Short answers, pulled from the story.
A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components such as dice. The earliest known uses of the term fall between the 1840s and the 1850s.
Senet has been argued to be the oldest known board game in the world, with possible board fragments dating to around 3100 BC and undisputed pictorial representations from roughly 2686 BC to 2613 BC. The Royal Game of Ur, originating around 2500 BC in ancient Mesopotamia, has been claimed as the oldest playable board game because its rules survive on a cuneiform tablet.
The Golden Age of board games ran from the 1880s to the 1920s, a term coined by American art historian Margaret Hofer. Mass production made games cheaper and more widely available, and the most popular game of the period was Monopoly, released in 1935.
The Board Game Renaissance is a new golden age that emerged in the early 21st century, with Carcassonne from 2000 and Ticket to Ride from 2004 as a major part of it. It marked a shift away from 20th-century standbys like Monopoly and the 1960 Game of Life. The Settlers of Catan, from 1995, helped popularise German-style games outside Europe.
Some board games such as chess depend completely on player skill, while children's games like Candy Land from 1949 and snakes and ladders are decided purely by luck. Many games combine both, using dice, shuffled cards as in Sorry! from 1934, randomly picked letters as in Scrabble from 1948, spinners, or timers to introduce randomness.
A 1991 estimate put the global board game market over $1.2 billion, and crowd-sourcing raised $233 million on Kickstarter in 2020. A 2009 estimate placed the American market around $800 million, a 2011 estimate put the Chinese market over 10 billion yuan, and in 2009 Germany was considered the best market per capita.