Announcing The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame Day 4 Inductees

by Scott Alden

As part of the celebration of BGG's 25th anniversary, we are pleased to announce the next five of 25 inductees into The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame, listed in order by release date.

For background on The BGG Hall of Fame, the reasoning behind which games were eligible and which were chosen, and the first five inductees by chronological order, please see this introductory post. Inductees #6-10 can be seen here and #11-15 here.

The final five inductees will be revealed on Friday, January 24, 2025. Stay tuned!

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16. Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization — 2006
Civilization games have been a standard on the game market for decades, but in Through the Ages, designer Vlaada Chvátil reinvented the genre by doing away with the seemingly prerequisite world map and having players focus more abstractly on the technologies, leaders, and wonders one would expect to find. Over four ages, players guide their civilization of human development through a card-drafting system that consistently forces hard economic and tactical decisions. With random set-ups and powerful events ensuring that no two games play alike, Through the Ages is a wonder of high-conflict, heavy Eurogame design that will challenge your ability to manage people, resources, and ideas.

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17. Agricola — 2007
In Agricola, players take the role of a 17th century Central-European family of farmers. Each turn, players use the husband and wife tokens to take actions from an expanding array of options, one of which is family growth. Time to have a child and put them to work! As the game progresses, you can plow and sow fields to grow grain and vegetables, fence off your land, breed animals, start occupations, add major and minor improvements, expand your home, upgrade said home, and more. You want to do so much, but time is against you, as well as the threat of starvation if you don't feed the family. Agricola launched a wave of imitators and gave designer Uwe Rosenberg a second career after the success of Bohnanza.

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18. Brass — 2007
Martin Wallace's Brass is an involved economic and route-building game set during the early days of the Industrial Revolution in Britain’s Lancashire County. You are an entrepreneur who wants to use technology to make money, and during the game players will construct cotton mills, ports, coal mines, iron works, and shipyards — but construction is only the first step. You also need canals and railroads to connect energy sources to industries, and industries to sales locations. Complicating all of this is your constant need for money, which will lead to loans as you try to permanently boost income. Brass has inspired other game designs, including Brass: Birmingham, which became the #1 game on BGG in 2023.

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19. Race for the Galaxy — 2007
Tom Lehmann's Race for the Galaxy is a deep, interactive card game. Each round, players simultaneously choose an action. Everyone can take the actions chosen, and whoever picked an action gets a better version of it. Unchosen actions are skipped, so you want to anticipate others to benefit from their selections. Cards in hand are resources that you can spend to put other cards in play, whereas cards on planets are trade goods you can sell for...more cards as you strive for high-value cards, military conquest, and points from produced goods. With its multiple expansions and board game adaptations, Race for the Galaxy has proven to be one of the richest, most replayable designs in the card and board game canon.

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20. Dominion — 2008
Magic: The Gathering launched the trading card genre, with players building a personalized deck for each game. Donald X. Vaccarino's Dominion transformed deck-building into a game of its own. Starting with only a handful of copper, players buy action cards and more valuable money cards turn by turn to work their way up to buying valuable point cards. The Dominion game system is incredibly versatile, with 25 different action cards in the base game, only ten of which are in play. Changing even one action affects the feel of a game, and hundreds of actions are available across more than a dozen expansions. Hundreds of deck-building games have been released in the wake of Dominion's success.

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