If you were in one of a handful of places in 1995 in the United States, you knew that a revolution was starting. It's been going on quietly ever since, even though most people are still blissfully ignorant of it. This game, Settlers of Catan, was the opening shot.
Before 1995, non-digital games in the US were mostly children's games. If a game said it was a "family" game, it meant that it was a children's game that the parents would grudgingly play to keep the kids happy even though it was about as exciting as watching paint dry. The problem of how to make a game that could actually appeal to all ages, for real, had not yet been definitively solved.
This game itself is fairly simple. The board consists of some hex-shaped tiles that each feature one of five commodities (wood, ore, grain, clay and sheep). Each space has a number on it from 2 to 12. On your turn, you roll two dice, and whatever board spaces match the number rolled will produce their resource type for any players who have adjacent settlements. Next, you can trade with any other players or with the bank (although the bank gives lousy exchange rates, so most of the time you trade with others). Lastly, you can spend your commodities to build additional roads, settlements and "progress" cards (you might call these "Chance" cards in another board game, except they're all useful).
The object of the game is to reach 10 victory points. You get points for building settlements; some progress cards give you a point; and there are also a couple of bonuses that encourage players to either build lots of roads or buy lots of cards. There is more to it -- I didn't get into the rules for stealing, or upgrading settlements to cities, or taking advantage of ports for better exchange rates -- but those are secondary. Primarily, the game consists of a virtuous cycle of production and building, enhanced by player trading.
Settlers uses a number of design techniques to appeal to a wide age range. The board is colorful, and there are a lot of toy bits to play with: cards, wooden roads and houses. There is enough randomness to give weak players a chance to catch up. There is virtually no downtime when you're waiting for other people to take a turn, because even on other people's turns you can still produce and trade. An entire game is over in about 90 minutes, just around the upper limit of a child's attention span. All of these things make the game palatable to kids.
And yet, the randomness can be understood and planned for, allowing a decent amount of strategy. The game's trading aspect is social and engaging. There are many paths to victory (expansion, upgrades, cards and roads can all give you victory points), so a good player uses different strategies based on the board position and market conditions. The game also has a random setup, leading to vastly different initial conditions and giving it high replay value. This all serves to give a satisfying experience to adults.
This is not the only good game to come out of Germany. It wasn't even the first good game from Germany. But it came out at a time when the market was right. Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering had established the hobby game market here in the US, and it was shortly thereafter that Settlers of Catan came along and made people re-examine boardgames.
If you've played any other Eurogames, you've probably already played Settlers of Catan, and if you haven't then you probably will before too long. But if your idea of "boardgames" is Candyland, Monopoly and The Game of Life, I'm here to tell you that boardgames can do better. We don't have to put up with "roll a die and advance around a track" as the only way to pass a rainy afternoon. Are you with me? Then join the boardgame revolution, and play this thing!
Ed.: Another point worthy of note: Settlers is, internationally, the single best-selling boardgame in the last ten years, with more than 13m copies sold worldwide. This certainly raises the question as to whether "videogames" are the revolutionary advance some think, or whether interest in games of all sorts have co-evolved in the last couple of decades.
US Gaming
"Before 1995, non-digital games in the US were mostly children's games."
You're kidding, right? Ever hear of consims? Role-playing games? Miniature games?
Anglogames Rule
Hmph! And again, I say, hmph. Long before 1995, some of us were playing games like Diplomacy and Junta and Kingmaker and History of the World and Civilization (the boardgame, not the computer game) and Kremlin (well, okay, that's Swiss originally). Not to mention, say, Bazaar and Acquire and Twixt.
My point is that 1995 may well have been when America woke up to the ferment of creativity in Germany's boardgame industry, something that America, with its single monopoly mass-market publisher (Hasbro) hasn't seen for decades, to our loss -- yet plenty of boardgames worthy of adult attention have long been printed, both here and in the UK. And indeed in some ways, the "anglogame" tradition, which is more representative and simulationist, has advantages over the more abstract nature of the "Eurogame" -- as seen more recently in games like 1960 and Pandemic.
Not that everyone who hasn't played Settlers shouldn't do so immediately, of course.
Risk?
I love Settlers, and it may have ushered in a sea change -- I have seen more, better RL games since it hit -- but there have been lots of games in the past that families could play and that weren't Candy Land.
Risk comes to mind as the most important; it's the "gateway game" for all kinds of other stuff. As has been mentioned, there are all the Avalon Hill games, including mystery games, war games, miniature games, etc. There's D&D and GURPS and MtG (which is played by more adults I know than kids).
To my thinking, the game that changed the market for adults was Trivial Pursuit, in 1982. Before that, if you had adults gathered to play a game, and they weren't "gamers," they played cards. Or Scrabble. Or checkers. Or chess... Or Uno... the classics, eh? That was the game that made it cool to say, "Let's play a game!" at a party, though. Tons of stuff like Pictionary and Scattergories followed over the next couple years.
Settlers is important, yes. It's a great game and has made a difference in the industry... but it has some decent forerunners.
I like many of the Euro
I like many of the Euro board games too, but I really wonder what the sales numbers of these games are compared to board games and RPGs pre-1995. And as far as digital games are concerned -- compare Settlers sales to global console sales:
Wii: 24.45 million sold as of March 31, 2008.
Xbox 360: 19 million sold as of April 25, 2008.
PlayStation 3: 13 million sold as of April 21, 2008.
Anyway, I don't mean this like my game is bigger than yours -- just what is the real context here? I think the more niche games can have bigger relative impacts for sure, and this is overshadowed if we give more physical weight to those games than they deserve.
Role of the Internet
All good points above.
I've also been a "gamer" since the mid 70's. From my perspective, the Internet has had a huge impact on the hobby since the late 90's. Need to find a gaming group nearby? Game reviews and discussions? Easy access (and discount prices) to the latest imports? Organizing or looking for a convention? The Internet pretty much opened the floodgate for all of this, and has surely encouraged the flood of new games we've seen since Settlers first appeared.
Imagine if the hobby still depended on hardcopy magazines (and zines) and word of mouth - I'd guess we'd have a lot fewer games to play.
Apologies to everyone
I seem to have hit a nerve with my comment about "before 1995". I was playing many of the other games mentioned long before 1995 as well. Still, pound-for-pound, I would say that children's games saw far more shelf space (especially in the mass market) than other kinds of board games.
And of course, this is still the case. You wouldn't find Diplomacy or Advanced Civilization or Advanced Squad Leader or 1830 in Toys R Us any more than you'd find Settlers of Catan. Still, if you just look at the total number of copies of hobby games sold each year, you'd see a definite spike around 1995 and the years that followed.
It's also worth mentioning, from the Editor's comment, that not only has Settlers sold 13M+ copies since inception... but to date, it has sold more copies each year than the previous year, making it an exponentially-increasing sales curve (at least so far). This is in stark contrast to the typical sales of either licensed board games, or just about any video game ("long tail" or no). Someone should figure out how to do THAT with a video game...