I've always credited two games for getting me hooked on board gaming as a hobby. The first one was playing Dune with my cousins when I was little. We were young and didn't even play the game right, but we had fun... and sometimes we fought, as kids do.

While I (very infrequently) played other games before and after, none left as much of an impression as Dune. Those games were the usual suspects of Monopoly, Risk, Stratego, Clue, etc. While (somewhat) fun, none of those really made me felt like board gaming could be a hobby, just a way to pass time with relatives.

It wasn't until university that I dove into board gaming as a hobby. One of my friends wanted to play a game she had, Charmed: The Source. The game wasn't that great. In fact, it kinda sucked. But that didn't matter, sitting around a table with friends was fun. I learned more about my friends during that game than I did the times we went out partying together.

We repeated that a few more times. Again, by playing the usual suspect games. After a couple of sessions of playing the (bad) games we had, I took a friend to visit a board game store I found after a Google-adventure. A less-than-friendly employee recommended us Catan and Carcassonne. Fortunately for me, someone else overheard me mention that I liked Dune and told me about Cosmic Encounter (back then, the Avalon Hill version) and how it sort-of resembled Dune and was from the same creators. My friend bought Catan and I and bought Cosmic somewhere else, they didn't have it in the first store we visited.

Our first time playing Cosmic was... not very successful. There were a lot of rules, we got a lot of those wrong and just straight up missed others. There was a lot of flicking through the rules. We decided to play Catan afterwards and had fun. However, I wasn't about to give up on my new purchase and studied up on the rules - something I should've done BEFORE bringing the game, I know better now. During our next board game gathering I convinced people to try out Cosmic again. This time, we had a blast - I personally attribute this to the game playing a lot faster now that we all knew the proper rules. We played until late into the night and couldn't wait to play more.

So, yeah. That's how I got hooked on board gaming as a hobby. Being in uni meant we couldn't really buy a lot of board games, so we had to make due with what we had and the few games we could afford.