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@Oliver Schick
I think I probably played too much of that as a kid. Likewise with all the other 'standard' boardgames.
Germany has a huge boardgame boom. It all started in the early 80s when the gaming industry created a 'Game of the Year' award. For marketing purposes, GOTYs became the few games that even people who didn't play many games would buy and shedloads of new games are released every year, competing for the GOTY title. If you ever see a game that has something like this on it, it's probably a more than decent game:
Interestingly, one of the first really successful GOTYs was Dampfross:
Ironically, this was actually invented, under the name 'Railway Rivals', by David Watts, a British game designer, who couldn't find anyone to publish it over here. He took it to Schmidt Spiele in Germany, and the rest is history. It became very successful and a cursory Google just now brought up quite a lot of evidence of continued popularity.
In the mid-90s, a game called "Die Siedler von Catan" was published which took the commercial potential of boardgames to a whole other level. It was wildly successful.
I like playing some of those more advanced games rather than Monopoly, although that is still a more than serviceable game. Having said that, one of my all-time favourites is Boggle, not strictly a boardgame, which is very simple.