Sadly, the first board game and I played was Monopoly at ~10, and that drove me away. Then I rediscovered them in uni with Settlers of Katan and Risk.

Family always played Scrabble and I did not like it… In college my friends frequently played Dominion but I always opted out because I thought I didn’t like board games. Eventually I tried it and fell down a rabbit hole

A college buddy introduced me to Settlers of Catan, and the rest was history.

I’d always liked board games, but the wife and I never had anything beyond the ‘classics’, which were fun but kind of been there done that sort of vibe. Then one day a couple years ago we went down to our friend’s house and they showed us Unstable Unicorns, Dixit, and Munchkin and our minds were blown. We immediately started buying the games we’d played and a couple more that had cool art and as we played more with friends and by ourselves we kept buying more and more, even being able to show our friends games they hadn’t heard of. And now we have too many 🤣

Wow, so many Catan inductees here.

For me it was the notoriously shitty Civilization (2002). I was around 11 years old. Any designer board game is incredible if it’s the first one you’ve ever played.

Been playing board games of one stripe or another since I was 4-5yrs old and my dad taught me how to play chess, backgammon, checkers, Monopoly etc. Early teens brought more complex games like Shogun, Catan and Roborally (I am HORRENDOUSLY bad at games with move programming like Roborally) along with CCG’s and RPG’s into the mix.

Jeez! Now I feel really old realizing I’ve been gaming for nearly 40yrs.

As a kid I liked boardgames, but often I would have to play them alone and would play some of them on the PlayStation or similar. This basically started the transition of playing games on video consoles and later PC. Boardgames became a forgotten pastime and I raveled in the complexity of pc games for many years. I even disregarded boardgames because I thought they could not compete with the glory of PC games. Of course I was utterly wrong.

It all changed when I got Slay the Spire Early Access on PC and loved it. My gf also saw the game and liked it as well. We both thought its silly to play what in essence is a card game alone, on our own computers. So we venture to a local boardgame shop and told them that we play Slay the Spire and the lad, in his wisdom, suggested Dominion. What a great start it was! We played Dominion for like 9 months pretty much every evening before we thought it could use an addon. Soon more and more games and expansions entered our collection. Here we are, 5 years later and boardgames have become a very central part of our hobbies.

My family always played the standard 80s/90s board and card games, I picked up Carcassonne in 2012 but it didn’t really click, plus my girlfriend wasn’t into it.

It wasn’t until 2021 when I picked up Azul and Sagrada, that I realised how amazing games have become. The pieces, rulebook, simplicity and depth.

First time playing a worker placement Euro was a real eye opener, having been raised on roll-and-move.

I’ve always had the core family bargains around the house; Cluedo, Monopoly, chess, backgammon, as well as slightly older pub games like shove ha’penny, shut the box, devil among the tailors (pub tabletop skittles). But with the young family a couple of years ago we started looking for new things, found Carcassonne & settlers of catan. Pride of the newest games I have is split between ‘The King is Dead’ and a full size Carrom table. And I built my own Mah Jong table to house an automatic mechanism that shuffles the tiles and racks them for you. (We’ve had a traditional set for years and always played a UK version of Hong Kong rules across a couple of generations.) Yeah I clicked with board games as a kid and have always looked forward to a chance to play them with family and friends.

I’ve been playing board games my whole life, but when I was 9 my cousin busted out catan, that was the first proper longer game with actual mechanics. It was the moment I realized board games could be more than a boring family activity.

Catan… The “human warrior” of boardgame introductions, but it did its job

It branched from there to Citadels, Villainous, Rummikub and others until reaching my inevitable fate of becoming a Wingspan addict

They generally still don’t. I’m very picky about my board games and also about the people I play with. If you just grab a random well liked board game and a number of average board game enthusiast and sit me at a table with them. I might have a good time but it’s unlikely.

When my dad did blockades in parcheesi, and also when I found Carcassonne

For me it was either Arkham Horror 2nd edition or Last Night on Earth. Big thematic games with some fun mechanics that we would have stories about playing for months after they were finished.

As a kid, I liked boardgames but I haven’t really been introduced to anything that you couldn’t find on a toy store so I didn’t know about “real” boardgames before I found a YouTube series called “Tabletop”. They basically recorded playthroughs of different types of boardgames with amazing production. That series really opened me up to the world of boardgaming and gave me a good enough sample of different boardgames that I could have an idea of what kind of games I liked.