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.

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.

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").