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“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’” – Martin Luther King, Jr.         HT to Andy.

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By PUI-WING TAM

At an invitation-only executive retreat earlier this year in Sundance, Utah, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs including LinkedIn Corp. founder Reid Hoffman and Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly discussed the latest tech trends.

Then, as the night wound down, they began trading bricks, sheep and wood.

Over a German board game called Settlers of Catan, Messrs. Hoffman and Lilly and two other players garnered points by using cards representing bricks and other resources to build cities and roads. Mr. Lilly, playing Settlers for the first time, won the game.

It didn’t stop there. “We played a couple more times at the retreat,” says Mr. Lilly, 38 years old. Since then, he has played Settlers at other tech conferences and at social occasions in Silicon Valley.

Game Night in Silicon Valley

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Jeff Enlow for The Wall Street Journal

Settlers of Catan involves building settlements and cities.

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Mr. Lilly is among the recent converts to the latest interactive fad to hit high-tech circles. But unlike Web-based social-networking crazes — think Twitter and Facebook — this new digerati trend is playing out on a low-tech board.

Auren Hoffman, chief executive of search start-up Rapleaf Inc. (no relation to LinkedIn’s Mr. Hoffman), regularly hosts Settlers shindigs at his San Francisco home. He recently held a Settlers night with Internet company StumbleUpon Inc. Facebook Inc. was scheduled to hold its own Settlers tournament on Wednesday, its second of the year. Mark Pincus, CEO of social-gaming start-up Zynga Game Network Inc., says he plays Settlers at his company as a way to meet new employees.

“Settlers is definitely the new live networking for our crowd,” says Mr. Pincus, whose start-up makes online games such as FarmVille. “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.”

Licensed in the U.S. by Mayfair Games, Settlers was launched in 1995 by German board-game maker Klaus Teuber. Mr. Teuber created 19 hexagonal cardboard tiles that are arranged to form an island. The game involves rolling dice to gather resource cards from the island, such as sheep, brick, ore, wheat and wood. Those cards are then used to build settlements and cities, which are each equivalent to one or two points. The first player to score 10 points wins.

A German board game is redefining social networking in Silicon Valley. WSJ’s Pui-Wing Tam checks out who’s playing “Settlers of Catan.”

Settlers has been particularly popular in Northern California around Silicon Valley since 2005, with sales spiking in 2007 and 2008, says Guido Teuber, the creator’s son, who lives in Oakland, Calif. That was when the game reached a tipping point, with distribution on Amazon.com starting around 2006 and through Barnes & Noble Inc. stores in 2008, he says. While the younger Mr. Teuber declined to comment on the game’s revenues, he says the title has sold more than 15 million copies since its initial publication. The game carries a list price of about $45 and was available on Amazon.com recently for $33.60.

Despite its fan base, the game has nothing to do with technology. “Initially we were surprised” by all the techie interest, says the younger Mr. Teuber. “But then we saw how they need social interaction after sitting all day in front of a monitor.”

LinkedIn’s Mr. Hoffman, who estimates he has inducted nearly 40 Silicon Valley executives into the game, says tech entrepreneurs are drawn to Settlers because it “most closely approximates entrepreneurial strategy.” The title pushes players to collaborate and swap resources to get points, while the random rolls of the dice force people to constantly revamp their strategies for winning. That’s much like running a start-up, Mr. Hoffman says.

Settlers has become so popular in Silicon Valley that it’s now being used as an icebreaker at some business meetings.

When Glenn Kelman, chief executive of online real-estate start-up Redfin Corp., began raising venture-capital funding in September, he landed a meeting with venture firm Greylock Partners. Knowing that LinkedIn’s Mr. Hoffman — who is also a partner at Greylock — would be there, Mr. Kelman says he decided to say the “three magic words, Settlers of Catan,” in the hopes that it would help “form an incredible bond.”

Bingo. At the meeting, both men say, Mr. Hoffman’s face lit up when Mr. Kelman mentioned Settlers. Two months later, Redfin announced it had raised $10 million in venture funding, with Greylock as the main investor.

At some tech start-ups, Settlers is a spectator sport. When Facebook held its first Settlers tournament in September, the final match between three employees at the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s cafeteria attracted an audience of about 20 people, says Sarah Smith, Facebook’s manager of online sales accounts and the event organizer. That helped convert more people to the game, and she was expecting between 35 and 40 players at the Wednesday tournament, up from 25 last time.

High-tech chief executives who don’t play Settlers say they feel left out. Ben Elowitz, a co-founder of online jewelry store Blue Nile Inc. and now CEO of Web start-up WetPaint.com Inc. in Seattle, says he recently heard about the board game from several Internet CEOs. Interested to learn more, he tried to get the group to teach him how to play but has repeatedly been denied because he’s a newbie.

“I feel like I have to pledge to see if I can be accepted into playing Settlers,” says Mr. Elowitz, 37. “I’m definitely on the outside looking in.”

To learn the game in a hurry, some Silicon Valley executives have fallen back on their usual crutch: technology. After start-up investor Aydin Senkut was trounced at his first Settlers match last year, he was so upset that he resorted to playing an online version of the game for practice.

“I didn’t have a base to play the game well, so I told myself I was going to get there in a week,” says Mr. Senkut, 40, a former Google Inc. executive. Jousting with other Settlers fans online, “I ended up playing 200 online games in three nights.”

Mozilla’s Mr. Lilly says he has also turned to technology for his Settlers fix. He recently downloaded a version of Settlers for his iPhone, which lets players go up against the artificial intelligence embedded in the app.

“We’ll see how I do when I play the game with a human again,” Mr. Lilly says.

Write to Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A29

“Entrepreneurs are drawn to Settlers because it “most closely approximates entrepreneurial strategy.” The title pushes players to collaborate and swap resources to get points, while the random rolls of the dice force people to constantly revamp their strategies for winning. That’s much like running a start-up.”