Looking back at 2006 in board games

Surely 2006 wasn’t actually 20 years ago. Surely not. That would mean — well, you know what it would mean, don’t you? If you were gaming in 2006, you’re probably also thinking about that. Or maybe if you were in college. Or even high school. Time, you know, is the fire in which we burn. (OK, sorry, that’s just a quote from Star Trek Generations. It’s been seared in my head since 1994. I guess I was a weird kid?)

Honestly, I think 2006 was kind of a weird year in board games. It’s getting increasingly close to the explosion of the early 2010s, but games are still relatively confined to those classic themes. Games tended to be a bit drab; boxes tended to be varying shades of grey, brown, olive green, pale red, and yellow. Some of those games were good! Now, none of them are still on the BoardGameGeek top 100. You can decide how much that means to you, but it's an interesting fact all the same.

In 2006, war games were still atop the heap, with Command & Colors: Ancients (Borg) and Combat Commander: Europe (Jensen) the second- and third-placed games in the mix.

Strategy games — with a capital “S” — were coming into their own, though, and some games I still know and love are in the mix. Though, let’s be honest, it’s not that many of them, really. Bananagrams (Nathanson) is my most-played game from 2006, and it’s not particularly close.

Thurn and Taxis (Seyfarth) is a great game from 2006, and it even won the 2006 Spiel des Jahres prize. The box, as you'd expect, full of browns and brownish-reds, the board is mostly orangey-yellow, and the theme is about the German postal system. It doesn't sound like scintillating stuff from the outset, but it's a genuinely great game. It's a route-building game that pulls off some great stuff, and I think it holds up well today.

Sometimes, when I think about when I first started really getting into modern board games — 2010 or thereabouts — I wonder why it didn’t happen sooner. When I look at an array of boxes from 2006, it feels pretty clear why. These games rarely look all that appealing, and that’s not to really say anything about the games contained inside. There are plenty of great games in these bland boxes, but for a newcomer, it’s hard to be enthusiastic.

That’s what 2006 makes me think about. Just five years later, the shape of games would be totally different. Games were brighter, more colorful, and had widely varying themes. Takenoko (Bauza, 2011) is a vividly illustrated game about pandas eating bamboo. King of Tokyo (Garfield) took towering monsters in New York City and made it into one of the best family games for a decade. A Fake Artist Goes to New York (Sasaki) introduced the world to Oink Games, a publisher with boxes so colorful that they can’t help but stand out on shelves.

But that was 2011. 2006? It feels like a different generation of games — and, in a sense, it was. The ‘cozy’ themes, the colorful boxes, all that — they all served to build a generation of game-playing folks who weren’t drawn in previously by the renaissance themes, the drab boxes, the war game designs.

Still, we see signs of life. Days of Wonder, long before it was just an imprint under Asmodee, was ramping up after the early successes garnered by the mega-hit Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004). 2005 saw Ticket to Ride: Europe (Moon), and 2006 saw Ticket to Ride: Marklin (Moon) make its debut. (Incidentally, that is, I believe, the hardest to find these days. I found a copy used, and it was my primary copy for a long time.) It also saw the still-crucial Ticket to Ride expansion, Ticket to Ride 1910, which adds additional tickets and replaces the remainder of the cards with larger-format cards.

While many companies can lay claim to influence over board games at this stage, few, I think, have influenced the look and feel of board games more than Days of Wonder in those early years. Shadows over Camelot (Cathala and Laget, 2005) — shockingly still out of print, though it seems a new edition may be set for a 2026/2027 release — boosted early cooperative games; Memoir ’44 (Borg, 2004) and Battle Lore (Borg, 2006) were war games rendered a bit more accessible for a broader audience. Later years brought more games of note, but these were formative years.

What’s more, while five years on, games would look pretty different, 2007 itself had a ton of great games I know and love. I don’t think this is a classic ‘cult of the new’ issue here, but I do think there’s something odd about 2006. 2007 brought Agricola (Rosenberg), Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann), Galaxy Trucker (Chvátil), and Biblios (Finn). These were games that played an outsized role in my entry into the hobby, and I still have space in my heart (and collection) for all of them today.

2006, on the other hand? Bananagrams. That’s really it. I’m left scratching my head. I do own a few others, too. Thurn and Taxis, as mentioned. TTR Märklin, too. Mag-Blast: Third Edition (Petersen), which I really remember enjoying, but I also didn’t rate it very highly at that time on BGG. Who knows!

If we turn toward trick-taking, there are shockingly few titles on BGG for which I have much time. Null & Nichtig (Stockhausen) is at least interesting on its face, with its may-follow rules — I’ve not played it, but I’d of course love to, should I ever find it at a convention or something. There’s the 24 Countdown Game (Micarelli) which exists more as an artifact of poor decision-making than anything. And that’s sort of it, at least among games that I’d heard about. And it’s not like there weren’t great trick-taking games being released before 2006 — there are so, so many out there. Is Wizard Junior (Fisher) the best the genre had to offer?

I don’t know what it is about 2006, but it feels, I don’t know, different. If anything, it feels like a bit of calm before the storm.

A few more games from 2006 of note

• The first edition of Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil) made its debut, and it remains one of the iconic civilization-building board games. That first edition looks significantly less visually appealing than later editions, but great games all get their start somewhere. It’s since been supplanted by Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2015).
• Neuroshima Hex (Orazc) is a head-to-head strategy game set in a science fiction universe — it’s been well-regarded for a long time
• Qwirkle (Ross) is a family-focused abstract, and owing to the rules of the Spiel des Jahres, it actually won the prize in 2011. (It’s about when the game is published in Germany, not when it’s published overall.)
• The Pillars of the Earth (Rieneck and Stadler) had cult status among worker placement games for a long time — perhaps it still does. I’ve not played this one.