Catan is popular. By some accounts, it’s the most popular game of the modern era. Known as a gateway game that’s sold over 45 million copies and introduced countless families to a life of board-games beyond Monopoly, it’s a game that enforces interaction between players. Ironically, it suffers from a similar fate to Monopoly, which is also an interactive game in that it involves a vast – if not even more prominent reliance on needing to get lucky when it comes to rolling dice.

Online versions of the game are making millions of dollars despite it also being freely available in various forms. The cost, quality and origin of the game greatly varies too as Catan is also one of the most pirated board games at the moment. Several of the largest online marketplaces sell more unoriginal copied versions of the game than officially authorized ones.

Moddable.Games does not have this problem. In fact, we encourage it.

We are designing open-source games, freely available for others to modify and redistribute under their own brands. Our first game is Nukes, which in many ways was born from understanding the origins and evolution of chess.

Although Nukes has been under development for over a decade it was not until around a year ago that we realized you could play the game using a set of Catan tiles as the Nukes board. Since the game of Nukes is open-source and also uses generic pieces for each player and all their units in the same way the games of checkers and go both do, you really can play it today.

Our design objectives for Nukes were strictly focused on simplicity:

• Create a simple system that is easy to explain and allows for any number of players
• Provide a modular board that allows for endless possibilities
• Introduce as few unique components as possible

All we need to do now is to let the other forty-four million, nine hundred and nighty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people that own a copy of Catan know that they also own Nukes already.