History
Contemporary examples of modern German-style board games referred to as German-style, such as Acquire, appeared in the 1960s. The recent genre as a more concentrated design movement began in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Germany. Today, Germany publishes more board games than any other country per capita. The phenomenon has spread to other European countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Sweden. While many games are published and played in other markets such as the United States and the United Kingdom, they occupy a niche status there.
The Settlers of Catan, first published in 1995, paved the way for the genre in the United States and outside Europe. It was neither the first "German game" nor the first such game to find an audience outside Germany, but it became much more popular than any of its predecessors. It quickly sold millions of copies in Germany, and in the process brought money and attention to the genre as a whole. Other games in the genre to achieve widespread popularity include Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, and Alhambra.
Read more about this topic: German-style Board Game
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)