Hobby-game fanaticism is still very much a subculture, to be sure, but it is a growing one. At the 2017 iteration of Gen Con—North America’s largest hobby-gaming convention, in Indianapolis—turnstile attendance topped 200,000. For the first time in the event’s history, all the attendee badges were purchased before the event began. Whether they knew it or not, the many thousands of people carpeting the field level of Lucas Oil Stadium wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for a small group of obsessives on the other side of the Atlantic.

The rise of hobbyist games is legible in the career arc of one of the genre’s most famous present-day designers, Phil Eklund. He was born and raised in the United States. But tellingly, he didn’t really hit his stride until moving to Germany. Eklund took to game design early in life. As a teenager growing up in Tucson in the 1970s, he became frustrated with the narrow, child-oriented fare on offer at his local toy shops—roll-and-move games like Sorry! and Monopoly. So he started creating his own games, making photocopied print runs of a few hundred or so and mailing them out to customers.

Within America’s then-tiny board-game subculture, Eklund was making a name for himself. But he felt like part of the lowest caste of nerds. “I’d go to a gaming convention, and everyone would be crowded around the computers,” he tells me. “My board-game setup would be off in the corner. The only people who’d wander over were the folks looking for a garbage can so they could throw out their gum.”

That’s in the past. Eklund now lives in Germany, where he’s attained the status of cult celebrity. He has no plans to move back to the United States. “One of the reasons I came to this country is because I knew it was the place where people take board games really seriously,” he told me. “The designers have status. They put their name on the box, and people will buy based on their reputation.”

Now a board-game star in Germany, Eklund’s friends include such masterminds as Friedemann Friese, the creator of the game Power Grid, and the legendary Uwe Rosenberg, who designed award-winning classics such as Agricola, Le Havre, and Patchwork. At Germany’s world-leading Internationale Spieltage (“International Game Day”) fair in Essen—which now attracts an audience from all over the world numbering almost 200,000—bookish introverts are mobbed by groupies looking for selfies. “It’s not like I destroy hotel rooms or go out with movie stars,” Eklund tells me. “But it’s sufficiently intense that when I get back home, it takes a week just to recover.”

Hobbyists around the world started paying serious attention to German-style board games (or “Eurogames,” as they’re now more commonly known) following the creation of Settlers of Catan in 1995. While it took more than a decade for that game to gain a cultural foothold, there seems to be no going back: Much in the way that Cold War–era American beer connoisseurs gravitated to the higher quality and vastly larger variety offered by European imports in the era before stateside microbrews took off, players who’d become bored with the likes of Monopoly and Scrabble started to note the inventive new titles coming out of Germany.