Silicon Valley insiders’ favorite board game ‘Settlers of Catan’ to be turned into a movie

Hold on to your sheep and wood — the German board game that has become an obsession among Silicon Valley insiders is going to be turned into a movie.

According to Deadline, producer Gail Katz bought the film and TV rights to the strategy game “The Settlers of Catan.” Deadline reports that the board game has sold 22 million versions around the world.

“I’ve been wanting to see an adaptation of the game for years, ever since my Catan-obsessed college-aged kids introduced me to it,” said Katz in a statement obtained by Deadline. “The island of Catan is a vivid, visual, exciting and timeless world with classic themes and moral challenges that resonate today. There is a tremendous opportunity to take what people love about the game and its mythology as a starting point for the narrative.”

As Deadline describes it: “The Settlers of Catan revolves around players creating a dominant community on the fictional island of Catan. Settlers must outwit one another amidst fierce competition for the island’s scarce resources.”

Kind of like a certain high-tech region in a certain part of Northern California, no?

No surprise, then, that techie insiders have embraced the game with gusto. The Wall Street Journal took a close look at this phenomenon a few years ago.

“Settlers has been particularly popular in Northern California around Silicon Valley since 2005, with sales spiking in 2007 and 2008,” the Journal reported.

“Settlers is definitely the new live networking for our crowd,” Mark Pincus, cofounder of Zynga, told the Journal. “It’s like our kind of golf game — none of us have time to play 18 holes of golf, but we can handle a pizza and a board game.”

No word on who will star, or write, or direct, or when it will be released.

Above: Mark Pincus, cofounder of Zynga, tells us where it’s at.