Another vote for HeroQuest
I bought it off ebay last year so I could subject the girlfriend to hours of dungeon-crawling geekiness. Yes, I spoke with an accent while reading the mission briefings (think patrick stewart if he were evil).
Good times.
War of the Ring gets a lot of good press over at BGG. I haven’t had the nerve to buy it yet, but might be an Xmas present for myself.
Yes, I have played it. Most of my friends really enjoy it, but it is too wargamey for me. I think being into the books will make it more fun, whereas I haven’t read them and so wasn’t as keen on the theme.
Man, I looked that game up and it looks amazing. I’m tempted to drop the scrill, but I know that I don’t really have anyone to play it with and it would just end up rotting in my closet (i’m looking at you, Mordheim and HeroScape!).
I second that game. It’s a bit difficult to explain to new players, though, because everybody basically plays for the whole group, so you have to take everything into account before you move. It also has a couple of extensions that are worth the additional investment (Friends and Foes and Sauron).
I loved Melee and Wizard from Metagaming.
But the owner has vanished, & the titles are in Limbo.
I think it’s interesting, with a nice balance of chance and strategy. The use of random cards makes it more exciting than, say, Diplomacy. However, games are just too darn long, and it takes forever to explain all the rules to newbies. (Heck, even after playing a few times, I still need reminders.) Of course, I haven’t read the books, so I’m probably missing much of the fun.
I’ve been looking at it too, for the exact same reason. The game store lady doesn’t have one open, though.
psssst… Lives near Chicago… hates driving there… But would take the trip if there were a group playing the game…
(You need at least 3 people. 4-6 looks like an optimum number. We played with 4 when we played. )
A rather different type of fantasy is covered in Dinosaurs of the Lost World by Avalon Hill, which is a fairly faithful recreation of the Arthur Conan Doyle novel. I bought my copy years ago when we had been playing too much Illuminati at work, and were fairly frazzled with each other; I went into a games store and requested a “…game with less scope for interpersonal interaction.” 
Anyway, my daughters & I enjoy playing it.
Yes…I find with my group of gaming friends both Illuminati and Zombies!!! can get really brutal really fast.
Zombies!!! everyone always starts out laughing and joking and by the end it’s a hands-gripped-on-throats nasty struggle to the death.
-Joe
Oooh, plus now they have an expansion pack. A friend of mine owns both, and they’re fun, for but as much as he spent, I’d rather just buy the D&D core books and play that. Still, it was a fun game (we haven’t tested out the expansion yet).
Talisman was fun, but after a few sessions I came to the conclusion that it was deeply flawed. If someone was playing the prophetess or ghoul, they would pretty much always win. If it came down to a showdown between those two, the prophetess would have the edge. I never really played with the expansions, so I don’t know how that affected the game.
HeroQuest was pretty cool. We sometimes added some houserules, like letting the PCs carry a melee and a ranged weapon instead of just one or the other.
I saw the World of Warcraft boardgame at a convention back in February. It was a nice looking game, but the guy running it said the setup was a bear because of all the pieces and sideboards and counters and whatnot.
Talisman was fun, but in my circle of friends, well… We realized how easy it was to become powerful. We’d spend a few hours gathering stuff and experience, and then when it came to the ending… Well, let’s blow through the various ‘trials’ with 14 lives and 30+ stats. If Timescape was involved, even the HBV (Horrible Black Void) couldn’t actually stop us. It actually sucked to get the belt of hercules, because that usually de-powered you!
And you think prophetess / ghoul was bad? Check out Astropath from Timescape. I understand Archmage from the City expansion was just as bad.
Yep, those characters were just too powerful. When we played we just removed them from the deck.
The Warrior of Chaos also fell into that category.
To the Gallery of Unbalancingly Powerful Talisman Characters, add the Sprite. The Prophetess is still the worst of all, though.
The Monk and the Prophetess I can remember what they can do…but I don’t remember the Sprite. What did she do again?
-Joe
Her “only” power was that she always had at least two Spell cards. 
Oh yeah, now I remember.
So, did anyone’s group ever find the actual answer to “[Character X] always has at least one spell.”
Could a character blow through spell after spell all in the same turn until they hit the roadblock of a spell that could only be used in very specific circumstances? Could you only draw once a round?
Anyone? Anyone?
-Joe
The rulebook said that a character could only cast one spell per turn. I distinctly remember this because we looked it up after someone, playing the wizard, just started burning through spells until he found Finger of Death, or Random, or whatever the dastardly spell he was looking for was. We all cried foul and looked it up.