I played Brew Crafters Friday night, which is a pretty straightforward worker placement game where you have two “flavors” of workers, ones who take market actions that exclude other players, and ones who take brewery actions where everyone can take the same action if they want. I lost, but it was (as always) fun. We might do it again this week before everyone forgets the rules.
80% of our boardgame time is spent playing Gloomhaven. The other 20% is a mix of Azul, Fury of Dracula, Chess, Keyforge, MTG, and Memoir 44.
But mostly Gloomhaven.
And we just got the expansion for Gloomhaven.
Lately for me it has been Pandemic: Rapid Response, Star Wars Outer Rim, and Fury of Dracula. I wish I could find a group to play Gloomhaven.
Just bought Gloomhaven, but haven’t had a chance to play yet.
Played some Catan recently, and Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, Eldritch Horror, and Too Many Bones.
Played this last weekend:
Deceptively simple in appearance but complicated enough to get interesting. You roll 2 dice, can take either both dice together as a number OR each die as its own number separately. You activate the ship card in your base corresponding to that number (or those two numbers) and get the power(s) on that card (typically coins early on). You then may buy new ships from a common pool, paying attention not only to their power but also their “reward” and the numbered spot they will occupy on the “base” board. When you buy a ship from the common pool it displaces the one already in your base – displaced ships are tucked under with only the reward showing. On OTHER PLAYERS’ die rolls, you get the reward for these “deployed” ships if their number is rolled.
This creates strategic tension. The 1-6 ships tend to give less reward because you could get two of them in a turn. The 7-12 ships you could obviously only get the reward from once (since it takes both dice to add up to the number) so they tend to have higher payoffs. Displacing a good power means you lose it, but that ship’s reward is now available on other players’ turns. Do you want a few slots with heavily-stacked-up rewards, or lower rewards in almost every slot to cover whatever the dice might roll?
The powers and rewards become increasingly complicated as the game progresses, allowing you to shift over to a different slot (i.e., roll a 7, get the reward from slot 5), change dice, lock dice, increase baseline income, get victory points, and so on.
Play chess on my lunch break at work.
Just got Settlers of Catan to play at home.
Lately, our college kids have been getting us to play Root with them. They also ask us to play Betrayal at the House on the Hill every so often. We play Machikoro and Pandemic once in a while.
My partner and I frequently play a two-person version of Catan (Cities & Knights). We’ve spent a lot of time adjusting the rules.
Chinese Chess
Korean Chess
Hive
Mancala
Pentago
Onitama
I think I like Korean chess the most.
I love Hive! That’s become a serious go to when only two people want to play. And it’s easy to carry around. Definitely in the keeper category.
Our first game was Catan and we binged on it, but my daughter complained that it’s no fun once you get behind. I disagree, but to a kid, feeling like you’re behind in a 2-hour game is no fun.
Hey, question for you board gamers. What’s a good game for 9 year old kids that can go in 30 minutes or so? Maybe a card-type game?
Try Dragonwood, which is both cheap and fun. I have been playing a lot of Shards of Infinity with my kids lately, too.
You might want to check the artwork to make sure the humor is appropriate but Exploding Kittens might be fun.
I also disagree with your daughter.
It’s no fun when you’re ahead, either. 
I was coming in to recommend Welcome To…, a ~30 minute card game. I’m not great at estimating ages for games, but I think a nine year old would be in to it.
Each player is competing to get the most points by building a suburb. You have a sheet of paper with three rows of houses on it. In the middle of the table, three decks of cards give you combinations of house numbers and special abilities. The players (it can go up to pretty much any number of players, if you’ve got enough game sheets) each pick one of the combos and records it on their sheet. The house numbers have to go in ascending order from left to right. You can skip numbers, but you can’t repeat or go backwards. Meanwhile, the special abilities let you go after other scoring opportunities, like building pools or planting parks.
Lots of fun, easy to learn, and very quick to play.
I just learned about the game a few months ago. I play against AI on my Android phone, but I’m trying to get some friends interested in killing some time with it so I can play a live human. I’ve only managed to beat the “medium” difficulty AI so far.
Drat! I left out Realm. That’s one of my favorites, right next to Janggi. The game has some unique concepts (creating pieces depending on the result of your move, for example).
I agree with you about Catan. A friend is seriously into it, but he’s the only one I’ve met so far who is.
For choosing a game, you could always use this flowchart. It’s a bit old, but to make a quick decision and get the ball rolling, it’s good enough.
Thanks to you and Monty for reminding me about this, it is indeed a great game - need to remind my friend who owns it about playing it again.
So I partly came back to this thread to share that we played Throw Throw Burrito for the first time yesterday. It was absolutely hilarious - we played at work at lunchtime, and the people in the meeting room next door had to come in to tell us to stop (oops…). It’s from the makers of Exploding Kittens but I’m pretty sure all the artwork is OK for kids. The game is based on the card game Spoons, you are passing cards round the table to try to collect sets as fast as you can. But if someone gets a set of three Burrito cards (of which there are various types), players have to grab the foam burrito in the middle of the table and throw it at each other.
Another game that might appeal (and is less rowdy) is Fluxx. Good mixture of randomness and learning about rule-following. There are loads of themed versions so one of them may tickle your daughter’s fancy.
I agree, with the proviso that after a short while you’ll probably want to enter the result from the flowchart into boardgamegeek to find other games like it. I’ll always have time for the classics (even Monopoly), but there’s so much variety out there now.
Pandemic (the original version) takes 30 - 45 minutes.
It’s a co-operative game (very useful to avoid squabbling and disappointment.)
Players can discuss moves (which speeds things up.)
I’ve played it very successfully with both a smart 8 year old and an autistic 12 year old.
(It also does a bit of World geography as you pick up city names and locations.)
Thanks all for the suggestions and I apologize to OP for hijacking the thread with personal recommendations for myself.
Can’t seem to pull up specific cards… does it depict animal cruelty? If not, anything goes.
No, nothing like that. (Well except for the exploding Kittens :)). I was probably being overly cautious. There actually is a NSFW version so the normal version is probably fine. The game was created by the guy who writes The Oatmeal. The card art is in that style.
I played Exploding Kittens with my daughter when she was 11. As long as you don’t have the NSFW version (which is explicitly labeled so you won’t miss it) there’s nothing “racy” in it.