Yesterday, I talked about how the Geek’s newly minted Hall of Fame has inspired me to come up with one of my own.  I’m sticking to their ground rules, so the focus is on “modern” board games that are at least 10 years old, no traditional games, and no roleplaying games.  Rather than just listing the games I want to honor, I’ll also be discussing all of the games I considered and saying why I chose the ones I did and why I left the others out.  My criteria for selection are Popularity, Innovation, Impact, and Fame.

My process is to go come up with prospective games in chronological order and then put them into one of four categories:

• Yes – Games I consider to be obvious choices for my Hall. No matter how big my HoF winds up being, I will find room for all these games.
• Likely – Strong candidates that I would like to add, but which aren’t shoo-ins. If the total number of Yes and Likely games isn’t too high, all of these will make it; otherwise, I’ll have to make some hard choices.
• Possible – Games with a pretty good argument for being added. If, after all the Yes and Likely games are added, there’s still room, I’ll go through these and put the best ones in.
• No – Not serious candidates, but games with some notable aspects that I wanted to cite, for reasons of quality, popularity, innovation, or historical importance.

I’ve divided the years under consideration into the following five periods:

• Period 1: 1950-1989
• Period 2: 1990-1999
• Period 3: 2000-2004
• Period 4: 2005-2009
• Period 5: 2010-2014

Yesterday, I discussed 34 games from Period 1. Today, I’ll talk about games from Period 2 and Period 3.  So let’s get started with a game that isn’t particularly well remembered today, but which has vast historical importance.

Adel Verplichtet (1990)
Adel wasn’t the first game that came out of Germany to gain popularity elsewhere in the world; there were a few others, one of which (Scotland Yard) we’ve discussed.  But it was the first game whose German origins were explicitly made known.  In 1991, American game buyers were confronted with a colorful box from Avalon Hill that proudly announced that this was “Germany’s Game of the Year” and which displayed the SdJ poppel prominently on the front.  I assume that most gamers in the States were like me—I had no idea they even played AH-style games in Germany, much less that they actually had an award for them.  Yeah, almost all of us were pretty ignorant on our side of the pond back then.

But Adel’s importance went far beyond simply spreading the word about what was happening in Germany.  It was an enormous world-wide success, the first true megahit to come out of Deutschland.  It easily won the SdJ and also was awarded the first DSP award.  Its designer, Klaus Teuber, was hailed as the newest designer superstar.  I’m certain that if the Geek had been around back then, it would have been ranked as its #1 game.

And that popularity stuck around for quite a while.  It continued to get wide play throughout the 90’s.  alea republished it, more or less verbatim, in 2000.  Uberplay came up with a version in 2004, infamously titled “Hoity Toity”.  So even 20 years ago, this was still considered a leading title and it probably would have been a shoo-in for a Hall of Fame of that time.  But the years since have not been kind to Adel.  Its high-luck mechanics, based on outguessing your opponents in a Rock-Paper-Scissors kind of way, feel decidedly old fashioned to today’s gamers and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen any mention of the game anywhere.  So it’s case for the Hall is certainly diminished.  But I can’t rule it out of hand, since it was so important and widely played in its day.  I suspect it will wind up on the outside looking in, but not without raising a bit of a fuss.  Possible

History of the World (1991)
This ambitiously themed light wargame was widely played after the Ragnar Brothers self-published it and particularly after it was licensed to Gibsons (in the UK) and Avalon Hill (in the US) two years later.  It was based around the sweep of history, as dominant civilizations sprang up and eventually faded away.  Players got to play as 7 of these civs over the course of the game’s 5000 year retelling of the timeline.  It’s proven to be an enduring hit, republished by Hasbro in 2001 and redesigned (as the shorter A Brief History of the World) by the Ragnars in 2009.  It wasn’t particularly influential, as there really are very few games like it, but its popularity over an extended period of time speaks well for its candidacy.  Possible

Tichu (1991)
For just about every card player in the Western World, Tichu introduced an exciting and highly important new genre:  climbing games.  Designer Urs Hostettler released it in 1991 from his own publishing house, Fata Morgana and it made a reasonable impact.  But it didn’t get widespread exposure until Abacus and Rio Grande reprinted it in 1998 and from that day forward, it seemed as if the gaming world had gone Tichu crazy.  The game was everywhere, played obsessively by its fans, and it inspired the creation of more and more climbing games every year, a process which very much continues to this day.

But there’s one major complication to Tichu’s HoF case and that is that it’s largely based on several traditional card games from China.  Hostettler discovered it while visiting the country, cobbled together its rules, and added a few things of his own, but at its heart, it’s very similar to the games that had been played in China for decades, and maybe centuries.  So that knocks it down quite a bit in my eyes.  It’s still a very significant game of enormous popularity and impact, but I don’t think it quite makes the cut, at least not for the initial group.  Possible

Fast Food Franchise (1992)
A roll and move property game from the nineties?  Seriously?  Well, keep in mind, this was a very sophisticated take on the Monopoly genre, with all kinds of innovative rules.  It’s definitely a cult classic and still gets some play these days.  Consider further that it’s Tom Lehmann’s first design credit and that many people consider it to be the best game of its kind.  That’s still not enough to give it much of an argument for inclusion, but I did think it deserved to be listed.  No

Modern Art (1992)
It’s always interesting how the passage of time affects the way that creative efforts are viewed.  If you had asked Reiner Knizia fans 25 years ago about what his masterpiece was, I’m pretty sure the majority would have said Modern Art.  This, in spite of recent hits from the Good Doctor such as E&T and Lost Cities.  It was Knizia’s first hit game and the first one that had people talking about “hidden depth”.  But then, bit by bit, it became less well regarded until today, you rarely see it on lists of Reiner’s best games.  I’m not really sure why that happened.  Certainly auction games are considerably less popular today than they were in the 90’s, but other Knizia auction titles like Ra and Medici haven’t dropped nearly as much as Modern Art.  It’s also possible that people no longer get the sly humor of the original (with the bizarre works of “art” being replaced by genuinely beautiful ones, making the game more attractive, but no longer a spoof of the world of modern art).  All I know is that in 2025, Modern Art doesn’t really deserve to have its portrait hanging in a Hall of Fame and that would have genuinely puzzled the gamers of a generation ago.  Possible

Magic: The Gathering (1993)
There’s not much I can add about this classic that hasn’t already been said.  The size of its fanbase is almost beyond belief—an estimated 50 million players.  The game generates over $1 billion in revenue a year.  Despite being over 30 years old, this phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down.  So just based on popularity alone, M:tG would qualify for the Hall.  But it also was the first collectible card game; it fact, it freaking invented the concept.  CCGs (and its close cousins Living Card Games and Expandable Card Games) remain the dominant form of gaming today.  Magic was also the direct inspiration for deckbuilding games, such as Dominion.  Taking all that into account, it would take a pretty impressive feat of magic to keep this out of the Hall!  Yes

Warhammer 40,000 (2^nd edition)  (1993)
For a reasonable subset of players, both past and present, “gaming” means Warhammer 40K.  The game was a very successful attempt to bring miniatures gaming to a standard tabletop and has been enormously popular since its introduction in 1987.  It has been the cornerstone of Games Workshop’s success ever since.  The second edition altered and simplified the rules and appears to be the most popular version of the game.  Warhammer 40K is as popular as ever and its status as an enduring hit is the most persuasive argument for its induction into the Hall.  It still represents something of a niche branch of gaming (at least, in the BGG sense, which is what I’m modeling my HoF on), but its impact can’t be ignored.  Possible

We the People (1993)
30 years after the fact, it’s probably hard to appreciate how drastically innovative Mark Herman’s We the People (WtP) was when it was introduced.  There had been mechanical advances in wargaming, of course, but most of the titles available in the early 90’s weren’t that different from what Charles S. Roberts was peddling back in the 50’s—just bigger, longer, and more cumbersome.  But WtP was the first card-driven wargame (CDW) and that was, literally, a gamechanger.  Instead of the players having god-like control over their pieces that no general ever dreamed of attaining, they could only maneuver things via the cards they drew.  That was not only far more realistic, but also introduced a fog of war aspect without having to resort to onerous mechanics like hidden movement.  CDW’s soon became state-of-the-art in wargaming.  Additionally, WtP directly inspired many popular non-wargames, such as Twilight Struggle and 1960.  Finally, you could argue that this was one of the first appearances of multi-use cards in a significant title and they have proven to be extremely popular over the years.

The case for WtP for the Hall of Fame is a complicated one.  It was initially well received, but its sales were soon dwarfed by other, more nuanced, games it inspired, including Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage and Paths of Glory.  It can be hard being a trailblazer.  I sincerely doubt many people are playing WtP these days and it probably hasn’t gotten much play over the last 20 years or so.  That would usually be a significant deterrent for inclusion in the Hall.  But the game was so historically important and influential, and its creation was such an innovative piece of game design, that I’d really like to honor it.  I could still see WtP missing out if the number of other worthy titles becomes too great.  But the game’s impact was such that it’s the sort of title that deserves to make the cut, in my opinion.  Likely

6 nimmt! (1994)
Fillers don’t usually get a good deal of respect and 6 nimmt! is a filler with less control than most.  So it might be a bit of a surprise to see it here.  But the game has some strong bona fides.  It’s one of the very few card games to win a major award (it took the DSP in 1994).  It’s spawned several spinoff games and it remains quite popular.  It was the closer of choice for a number of well publicized game groups, like Rick Thornquist’s Terminal City Gamers.  Moreover, Wolfgang Kramer is one of the greatest game designers ever, and it wouldn’t surprise me if 6 nimmt! is his best selling game.  So let’s give the humble filler game the respect it, and this one in particular, deserves.  Possible

Blood Bowl (3^rd edition) (1994)
Similar to Warhammer 40K, Blood Bowl players form a significant niche in the hobby.  It’s a 2-player game which simulates a fantasy version of American football crossed with rugby, where, obviously, hilarity ensues.  The original Blood Bowl came out in 1986 and was based on the Warhammer system.  The third edition seems to be the most widely played one.  All told, there are now 28 different races that one can play.  The Blood Bowl series hasn’t had quite the impact that Warhammer has, but there are still a bunch of folks playing it, so only ignore it if you don’t mind an Orc stomping on your head.  No

The Settlers of Catan (1995)
Yes, I insist on using the original name for the game—call me a fossil.  Most of you are aware of the game’s vast importance to the hobby, but in case there are some younger gamers reading this, I’ll mention a few things.  Settlers was not only a huge international hit, it literally was the source of the explosion of interest in gaming that began in the mid-nineties.  It’s not just that every gamer knew about it, but a bunch of non-gamers did as well.  It became a part of our culture, so that a series like Big Bang Theory could perform an “I’ve got wood for sheep” joke and be confident that most of its audience would get the reference.  That may not surprise current gamers, but believe me, those of us who were around in the pre-Catan days probably never dreamed that such a thing could be.  After Settlers hit, it was suddenly a new world.

Perhaps Settlers most significant achievement was that it finally opened the doors of the vast, untapped American market to Eurogames, and to sophisticated games of all kinds.  Having that buying power be available to the best publishers of the day was hugely important.

Settlers was probably the first game that was considered an ideal “gateway game” (I’m not sure the term was used much at all before Settlers), but, strangely, it also had a very positive effect on more complex games.  Believe it or not, in the gaming world of 1995 that was dominated by simpler family games, Settlers was considered to be pretty complicated.  In fact, there was a tiny portion of the hobby who wondered if it might be too involved to win the family-friendly SdJ award.  Of course, that was never in doubt (the rules are different for once in a generation phenomenons), but it did make people realize that there was an audience, and possibly a demand, for games of its complexity.  Over the course of the next 5 years, mainstream games became more and more involved.  That trend stopped with the start of the new century, but the genie couldn’t be put entirely back in the bottle and smaller, indie publishers began featuring more complex games and many of them flourished.  That trend definitely started with Settlers.

I honestly can’t imagine any gaming Hall of Fame that doesn’t include Settlers.  I’m pretty sure every HoF voter has got wood for this immortal design of the late, great Klaus Teuber.  Yes

El Grande (1995)
El Grande was one of the first games to benefit from the Settlers Effect.  A game that seems very straightforward today was considered quite complicated 30 years ago and who knows if it would have even been published if Catan hadn’t shown that gamers were ready to embrace a game that was this involved.  It was an immediate hit and when it surprisingly won the SdJ the year after Settlers did, it signaled that designers and publishers could easily shoot for that level of complexity and be rewarded for it.

El Grande is one of the most enduring hit Eurogames in history.  If you check out the Geek’s current top 100 games, you’ll find only two titles that were released prior to 2000.  One of them is Crokinole, which is kind of a special case.  The other one is El Grande, still rated that highly 30 years after it first saw the light of day.  By contrast, Settlers, which came out the same year, is currently ranked 578.

El Grande is widely considered to be Wolfgang Kramer’s masterpiece, the best of all the fantastic games he’s designed.  The original version had some of the most gorgeous and iconic artwork ever seen, courtesy of Doris Matthaus’ amazing talent.  It’s regarded as one of the great 5-player games and has been viewed as such for three decades.  It would have been judged as a strong candidate for a Hall of Fame 20 years ago and its case is just as strong today.  Likely

GIPF (1996)
Abstract games have their own special appeal and very much their own dedicated fanbase.  The best of these games are considered timeless and, uniquely, the most popular ones—Chess, Go, Shogi—have been around for centuries.  But there is one celebrated set of abstracts that has bucked this trend by being introduced less than 30 years ago.  It’s the GIPF series of games, the brainchild of designer Kris Burm.  Burm’s games are all linked and you can play them together in a bizarre, integrated fashion if you so choose.  But the individual games are still excellent.  The only trouble is, there isn’t one that particularly stands out.  Several have won awards, but I don’t think there’s a consensus of which one is Burm’s masterpiece.  I’ve chosen to cite GIPF, the original one that the linked set is named after, even though it’s not the most popular or highest rated of the games.  If one of the games truly did stand out, it would have had a better chance of getting a HoF nod, but unfortunately, that’s not the case.  They remain a remarkable series of games, though.  No

Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (1996)
Hannibal built on the innovations that We the People first championed to become the next truly popular CDW.  It eventually achieved a 8^th place peak position in the Geek ratings and is still ranked in the site’s top 25 wargames, which is pretty remarkable for a game that’s almost 30 years old.  Designer Mark Simonitch updated it to an even more popular design, Hannibal & Hamilcar, in 2018.  So it’s a very well regarded game.  Unfortunately, We the People came first and another CDW (which I will soon discuss) is a more popular one, so Hannibal sits in between, without a real claim for HoF status.  No

Pokemon Trading Card Game (1996)
Pokemon was the first CCG to truly challenge the dominance of Magic.  Based on the massively popular manga series, it was originally released by a Japanese publisher called Media Factory and then licensed to Wizards of the Coast (Magic’s publisher) in 1998.  In some ways a more sophisticated design than Magic, it was an enormous hit, survived the bursting of the CCG bubble, and recovered to the point that has outsold Magic in recent years.  It, Magic, and Yu-Gi-Oh are considered the Big Three CCGs.  Pokemon’s popularity with both adults and children over the last quarter century make it a reasonably strong HoF candidate.  Possible

Bohnanza (1997)
For most gamers, including both dedicated and casual ones, “The Bean Game” has been a part of our lives for so long that it seems like an old friend.  But it was quite the sensation when it first debuted.  Its central concept—that you weren’t allowed to sort your cards, but had to play them as they were dealt—was one of the most audacious ones ever.  Negotiation games frequently don’t click with many players, but Bohnanza makes the negotiation mandatory and does so in such a low stress and disarming way that everyone invariably joins in, so that all the players are involved on every turn.  All the elements synch up to make it one of the great light games.

Funagain used to be the leading online publisher of Eurogames and I would regularly check out their site in the late 90’s and early 00’s.  They had a list of their best-selling games and it seemed as if Bohnanza topped that list every time I saw it.  It’s not quite the franchise that Settlers is, but it still boasts several dozen expansions and spinoff games.  Then there’s Bjorn Pertoft’s marvelous and iconic artwork on the beans, which is so ingrained in our gamer’s psyche that everyone recognizes the Stink Bean, the Sick Bean, and the rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ Blue Bean.

Bohnanza continues to be extremely popular and remains one of the best gateways to our hobby.  And while it took a while for other designers to utilize the “can’t sort” mechanism, you’re starting to see it more often recently, particularly in climbing games like Scout and Krass Kariert.  It’s an indicator of designer Uwe Rosenberg’s great talent that this game isn’t considered his masterpiece, but that in no way makes it any less strong a candidate for the Hall of Fame.  Likely

For Sale (1997)
For Sale is a filler and, as I mentioned in the 6 nimmt! entry, they don’t usually get much respect.  But For Sale might be one of the best regarded and most played fillers ever.  The double auction, where the first one sets you up for the second one that yields VPs, is very clever and leads to more strategy than you might expect from such a simple system.  It’s probably Stefan Dorra’s best known game, is still in print, and remains popular enough to have inspired a recent spinoff, For Sale Autorama.  I still don’t think it makes the cut, but it’s certainly worth considering.  No

Tigris & Euphrates (1997)
Reiner Knizia was already regarded as one of the world’s leading designers at the time T&E came out, but this is the game that cemented his reputation, proving he could create a true gamer’s game that took longer than (gasp!) one hour to play.  It immediately took the gaming world by storm, fueled by its great gameplay and celebrated victory conditions (your score was the lowest number of the four kinds of scoring cubes you accumulated).  It was the #1 ranked game on the Geek for about 6 months and only recently fell out of the top 100.  It is widely viewed as Knizia’s masterpiece and as one of the great gaming creations.  It continues to get a good deal of play and Reiner himself has tweaked its basic concepts in a couple of follow-up designs (Yellow & Yangtze and Huang), both of which are highly rated.  I think it’s an easy choice for my HoF.  Yes

Twilight Imperium (1997)
Twilight Imperium is a grand scope space opera game, which has undergone considerable change over the course of its four editions.  The fourth edition is the one with the best shot at a place in the HoF, but unfortunately, it came out too late (2017) to qualify at this point.  So this very popular series will have to wait to get consideration from this committee of one.  No

Apples to Apples (1999)
Of the party games to emerge P.S. (post-Settlers), Apples to Apples might well be the most popular.  It’s sold over 20 million games and that’s a whole bunch of fruit.  Soon after its release, it became the standard closer for many a Eurogame group and maintained that status for quite a few years.  It’s popularity is the strongest argument for its inclusion in the HoF, even if this judge decides it isn’t quite enough.  Possible

Lost Cities (1999)
For many years, Lost Cities was considered to be the ultimate S.O. (Significant Other) game.  A fairly simple 2-player affair (albeit one with a reasonable amount of math), it was probably the most played game in Kosmos’ celebrated “Spiele fur Zwei” series.  It was the direct inspiration for Knizia’s only SdJ winner, Keltis.  I think it would have had a pretty strong case for inclusion in a 2010 version of the Hall.  In 2025, though, some of the bloom is off the rose and I don’t get the feeling it’s nearly as popular as it once was.  Its status as a great game is unquestioned, but I feel it does fall short for the current version of the Hall.  Possible

Paths of Glory (1999)
The qualifications of Paths of Glory (PoG) for the HoF are many.  It’s one of only 8 games to achieve a #1 ranking on the Geek.  Even today, a quarter of a century after its release, it’s ranked as the #3 wargame on BGG (and the #2 game is Twilight Struggle, which most folks would argue isn’t really a wargame).  It was the next in the series of great CDW’s, after We the People and Hannibal and gave its players even more options when playing its multi-use cards.  It’s a very famous and well loved game.

For this exercise, I felt like I wanted to include one CDW game in my Hall.  Should I include the game that introduced the concept (WtP) or the most popular example of the genre (PoG)?  I chose to go with Mark Herman’s trailblazing effort rather than Ted Raicer’s masterpiece.  Why not choose both?  I easily could have.  I do get the feeling that PoG is no longer the dominant CDW these days—it’s a very intense and long game and has been overtaken, to some extent, by the COIN designs.  So that was part of it.  In the end, it came down to feel and WtP seemed more Hall-worthy to me than PoG, but the latter game still has a pretty strong case.  There were some hard choices to be made and PoG is one that just missed by a hair.  Possible

Ra (1999)
Ra was the first of the alea games and got the new publisher off to a roaring start.  Its main innovation is that the “currency” for making your bids in the following round is one of the things you’re bidding for in the current round.  Outside of the Ra spinoffs that Knizia has designed, I’m not sure I’ve seen that mechanism in any other auction game.

Ra was one of the games chosen by the BGG jury for their Hall of Fame.  Frankly, I was a bit surprised by its inclusion.  It’s certainly not a bad choice—the game remains extremely popular and it’s probably the highest rated pure auction game today.  But it just doesn’t scream “Hall of Fame!!!” to me.  It’s certainly well regarded and reasonably widely played.  The fact is that pure auction games aren’t nearly as popular today as they were in the 90’s, so if it is indeed King of the Auction Games, that may not be as impressive as it sounds.  It’s current rating on the Geek is 7.7 and that’s exceedingly high for a game from the 90’s, so that’s a strong point in its favor.  But I can’t say it’s a particularly influential game (its genre has basically died out), nor was it a game that blew you away with its innovative touches when it was released.  It’s just a very popular, well designed game, but so are a number of other games I’ve mentioned in this list.  Maybe I’m selling the game short, but while I don’t think Ra wouldn’t feel particularly out of place if I included it, neither do I think it would be a massive miscarriage of justice if I left it out.  If you think I’m being hugely unfair here, feel free to tell me so in the comments.  Possible

Tikal (1999)
As you can see by my little list here, 1999 was a very good year for games.  And yet, without question, the hit game from that year, by the standards of its day, was Tikal.  It was a huge seller.  It swept the annual gaming awards, winning the SdJ, the DSP, and the IGA awards (only 7 Wonders has repeated that feat).  Its artwork was both stunning and iconic, thanks to the talents of Franz Vohwinkel.  It probably wasn’t the first game to use Action Points, but it was certainly the most popular.  Tikal’s impact was such that Kramer and Kiesling were inspired to add two other games to their celebrated Mask Trilogy (Java and Mexica were the other ones), along with the SdJ winning Torres; all three games are based on Action Points.  At the turn of the century, I imagine more people would have considered Tikal, and not El Grande, to be Wolfgang Kramer’s masterpiece.

And then it all changed, in a startlingly short period of time.  There were instances of very long play times reported.  It seems that there is a group of players for whom AP (Action Points) =  AP (Analysis Paralysis).  Action Point games quickly got a bad reputation.  After Mexica was published, in 2002, AP games quietly faded away.  Tikal still had a rather large fanbase (including, I suspect, the folks that gave it all those awards), but it was no longer considered one of the period’s leading games.

Tikal is still well regarded (its current rating of 7.3 on the Geek is a very healthy one for a design from the previous century) and its achievements can’t be ignored.  But the backlash was real and the game never quite recovered from it.  Despite the heights it achieved, it really can’t be considered a strong candidate for the Hall.  Possible

That takes us to the end of Period 2.  Of the 24 games covered, I added 3 Yesses, 3 Likelies, and 12 Possibles to the list.  That gives me a total of 22 games ranked as Possibles and we haven’t even reached the 21^st century yet!  With a total of 14 Yes/Likely games, I think it’s becoming pretty obvious that none of the Possibles will make it into my Hall.  But we still have three more periods to cover, so let’s see where that takes us.  Onward to Period 3 (2000-2004)!

Blokus (2000)
Blokus is both an abstract and a filler and I’m not sure if that was a very common combination at the turn of the century.  Anyway, it was an extremely popular opener and closer for gamers during the aughts and was popular enough to have five spinoff titles.  Perhaps not a very serious candidate for the Hall, but it did get an awful lot of play for a decade or so.  No

Carcassonne (2000)
This is another game that launched an entire franchise—the Geek lists over 130 spinoffs and expansions for Carc (and that doesn’t include about 100 fan expansions!).  The game is #2 in number of ratings on the Geek, just behind Settlers with over 130,000 votes (Pandemic is just behind these and those three titles have a significant lead over all other games).  Carc has sold in the range of 14 million games since its release and that’s just for the vanilla version.  Plus, it has provided us with the most iconic of all game components, the marvelously designed meeple, which was so appealing that it inspired gamer Alison Hansel to provide it with its immortal name a quarter of a century ago.

The game still gets a ton of play and its Geek rating of 7.4 (very good for a game of its vintage) shows that it’s still well regarded by fans of lighter designs.  It’s an obvious choice for inclusion into the Hall.  Yes

Citadels (2000)
Bruno Faidutti may be known just as much for his incisive opinions about gaming and his successful efforts to popularize the hobby as he is for his designs.  But he has also been viewed as one of the world’s leading designers for an extended period of time.  And there’s no question which game is his masterpiece:  Citadels (aka Ohne Furcht und Adel).  This was wildly popular at the turn of the century (particularly since it could handle up to 8 players) and won a few gaming awards along the way.  It still gets some play, but I think its reputation has taken a hit over the years.  So, unfortunately, I have to deny Bruno his best chance at making the HoF.  No

Lord of the Rings (2000)
Cooperative games are a huge part of the hobby and have been for a long time.  But in 2000, there basically were none.  That’s not strictly true—there were some co-op family games which allowed parents to play with their children without having to worry about some youngster sobbing over their loss, but they were not, to be honest, very good and were basically of zero interest to dedicated gamers.  Chaosium gave us the Cthulhu-themed Arkham Horror in 1987, which definitely qualifies, but at the time, it wasn’t widely played and was regarded as a niche game, if it was remembered at all.  So when Reiner Knizia, at the height of his powers, gave us a sophisticated cooperative game pretty much out of nowhere, gamers truly were astonished.  Particularly since Reiner’s goal wasn’t necessarily to invent a new genre, but to fit the game to its theme—it made no sense, he said, for the members of the Fellowship of the Ring to be competing with each other, so let’s make the objective a cooperative one.  This was clearly the thinking of a master craftsman who was able to tailor a game to whatever was needed; the theme needed a cooperative game, so he came up with one.  Looked at that way, it seems mindblowing, and that’s how we all felt 25 years ago when this came out.

LotR was quite successful and inspired two widely played expansions, one of which introduced a one-versus-many aspect to the game (called, naturally, Sauron).  But it was not, ultimately, that influential.  Cooperative games remained few and far between until Pandemic really made the genre popular eight years later.  Even during the height of LotR’s popularity, there were complaints about its essentially abstract nature.  Soon after Pandemic and all of its fellow co-ops hit the scene, Lord of the Rings seemed to fade into the background.  I doubt that it’s played much today at all.

Throughout this exercise, I’ve had to deal with the decision of either honoring the game which introduced a genre or innovation, or the game which most popularized it.  I haven’t been consistent in the way I’ve done so, which doesn’t bother me at all, because I think they’re all individual cases.  In this instance, I’m pretty comfortable that LotR, as groundbreaking as it was, doesn’t quite meet the standards of making the HoF.  It presents a strong case, but the honor will have to go to one of the games which followed in its very large (and not hobbit-sized) footsteps.  Possible

The Princes of Florence (2000)
Sometimes, a game’s popular reception doesn’t quite match its critical acclaim.  There are often good reasons for this, but sometimes we are left to puzzle why this is the case.  I think Princes of Florence is a fine example of this.  The game has been praised to the skies literally from the day it appeared.  It won multiple awards and was selected for a prestigious Hall of Fame.  I can name so many gamers from that era who adored the game and considered it one of their very favorites.  And it was highly rated, so it wasn’t like it was a niche title or anything.  But it never seemed to be truly embraced as much as the plaudits made you think it would be.  When Puerto Rico appeared two years after its release, I remember seeing a ton of people saying that PR “fired” Princes.  That made no sense to me, because, other than the fact that both games were big-box alea titles, they truly have nothing in common.  And yet, it was a very common sentiment, approaching the status of common wisdom.  Then there were complaints that Princes was responsible for the downfall of OG (Old Guard) games (which are basically those Eurogames that include considerably more player interaction than the Euros of today).  Specifically, the culprit was supposed to be Prince’s individual player boards, which are anathema to OG fans.  I’ve never quite understood this (if you ignore your opponents in a game of Princes, you have almost no chance of winning), but who knows, they may be right.  Anyway, as well regarded as the game is among a significant minority, it just never got the truly universal acceptance that would make it a logical entrant to the HoF.  If you ask me as a game player, I think Princes absolutely belongs.  If you ask me as an observer of the hobby, the answer is it’s just not loved enough.  Possible

San Marco (2001)
If you’re playing word association with your gamer friends, then when you say “San Marco”, they’re liable to respond “pie split”.  That’s because designers Moon and Weissblum took a practical way of evenly dividing something like a pie (the “I split, you choose” method) and cleverly based a game around it.  San Marco won some major awards and the pie splitting mechanic was much admired (and imitated by a few other games).  The game still gets some play, but while it might have been a serious candidate about 10 years ago, I don’t think there’s a particularly strong case for it today.  No

Zendo (2001)
There are a lot of games that are based on deductive reasoning, but only a handful based on inductive reasoning (which involves proposing a theory to explain something and then coming up with an experiment to test your theory; i.e., the Scientific Method).  Robert Abbott did it first with a card game called Eleusis (1959), but easily the most popular game that uses induction is Zendo.  It was not only a highly rated brain-burning game for an extended period (it probably still gets a reasonable amount of play), but it also was responsible for popularizing Looney Pyramids, that can be used for a number of other games.  All that makes the game worthy of mention, but not really induction (see what I did there?) into my Hall.  No

Age of Steam (2002)
Age of Steam was designer Martin Wallace’s very successful attempt to bring 18xx-style mechanics to a considerably shorter and more accessible game.  It was an immediate hit and has probably brought more gamers to “train games” than any other title.  It also has led to quite a few spinoff designs and an enormous number of expansions—it seems as if several designers have made a career out of churning out AoS expansions year after year.  This continues to be true:  the Geek shows no fewer than eight expansions released in 2024.  It may not truly have been groundbreaking, but its combinations of mechanisms was still innovative and it has just about every other HoF aspect you could want:  long-lived popularity, impact, and fame.  It all adds up to a very strong case for the Hall.  Likely

Puerto Rico (2002)
I played Puerto Rico for the first time in March of 2002, just before leaving for the Gathering of Friends that year.  With a couple of games under my belt, I strode into the GoF game room and found that PR was everywhere.  I’m pretty sure there were times when a dozen or more games were going on simultaneously.  This dominance continued even after I got back from the convention.  Puerto Rico swept the gaming world.  It was hugely admired and very widely played.  Its central mechanic (in which the players determined the order of the phases each turn) soon found its way into other games like San Juan and Race (and Roll) for the Galaxy, along with, surprisingly, a number of Ameritrash titles.  In a few short months, it zoomed to the top of the BGG game rankings, where it held its #1 position for seven years.  That’s almost two years longer than any other game has ever been on top.  It continues to be widely played and remains in the BGG top 50, a very impressive achievement for a 23 year old game.  So with all those qualifications, it should be an easy choice for the HoF, right?  I sure think so.  In fact, if you had asked me to come up with a list of games for a “modern” Hall of Fame, PR would have been the first one to pop into my head.

I’m sure many of you are aware of why I’m talking about this at such length.  The reason, of course, is that Puerto Rico was not one of the initial group of games that the BGG jury inducted into its Hall earlier this year.  I don’t know why they chose to omit it and, since the jury has politely declined to discuss the reasons for their choices, there’s a good chance I’ll never know.  But there’s one strong possibility, representing the elephant in the room, and that’s the game’s theme.  Specifically, how it relates to colonialism.

After being a very popular theme in Eurogames for many years, colonialism is close to being a taboo topic these days.  And I sympathize with those that object to games that were based on it.  Mind you, I don’t like it when people whitewash history and pretend that unpleasant truths like colonialism and slavery didn’t exist.  But the games we’re talking about are hardly historical simulations and merely use their settings as a backdrop to hang their mechanisms on.  And theming a game on events that displaced, enslaved, and killed thousands of indigenous people is, rightfully, no longer considered appropriate.  Yes, I roll my eyes when recently released games now do things like colonize the moon (hey, that’s safe, right?), but still, moving away from these objectionable themes is a positive development.

But should this keep you from honoring a game like Puerto Rico?  I don’t think so.  For one thing, the game debuted over 20 years ago, when themes like these were much less of an issue.  More to the point, PR is hardly an egregious example of a game heavily tied to colonialism.  No territory is being conquered or annexed, no native population is being enslaved or shunted aside.  If someone is disturbed by the game’s theme, I understand, but there have been far more objectionable games over the last quarter century, including some other games I’ve cited in this article.  So why has  Puerto Rico been the subject of so much vitriol over the years?  I have to assume that it’s a victim of its own popularity.  There’s no point in screaming about a game that only a few hundred people have played, but pointing to the #1 game in the world, even if its connection to its theme is more tenuous, will serve your cause better.  Again, I don’t want to minimize how insulted many feel about tying games to colonialism.  But to bar PR from an honor like a spot in a Hall of Fame seems to be carrying things too far.  Use it as a talking point, about how such themes shouldn’t be used anymore, but don’t punish a great title in this retroactive fashion.

So, yes, I absolutely feel that Puerto Rico belongs in my HoF and that its omission from the BGG Hall is easily the most controversial decision they made.  As I said, I don’t like whitewashing history, but that cuts both ways.  And ignoring the fact that a game based on colonialism was so popular, so critically acclaimed, and managed to hold the top spot on the Geek for so long is whitewashing of the first degree.  Yes

HeroScape (2004)
If Axis & Allies brought the toy factor to wargaming in the 1980’s, then HeroScape did the exact same thing for fantasy battles.  The game came with dozens of painted miniatures, which represented warriors from wildly different eras, just for fun.  Players were also able to construct their own 3-dimensional terrain, using the tiles in the box.  The system was hugely popular and featured a large number of expansions and spinoff designs.  That popularity continues to the present day, as a new master set was released just last year and continues to be supported.  It was the Euro version of the lifestyle Games Workshop miniatures games from the 90’s, making it fully worthy of consideration for the Hall, even if I feel it doesn’t quite measure up.  No

Memoir ’44 (2004)
Richard Borg’s Command & Colors system is one of the most successful and popular light wargame systems ever designed.  It was introduced in 2000 with Battle Cry and 14 different games have been based on it.  But easily the most popular title in the series is Memoir ’44.  No doubt this has much to do with how WWII themed games so often rule the roost when it comes to wargames, but the continued popularity of Memoir cannot be ignored.  It makes for a compelling argument for inclusion in the HoF, and I gave serious thought to giving it a Likely rating.  But I think it falls just short.  Possible

Power Grid (2004)
Power Grid, the highlight of Friedemann Friese’s design career, is an interesting mix of game elements:  auctions, market manipulation, economics, route building, and (in the original version of the game, Funkenschlag) crayon drawing!  It’s been a big seller for 20 years and shows no sign of slowing down.  Friese has done a great job of providing expansions (the Geek shows almost 30 of them) to maintain that interest and there have been a few spinoff designs as well.  It’s easily one of the most popular economic games of this century.

To me, it feels like it’s right on the edge of sneaking into my Hall or just falling short.  Because of its unique mix of mechanisms, I can’t say that the game has been too influential.  But its two decades of continued popularity tips the balance in its favor.  Its fate is still a bit in doubt; the number of “likely” rated games is piling up, so I’m not sure all of them will get the nod when I reckon things up.  But for now, all systems are green.  Likely

Ticket to Ride (2004) 
There’s an old joke that goes “If you look up X in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of Y.”  Well, I don’t know if there’s a dictionary of gamer terms, but if there is one and you looked up the phrase “Gateway Game”, I’m pretty sure there would be a picture of Ticket to Ride.  That’s how universal the feeling is that TtR is the quintessential title for introducing new gamers to our hobby.

That’s a pretty impressive achievement.  But in addition to the original Ticket being such an big hit, Alan Moon has done a wonderful job of providing a huge number of spinoff titles that each add their own additional element to the game, while maintaining its basic structure.  By my count, there’s two dozen of them and I may have missed a few.  This has kept the system fresh and in the public consciousness for the last two decades.  Although I’m certain that the version that gets the most play is the original one, both as a gateway and because people just like its simplicity.

As if that wasn’t enough, the recently published legacy version of TtR brought a whole new element to the game and is such a big hit that it recently broke into the Geek’s top 100.  But to be honest, that’s just icing on the cake—this very successful game punched its ticket to the Hall of Fame a long time ago.  Yes

War of the Ring (2004)
War of the Ring is perhaps the most epic treatment of the events in Tolkien’s famed LotR trilogy.  The game has many facets, including multi-use cards, action dice, politics, multiple victory conditions, and much more.  The original version got as high as #3 in the Geek rankings and future editions also did very well.  The various versions continue to be widely played, marking this as a significant tile worthy of HoF consideration.  Possible

That finishes up Period 3, with three more Yesses and two more Likelies added to the list.  We still have 10 more years of games to consider, so the Hall of Fame story isn’t close to being finished.  Tomorrow, we’ll go through the final two periods and then decide which games make my Hall and which are left on the outside, tantalizingly close to gaming immortality.  I hope you’ll all find time to join us for the finish!