Our group plays a lot of PowerGrid, Dominant Species, 7 Wonders, and London. We break out heavier games sometimes: Rise and Fall, Sword of Rome, Outpost, Agricola.
Lighter games used for a break, or to fill in the end of a gaming day, include Sherlock Holmes (card game), Dominion, Citadels, Illiad.
Well, the fundamental gameplay of moving your guy around the globe and then embarking on “Adventures” where you roll a bunch of dice to pass a series of tests is really easy to understand. My seven year old plays it by himself, and while like every parent I think my kid is a genius, the fact that a seven year old can play it and have fun means it can’t be that complicated.
The complication comes in with all the minutia like “If I’m in a temple and it collapses while a Nazi is also in it, where does the Nazi go and what happens to the gold he’s collected. Which of the 3 states is he in when he goes back to his base and does it matter where the zepplin is when this happens.” Someone went through all this stuff and made a flowchart which they posted at boardgamegeek which in 1 page covers 95% of what you need to remember to play the game.
And in the end, all that minutia doesn’t really matter. The game might be slightly harder or easier if you forget things like “you get a gold each time you hit a Nazi” but it’s not a game that you play for its deep strategy; whatever house rules you develop are going to be just as much fun as the official rules. You play it to tell stories to each other, come up with plausible reasons why you run across a night club after finding your way through a maze of trap filled tunnels high up in the Andes, and curse the Nazi’s when their zepplin decides to dump some soldiers on you while you’re trying to get an artifact back to the auction house in Shanghai.
Thanks. I think that’s basically the conclusion Wil Wheaton came to, as well: “We didn’t play it exactly according to the rules, but we had fun anyway, so who cares?”
As long as everyone agrees, you can pretty much play a game any way you want to. The Fun Police won’t arrest you for playing by your own rules 
Chess will always be my top pick. I can think of few, if any, other games where you can so easily play through the games of great players, past and present, and see things of beauty.
Otherwise, in no particular order, my top 10 would include:
Carcassonne: The City https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12902/carcassonne-city
Diplomacy https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/483/diplomacy,
El Grande https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/93/el-grande,
Liberte https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2507/liberte,
Junta https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/242/junta
Railway Rivals https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/460/railway-rivals
Taluva https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24508/taluva
Lost Cities https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/50/lost-cities
Raider & Traders https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1789/raiders-and-traders-heroic-age-greece
Someone already mentioned it, but I also love Dead of Winter Very good zombie game.
I’ve been obsessed with Ticket to Ride lately too.
I also like:
Pandemic
Legendary: Marvel Deck Building Game
Boss Monster
Onirim
Talisman
Arkham Horror
Cards Against Humanity
The Resistance
Pandemic’s fun.
I really liked Sentinels of the Multiverse, although I guess that’s more of a card game than a board game.
Always enjoyed Avalon Hill’s Advanced Squad Leader and Tactics II (Dad had a vintage copy!)
Small World is a LOT of fun as well.
I love, love, love Axis and Allies.
Axis and Allies is best played with the “Pizza and Beer” expansion. You get an A&A set and then order in two extra large pizzas and get two cases of beer and just go to town with four friends. The “Have a game on in the background” expansion works very well with this. By 3 AM when the Axis finally loses, if at least one player barfs, everyone wins.
If you replace A&A with Civ, it’d be like you were remote viewing me in college.
My favorite game is Dominion. Although the theme is weak in it, I just haven’t found a deck-builder that I like better.
Another favorite of mine is Five Tribes. This game uses a mancala mechanic on a randomly generated and seeded board. It can become quite “puzzly”.
Pandemic is an awesome game and I often play it solo. It really shines with the “On the Brink” expansion. I haven’t tried the other expansions yet. I do have Pandemic Legacy on the way, though. My sons and I are really looking forward to that since we are having a good time with Risk Legacy.
Speaking of Risk, I am not really a fan of the original game, but Risk Legacy has been fun. We are at 8 games through the 15 game Legacy campaign. Also, the Star Wars Original Trilogy edition of Risk was fun the one time I got to play it. My son has the new Star Wars Risk, but it is not really a “Risk” game. They just gave it the name for promotion. It is fairly fun, even though it seems to be imbalanced in favor of the rebels.
Another game that I really like, but don’t play as often because of the length and heaviness of the game is Alchemists. This a deduction game with pseudo-Worker Placement mechanic.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a variation on the Mafia/Werewolf games that only lasts 10 minutes. It is a lot lighter than regular Werewolf, but the groups I play with always have a blast with it.
I adore the game Love Letter. While definitely a light game, elegance of the mechanics to create such satisfying gameplay is amazing.
Pandemic: The Cure is a dice version of Pandemic. Even though it is a cooperative game with the same theme, the gameplay is quite different and it is a fun game. It has a push-your-luck mechanic that can make for some tough choices.
Hanabi is a cooperative card game where you do hold your cards so that you cannot see them, but the other players can. You then work together by giving clues to each other about what cards they have in order to play the cards as required. A very nice “thinking” game.
No, Thanks is an excellent little filler card game.
Forbidden Desert is another Matt Leacock (of Pandemic fame) cooperative. You move around on a shifting layout looking for parts to a steampunk type airship to escape the desert.
Other games that get played, but do not rank quite as highly as the ones listed above for me include
Sheriff of Nottingham - A bluffing and negotiation game.
Marvel Legendary - A coop deck-building game featuring superheroes and villians from the Marvel universe.
7 Wonders - A card-drafting game where you are building up your civilization with different buildings.
Sushi Go - Sort of a 7 Wonders lite. You are building up your sushi meal instead of a civilization.
I enjoy Smash Up a lot, but the rules are written terribly vague. I’ve played Cosmic Encounter once and really enjoyed it. We had a three way victory because I didn’t want to be a dick. I always call out for The Resistance before a long game. Or if we’re bored at a bar.
I love backgammon, and would also rate it number 1. Go and Chess are also good. Even children’s classics like Chinese checkers can be fun!
(I’m sure no one wants to hear about the games I played in the late 1950’s. :smack: Googling, I see that Stratego was actually invented in 1908!)
I suspect you have to learn at a fairly early age to become good at a game like Chess. I wasn’t a bad player when young (I was even First Board on our league-winning high school team, and could even win blindfolded against poor players) but I couldn’t play Thai Chess, which I learned 35 years later, at all well. It’s almost exactly the same as Western Chess, but a few of the pieces move a little differently, and I just can’t visualize who’s going where. 
Scrabble ®
I highly recommend the iOS app for anybody who likes Ticket to Ride. It plays well as a solo game, and my family prefers it to playing the board game now. It’s faster and you don’t have to worry about mucking up the scoring. It also allows family sharing, so if you’re set up for that, $1.99 gets you a lot of entertainment value. Wouldn’t want to play it on an iPhone 4, but my sister plays on a 5 and does fine.
Been playing on an Ipod touch 4 for years. Great game. All versions.
I’m fortunate to have a regular Friday night gaming group. We alternate between D&D and board/card games.
In addition to the many great suggestions here, I’ll add Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is a co-op game that turns into a traitor game - you play a group exploring a haunted house, finding items, until someone triggers The Haunt, and one of the players becomes the traitor. There are something like 50 different haunts, each with different win conditions for the traitor and the group, so it has lots of replayability.
For those (like me) who love Sentinels of the Multiverse and want more, in addition to the published expansions, there are print-and-play fan-made heroes, environments and villains, including The Cauldron at http://meromorph.com/tangent/cauldron/, with printable card files set up for on-demand printing. I have not printed them, but I have played a few of them on a friend’s printed set, and they were fun. And the printing was quite good.
I should note that I’ve picked up a number of games, including ones listed here, after seeing them played on Tabletop - if you are curious about whether a game is for you, watching Wil Wheaton and friends play it may give you the insight you need into how it’s played and whether you’ll like it. I’ve also decided not to buy a few games after seeing them on Tabletop, because I could tell that they wouldn’t work for me and my friends.
My game group usually has five and sometimes six and is full of people who had very little board game experience, so that has kind of constrained what I play and buy.
Pandemic: I have this would love to play this, as the group likes co-op, but it’s only four player. IIRC one of the expansions reportedly adds a fifth player, along with some other things. Is it worth getting, or does the expansion make the game much more complicated?
Carcasonne: A good game, but totaling the finals scores with six players is an ordeal.
Settlers of Catan: Luckily, I have the 5-6 player expansion, which includes more tiles and a second desert.
Smallworld: This is currently the group fave. I have the six-player board and a few of the mini-expansions with new races and powers
Elder Sign: About as complicated as we get and a great co-op game. A lot of the flavor of games like Arkham Horror, without the laborious setup and tons of variables.
Dominion: Although you can play with more than four players with the extra cards in the Intrigue expansion, I don’t think it works very well with more than four players. Turns just drag out, especially when you get those chain reaction late-game turns with tons of extra actions, cards, and buys.
Machi Koro: A fun game, albeit dice dependent. With the base game, the problem is that everyone usually figures out the optimal strategies and then goes for the same resources. I have the expansions, which look cool but I’m trying to work out a good way to work them in, as the official rules have created bottlenecks whenever I try to use them.
Ticket To Ride: A very good intro game with a lot of replay value.
Shorter Games:
Sushi Go
Ice Towers: Any short game by Looney Labs is pretty good.
Gloom: I have high hopes for Fairy Tale Gloom.
Coup: Just 15 cards
Love Letter: Also just 15 cards.
Tsuro
Pre-Euro Boardgame Favorites:
Civilization (Avalon Hill): Not related to Sid Meier’s game, but similar (minus the military units). An all day affair
Dungeon: The old TSR game where each ream had a random monster/trap and a random treasure
Divine Right: An old TSR fantasy wargame.
I’m a traditionalist; get me a nice game of Sorry any day. With four players, of course.
I like a lot of the games already mentioned but I wanted to mention a new game that is about to come out.
Ghostbusters: The Board Game
https://www.cryptozoic.com/ghostbusters™-board-game
I was part of their Kickstarter campaign so I should be getting it within the next couple of weeks and then it’ll hit the stores soon after that.
They say game length is about 30 min -2 hrs depending on the campaign you choose to play. The board is in four pieces that can be played on either side to add replay-ability. It’s a co-op game and I like co-op games. One of the other things I like is that the ghostbusters have abilities that help them and the group and the GBs level up and get new abilities. Each GB has unique abilities to that GB.
Having never played it I can’t really give an opinion but the Kickstarter campaign went out to cons and let people play and they seemed to like it. Also board game geek gives it a 6.7 out of 10.
Here’s a vid of a guy explaining game play at a con.
My first choice, even after all these years. (Decades? :eek:) Don’t get to play it anymore, but I would jump at the chance.
Mostly we play the various Empire Builder games, with occasional side trips to Small World, Ticket To Ride, and Pandemic. I would love to try a bunch of the games on this thread, but getting my group to branch out is really hard.