Board games

Some of the Meetup groups I'm a member of are devoted to board games.  I haven't been so active in them lately, but I used to be a regular and I may return someday.  These groups have introduced me to several new games which Parker Brothers can't hold a candle to. (I've even bought some of them.)

Of course, the "gateway" game that got me into this new generation of games was Settlers of Catan.  It's a strategy game where you start with a map of an island formed with hexagons representing areas that produce wheat, wool, wood, brick and metal ore respectively.  You build settlements on vertices where three hexagons meet and they yield resources from these areas depending on dice rolls.  You then spend resource cards to expand your network:  wood and brick buy you a road; wood, brick, wool and wheat buy you a settlement; two wheat and three metal buy you a more productive city.  It can involve intricate strategies.

Another game I like is Ticket to Ride, where you collect train cards of different colors and use them to lay rail lines between cities until you fill the routes on tickets you chose at the start.  I prefer the Europe variation:  it has extra-challenging tunnel routes and sea routes, and you can also buy stations to leap over a link when someone else has taken it.

Puerto Rico is another strategy game where you start plantations, introduce settlers (more like slaves), buy factories to make the plantations productive, and ship the goods home.  I'm a big believer in the hospice card, which speeds up settlement.

Smallworld is a D&D-style game with fourteen different races and twenty special powers.  You choose a race with a power and use it to conquer land until it's worn thin, then you put it into decline and choose a new race.  There are 280 possible race-power combinations, and some of them are especially powerful:  spirited ghouls, bivouacking amazons, flying wizards, pillaging orcs, seafaring tritons...