A board game is a small world flattened onto cardboard, and each great one runs on its own private logic. Monopoly is a city block you circle forever, unable to stop buying. Clue is a floor plan with a body waiting in one of its rooms. Catan is an island of bare hexes that only becomes a country once players start trading for the brick and grain to build on it. Every board is a place before it is a game.
For decades those places were governed mostly by dice. You rolled, you moved, you landed on whatever the board handed you, and the weaker players were knocked out to watch everyone else finish. Then, in the mid-1990s, a wave of German designs - Catan loudest among them - quietly rewrote the rules. The interesting part became the decision rather than the roll: which resource to hoard, which route to block, which engine to build. Wingspan turned a wildlife preserve into a machine of chaining birds; Gloomhaven folded a hundred-hour dungeon campaign into one enormous box. Nobody gets eliminated; everybody plays to the last turn.
The classics never left the table, though - and the best of them made the board itself into a metaphor you could walk around.