[cycomanic]

Board games are an interesting thing because it's one of those global trends that did not originate in the US. Instead it game from Germany but with quite a bit of delay.

The German version of settlers came out around 1995 IIRC and sparked a big revival of board games (and strategic board games in particular in Germany. Then some time around 2008 or so I had friends in NZ and OZ who used to not play board games tell me about this cool game the wanted to play. I was quite surprised that it was settlers which I had not played since moving overseas in 2004.

So yeah the whole revival originated in Germany, but took about 10 years to suddenly go global.

[User23]

To be clear, board games have been extremely popular in Germany for a very long time. They just got even MORE popular. I'm not sure there was a house in post-war West Germany that didn't have at least a "games collection", something more or less like this: https://www.amazon.de/Ravensburger-01315-9-Familienspiele/dp...

[hyperman1]

We were playing settlers already around 2000 in The Netherlands, Belgium and France, all neighbouring countries from Germany.

[iso1631]

German boardgames became popular in the late 90s in the UK (although even before then several spiel de jarhes games were in mainstream shops like Toys R Us -- Hare and Tortoise and Scotland Yard come to mind)

Earlier in the 90s the games that were mainly for sale were games like Britania, History of the World, etc. Axis and Allies was always around too.

The German games brought in shorter games though, which didn't take an entire afternoon to play.

[asdf21]

Got popular in 2005 - 2006 in California

[zeroonetwothree]

That sounds exactly right based on my recollection.