Watts, a geography teacher, originally developed the game as a teaching aid to help students become familiar with the geography of industrialized countries and to try to demonstrate how geography and competition had resulted in lines being developed in some places but not others.
In the 1980s, the game was formally published first by Butehorn and then by Schmidt Spiele (from 1981), both in Germany, and won the Spiel des Jahres in 1984.