The first and only time I had played Dan Hallagan’s Obsession was shortly after its release in 2018. At the time, I regarded it warily. The Eurogame model has produced a net positive for board games as a whole, but like all genres it comes with its own inbuilt limitations, and Obsession struck me as overly shackled by the model’s conventions. Specifically, that Eurogame tendency to flatten everything to a grocery list of scoring categories and an airiness in what we label “theme,” a quirk of wording unfortunately particular to our medium that betrays a suspicion that board games are closer to amusement parks than novels. Like many Eurogames, Obsession seemed to excel at setting while missing what would constitute thematic import in any other medium. Full of “theme,” low on theme.

But Obsession endured. Oh, how it endured. On BoardGameGeek, it’s currently rated as the sixtieth best board game of all time. Thirteen thousand people have rated it. A steady schedule of expansions have rounded out the experience, including a few that have taken direct stabs at some of my original nitpicks with the design.

More than that, a fellow scholar insisted that it deserved another look. In both of our fields — him as a literature guy, me as a historian — there’s a concept called reception theory, a method for investigating a work of art on the basis of its interaction with audiences over time, as opposed to focusing on authorial intent or critical reading. So I took a step back. Why was this game so popular? How was it speaking to people? I agreed to try to understand the obsession with Obsession.

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