That’s an incredibly low bar! I’ll put it a bit higher, and not only go for “holds up” but “does its thing better than anything released in 2008 or later”.
On the Eurogame side, I think what you need to look at are the evolutionary dead-ends. Games that just did not have credible follow-up. E.g. Agricola is a great game, but I don’t know that I can make the case that it’s not been equalled by any of the thousand worker placement games released since.
Age of Steam is an interesting evolutionary dead end (“Steam” is not even worth discussing as a worthy successor), since rather than spawning a genre it spawned an incredible expansion sub-culture. There must be like a hundred commercially printed expansions. It’s just an incredibly versatile game system. Today no game does crushing debt, brutal auctions, nor network building better than Age of Steam. And it does all three in one box!
Puerto Rico being an evolutionary dead end is a total mystery to me. It was the hottest game in the world. There is so much you could do with the role drafting + following mechanism. I love it, since much more than in worker placement games you need to be considering not just what you’re getting from the action you take, but what everyone else will get. It’s a much stronger form of interaction than the typical worker placement action space blocking.
But somehow that genre just fizzled out despite being objectively (objectively, I say!) more interesting than worker placement. There are only a couple of games worth bringing up in that discussion, and luckily they’re both pre-2008, Race for the Galaxy and Glory to Rome. Both clearly drew inspiration from PR, but went in wildly different directions. Both are still the best at what they do (fast-playing economic engine game for RftG, card game about special powers and synergies for GtR).
The action point game is another one that is mostly gone. I.e. the games where you’re no just taking 1-2 actions per turn, but maybe even up to 10 actions but then get to do nothing for a full agonizing round of everyone else taking their actions.
Maybe they went out of fashion for a good reason, it was always a bit prone to analysis paralysis, and the level of player interactivity it enables is too high for the modern palate. I think Torres was the crowning achiement of this lineage, especially when combined with the amazing spatial 3d building gameplay that I don’t think has been repeated. (Note. the Master rules are the only way to play Torres. The base game is nothing special).
Auction games fell out of fashion hard. To heathens, Amun Re was. the pinnacle of heavy auction games. They’re wrong, it is obviously Scepter of Zavandor (which also has one of my favorite exponential growth economic engines, and one of the best jockeying for turn order systems). Auctions are an amazing game mechanism when used to drive the gameplay. More modern game design tends to mostly use it as lazy balancing crutches, which is a lot less interesting.
I don’t even know how to describe Neuroshima Hex. It’s a multiplayer tactics puzzle wareurogame maybe? Nothing else like it exists. I don’t understand why, given how brilliant the concept and the system are.
18xx is an interesting case, because the number of games has just exploded in the last 10 years. So the “hasn’t been done better” bar is pretty high. This is basically a genre of economic and stock market simulations.
As much as I’d love to e.g. say that 1841 hasn’t been obsoleted, maybe it has by 1817. But there’s at least two that are unsurpassed. 1860 is a brilliant, brilliant 2p game. The only 2p 18xx worth playing. And I think it’s abou to get a boost in popularity since support is being added on 18xx.games. And 1846 is the best fast-playing 18xx. Again, a brilliant game exploring a part of the design space that the next 15 years just ignored.
As for wargames, I think it is obvious that the Card Driven Wargame peaked before 2008. Nothing has matched Paths of Glory or Empire of the Sun. And then there’s Titan… Maybe it’s not a wargame despite the subtitle being “monster fantasy slugathon cardgame”. It’s certainly not in any other recognizable genre, and never had anything even try to do the same thing let alone replace it. (just look at the glorius map). If I could get the old gang backtogether, I’d happily spend the next weekend doing nothing but playing Titan every waking hour.
Splotter deserves a category all its own. Every single one of their games is basically sui generis and defies any kind of classification. And their trifecta of Roads&Boats, Indonesia, and Antiquity is all from before 2008, and form a little bit of a continuity in about being all about logistics. You will not find better logistics boardgames than these three:
