Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Settlers of Catan

Note: I recently partook in a "how did you get into board games?" thread over at BGG, and Mary and I decided that a post might be of sufficient interest to warrant republication on the Hollandspiele blog. And so, here we are. When I was a kid, I loved to play chess and Othello/Reversi, despite the fact that I was terrible at both, and I remember playing Risk at my grandfather's house. And we had Monopoly, Uno, etc. So, fairly typical childhood exposure to board games. How I got into modern games... it's kind of a long, but hopefully mildly...