at Cornell. In 1997.

When reading this article I had to keep looking up at the dateline to make sure I hadn't accidentally slipped back into graduate school. Talk about existential terror.

The moral of this story is threefold. First: I was a much bigger game geek than I ever thought I was. Second: Your business can take a really long time to reach its full potential. Third: Just because something is old news to you doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people encountering it for the first time.

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I was never a board game geek, but that might have been a side effect of growing up in the 90's. I had friends who I couldn't hang out with every day, because we lived so far apart. So I ended up being killer at early video games and for the most part I still am although I rarely play the first person shooters or the RTS games anymore due to time (and, for the FPS', interest) constraints.

Yet even I knew what Catan is. Even my wife does, I told her about 3 months ago that the next time we waste money on a board game we're actually going to get one I like, so I pointed it out to her.

So even for me that was a sort of bizarre 'deja vu' experience. Then again, I grew up in the UK so I suppose this game probably hit the market much bigger and much sooner than in the US. I guess an addendum to your second moral is that foreign markets can act in unexpected ways.

No, you're not alone. I've been playing Settlers for years, and it's long been a favorite of a number of friends of mine in different cities who don't all know each other. Perhaps it's been a niche game this whole time and will go "mainstream", but its niche hasn't been that obscure.

Not that this isn't some sort of time-warp article, but haven't you learned by now that Cornell has little in common with reality? We even put it on a bumper sticker. :-)

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