Operation and Hungry Hungry Hippos don't really belong on this list as they are not board games per se, they are games of skill. By this rationale quite a lot of video games are "bad" because they don't fit the criteria for a good board game; of course it doesn't make sense to judge them by that rubric.<p>It should be noted that they both we created in a time before video games were widely available, so perhaps they are rather quaint in some respects today, but I think the fact that the skill required is different from that required by most video games today causes them to retain enough novelty to still be entertaining.<p>The author says that without the theme, Operation would be nothing but picking stuff up with tweezers. In fact, that is a game my siblings and I (all firmly in the Nintendo generation) enjoyed very much and spent many many hours doing (in a version called "pick up sticks").