[VLM]

You've gotten massively downvoted (why?) but before the eurogame invasion around the turn of the century, sales were not as good.

There's a pretty good documentary called "Going Cardboard" focused around the early years of the eurogame invasion, mid to late 00s products, tells the story fairly well in an hour or so.

[logfromblammo]

When I was younger, if you wanted to play a board game and actually have fun across multiple ages and skill levels, you had to read the GAMES Magazine's "GAMES 100" issue, pick out a few candidates, go to one of these places called "shopping malls" that were popular in the 80s, enter the specialty game store, and shell out a decent amount of cash for your choice. The resident geekployee was probably busy setting up a table for the Warhammer 4k miniatures game that they hosted in the store on alternate Nerdsdays, so if you asked him about the game you were buying, you might get a lukewarm positive response. He was really more into "Axis and Allies"-scale games, anyway.

Nowadays, you can find a game you might like on boardgamegeek any day of the year, order it off the Internet, and play it a few days later. You can pile up a bunch on your public wishlists, and lo, they are priced just right for birthdays and holiday giving.

Best of all, the intense competition tends to weed out or downvote games that are not at least good in their niche. So the games you buy are by gamers for gamers and the people gamers want to socialize with, not by Hasbro marketing executives for bored kids, or by detail-obsessed simulation engineers for detail-obsessed consumers.

I think the "Eurogame" phenomenon was more about Internet commerce and niche social networks than the games themselves. You could still find non-mainstream games before then, but it was harder to get them into widespread distribution. You couldn't ever get them into a department store, and only the geeks and nerds even went into the specialty games shops. But when Amazon shows up, these games are on the virtual shelves right alongside the horrid and overrated Monopoly.

As Kickstarter et al lower the startup cost barriers, you will see all kinds of new entrants ramping up the competition. And while more bad games will fail, I think the market will probably expand to accommodate more good ones rather than squeeze out the ones at the margin.

[VLM]

I believe there's also a narrowcasting / local maxima / monopoly (in the .biz sense) effect, where Hasbro and friends hyperoptimized for American 6 year olds, leaving a gigantic empty unserved market which the eurogame folks never abandoned, so someone translates from German to English, the games hop the Atlantic with the help of internet publicity and online stores, and take the country by storm.

To help the HN readership, WRT board games, Germany is more or less the Silicon Valley of board games.

[logfromblammo]

And to extend that analogy, Klaus Teuber, Reiner Knizia, and Wolfgang Kramer are like the Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of board games.