Here's my take on the best board games of the last decade, broken down year by year:

     2000 - Carcasonne
A really good game, and a truly innovative design space to explore as well. It's no longer in regular rotation for me, but Santa brought "The Kids of Carcasonne" for Kira this year and I highly recommend that variant for anyone with a budding gamer who's 4-7 years old. It's easy to learn and no reading is required, but it's got a surprising amount of depth of strategy — enough to keep things interesting for parents too.

     2001 -  Transamerica over Risk 2210, I guess
Nothing I saw when searching through Board Game Geek by publishing year really seems to have stood the test of time. I've heard that Risk 2210 is quite a good variant, but I've never actually played it myself and it's a Wizards of the Coast design so my info could easily be biased. Meanwhile, Transamerica is fun enough that we still bust it out every once in a while at the ongoing WotC R&D board game night.

     2002 - Puerto Rico
This was ranked #1 for many years on Board Game Geek and with good reason. The action-drafting mechanic is really clever and the strategies in the game are quite deep. It's been recently edged on Board Game Geek by a game that does the action drafting mechanic a bit better in my opinion (Agricola) but you've got to give Puerto Rico credit not only for being the best board game of 2002, but also blazing a trail for future game designers to follow.

     2003 - Amun Re
A bit less heralded than many of the others on this list (it's only #57 on the 'Geek), but I for one really enjoy this game and our circle of gamers considers it the go-to game when we have 5 people who want to play. I think it only truly shines with 5 players, but if you've got 5 then it might just be the best game of the decade.

     2004 -  St. Petersburg (over Ticket to Ride)
I have played a ton of Ticket to Ride (esp in various digital incarnations), and it was a fine choice for Spiel des Jahres in 2004, but when given the choice I choose to play St. Petersburg just about every time. A few of the cards from the original game were overpowered or underpowered and so we now use the versions of the Mistress, Observatory, and Academy that came with the 2008 expansion; but we don't use any of the other stuff from the expansion. With those few "development" tweaks the base game remains a remarkably deep, re-playable game that clocks in a good bit under an hour even at 4 players.

     2005 - Vegas Showdown (over Railroad Tycoon)
This could be the a Wizards of the Coast bias, but I think Vegas Showdown was quite a good game. It's the only one of the WotC-design Avalon Hill games that I actually like, so I can't be completely biased by having been there all those years. I still break this out and play it from time to time, both in person and over on GameTableOnline (where you can even play against an AI), and I enjoy it with 3, 4, or 5 players (which is actually a bit unusual for me). Meanwhile, I did want to call out Railroad Tycoon since I think it's quite a well-done train game. Probably the best train game of the decade, assuming you have a good space for setting up the massive board (edging out Ticket to Ride and Thurn and Taxis).

     2006 - Through the Ages
I have been playing the hell out of this game non-stop since I was introduced to it early in 2009. It is quite long (figure 90 minutes per player unless everyone really knows what they're doing, and even then it's still 4 hours for a 3-player game) and it is both complicated and unforgiving (unlike most other civilization-building games you cannot ignore military ... if you fall behind you will get crushed and never be able to recover). However, the hard-core gamer side of my crowd seems to agree with me that it is remarkably well balanced and the way in which you shuffle the decks and then draft the cards works out to give it a shocking amount of re-playability. I've now played around 50 games of it and I continue to be surprised by the ways in which games can evolve. A lot of the skill in the game is being able to improvise and take advantage of whatever opportunities the game has randomly presented you with. In that sense, it actually reminds me a lot of Magic (which I still consider to be the best strategy game of all time), only if Magic games took 4 hours to play themselves out.

     2007 - Agricola
A truly great "thinking" game and totally worthy of the #1 spot on Board Game Geek. It's got a lot of "fiddly bits," but I wouldn't cut any of them even if I could. The mechanics are tied together really well and this game shows once again how much re-playability you can get from shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing out some of the resources randomly. Interestingly, the German game critics who award Spiel des Jahres every year for the best "family style" board game called out a separate category for "Complex Games" so that they could acknowledge how good this was with a special prize.

     2008 - Dominion
Pure awesome, and I was glad to see it win Spiel des Jahres. The idea of constructing your deck on the fly by buying cards each turn that you then shuffle in so you can draw them on future turns is really brilliant. I wish the expansions were able to live up to the promise of the base game, but so far they have not. So far most of the cards in the expansions just make the game more complicated, which I guess might make some people happy as the original card set can start to feel like a solved puzzle if you've played it hundreds of times, however my advice is just to stick to the base game and to introduce it to all of your friends. If you're reading this blog then I'm sure all your gamer-friends will like it and even some of the ones who don't normally like games will probably like it too.

     2009 - Smallworld?
Here's where I'm supposed to end the blog entry by crowning a winner for the year that has just ended, but I'm not sure i have anything compelling to say. The Agricola expansion that just came out (Farmers of the Moor) seems really good, but I've only played it a couple of times and I'm not sure an expansion is supposed to qualify as the best game of the year (though this one might be a special case as it changes the game dramatically and the new game seems to be really good). Vlaada Chvatil's latest game (Dungeon Lords) has me pretty excited, and it does have a 2009 publication date according to the 'Geek, but it has yet to be distributed in the States so I haven't played it yet. I guess Smallworld is the best new game I have played this year. It's got some flaws (primarily that it's vulnerable to politics because using table talk to convince your opponents to attack your other opponents is very powerful), but the flavor is awesome and the mechanics are definitely fun as long as you aren't taking things too seriously. It you like multi-player Magic then I highly recommend it, but if you hate multi-player Magic then you probably won't want to play it more than 2 or 3 times. 

My top 3 overall for the decade would be Dominion, Agricola, and Through the Ages. TTA is my personal favorite, but the ordering of which I want to play at any given time changes completely depending on who I am playing with, how hard-core they are, and how much time we have to play.

There you go, the decade in board games from the perspective of a thinking gamer.