What game got you addicted to board games?

I'd grown up with Dungeon and Diplomacy as family board games (diplomay was pretty nuts). And I played DnD and Warhammer as a teenager

I really got into designer boardgames in around 2010 after Rab Florence started writing about them on the PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun. First game I bought was Ascending Empires.

When I was very young I was in love with RISK, STRATEGO and the game with the coolest "board" I've ever seen; SUB SEARCH the "three level strategy game". But it was TALISMAN that I started playing in college, that really turned me into an "adult" board gamer.

We did lots of boardgaming as kids when running around outside in the country wasn't an option - early games like Dogfight and Hit the Beach, detective game called Manhunt (I think), Monopoly of course (four kids basically destroyed my dad's classic 50s edition), the classic Dungeon when it came out. But then as a young adult I was out doing life things like alcohol, travelling, girls, alcohol ... and didn't get back into games until twenty odd years later after moving to the UK, a mate had the deluxe edition of Risk and that kinda kickstarted me back into the hobby. And since then the depth and variation and quality of games increasing every few years has kept me in the hobby.

Like several others Axis and Allies was my big one. My dad was attending some trainings for his job where he and a bunch of other guys would be sent to Oklahoma for several weeks at a time. To pass the time the guys randomly picked up Axis and Allies and somehow my dad brought the copy home. I was in the 5th grade. We played a lot of various versions of Axis and Allies over the decades.

The joy of playing Axis and Allies lead me to exploring other games and dragging all my friends with me. Steve Jackson pocket box games (car wars, necromancer, OGRE, etc.) were huge and roleplaying (DC heroes and Robotech)


Fun topic by the way!

I grew up playing Monopoly, Risk, etc, plus some of the other Parker Brothers ones. The local hobby shop sold AH and SPI games, and I bought a copy of Invasion: America. I couldn't get anyone interested in that game in particular, but did get a few folks I knew while I was in the military to play some other hex and counter wargames.

From there, when I went to college I played a lot of AH games with my friends and brothers, bought at the same old local hobby shop. Civilization, Rail Baron, Gladiator, Circus Maximus, and Kingmaker. Missed a trick by not getting Acquire, because we'd have loved that. We also played some of the Steve Jackson games, like Illuminati, Ogre, and Car Wars.

I didn't play a whole lot of boardgames after I graduated college, until a friend turned me on to Magic in the 90's. This is akin to a friend turning you on to crack. That took up all my gaming time until my daughter was born and I gave up Magic. But I did remember seeing the boardgamers at Origins when I was playing Magic there, and I saw our local gaming club there. Playing with them led me to playing train games (crayon rails, 18xx) and Euros.

We played the $10 starter box of Dungeons and Dragons (in my memory it had a green box) and eventually bought advanced D&D, but I can't remember if that was before or after my cousin introduced us to Car Wars and Ogre. I also bought a few games at our local hobby shop, like UFO: Game of Close Encounters which I never ended up playing, and TimeTripper which I played once or twice. The protagonist was a U.S. soldier in Vietnam who was dropping acid. We got into Traveller and also bought Azhanti High Lightning which hit the table a few times.

When I graduated from high school I stopped playing, then spent two years overseas in the Marshall Islands, went to college, got married, went to graduate school and got a full-time teaching job.

In 2005, almost 20 years since high school, we were visiting my wife's family in Oregon and I stopped by a local game store and bought a copy of Lord of the Fries, which was on sale for a couple of bucks. I got back to my Father-in-law's place, Googled the game and discovered BGG. That led to building a collection, playing with a local group, etc. for a number of years. A few years agoI sold or traded almost everything because I was collecting, not playing. I think I made $400 at one sale. Now I have about ten games and play The Crew once in a while with my family. I have a hard time getting excited about new games at this point, so I guess I'm old now.