A Short History of the Modern Board Game
Board games did not begin in the 1990s, though a good deal of the hobby writes as though they did.
Much older than the hobby
Board games are among the oldest recorded pastimes, with playable sets surviving from several thousand years ago. The general category covers everything from ancient race games to modern designer titles, which makes it almost too broad to be useful.
What people usually mean by the modern board game is much narrower and much more recent: a designed product with a named author, published commercially, sold on the strength of its rules rather than its licence.
The mass-market century
For most of the twentieth century the commercial game was a mass-market object built for families and sold at scale. The design goals were accessibility and shelf appeal, and the mechanics were largely inherited rather than invented.
The period produced a handful of genuine classics and an enormous quantity of filler. It also produced some strange origin stories; the history behind Monopoly is considerably less tidy than the box ever suggested.
The designer becomes visible
The shift that created the current hobby was the arrival of the credited designer as a reason to buy. Once a name on a box meant something, designs could be sold on their ideas, and ideas could get stranger.
It also created a feedback loop. Designers played each other's games, borrowed mechanics openly, and iterated in public. The pace of change went up sharply and has not really come back down.
Preserved, eventually
Games have historically been poorly archived, treated as ephemera rather than artefacts. That is slowly changing, and institutional collections now hold material that would once have been thrown out; the British Library's collection items are a reminder of how much printed matter survives only by accident.
For a hobby that produces thousands of boxes a year, most of which will be out of print within five, that work matters more than it sounds.
Regional traditions, briefly
The narrative that modern board games came from one country is a convenient simplification. Distinct design traditions developed in parallel, with different assumptions about conflict, length and how much luck an audience would tolerate.
What produced the current moment was those traditions becoming visible to each other, largely through translation and later through the internet. Designers started borrowing across traditions rather than within one.