I'm a casual board gamer, with a couple of groups I play with. We're always looking for a new game to try, but there are those of us whose eyes will glaze over by the third page of rules. So we stick to simple-to-intermediate strategy and cooperative games such as King of Tokyo, Settlers of Catan, etc. The most complicated games we can play and actually have fun would be Shadows Over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica.

This is the official suggestion thread for board games my group should try out. If I end up buying a game you suggest and posting it on the main page, you'll get some Shmuckers and a shout out.

Smash-Up: Everybody sends their minions to try to take over various sites. There are a bunch of different themed minion decks -- each player's deck consists of two of them shuffled together so you have factions like Pirate/Zombies, Dinosaur/Ninjas, Alien/Wizards. Rules and mechanics are simple; the only somewhat fiddly bit is determining each side's strength when a bunch of bonuses get stacked up.

Cartagena: Everybody is trying to get their gang of pirates to the escape boat first. To get more of the cards you need to advance your pirates, you need to let some of them fall behind (one key tactic is to lose as little progress as possible while doing this).

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Is this a real holy war, or just a bunch of deluded boopholes croaking each other?

Lords of Vegas is a cracking game.

Dice, casinos, gambling, backstabbing and uhhh, dice. You build casinos, make money, expand casino empires, make more munneh. But there's enough interaction with other players to make it more fun than I make it sound.

For co-op play, Pandemic is a lot of fun. 4 players work together to search for a vaccine to a global pathogen that threatens the very fabric of humanity!

You each take roles as researcher, dispatcher, doctor, etc (the etc class is OP though, don't use it) and work together to stop the outbreak for good.

I can't vouch for it personally, but Mason Williams' And The Beat Goes On might be worth a try. On the plus side, it is very affordable, and has a relatively small rulebook. (20 pages and a character sheet)

A PDF link here.

Apologies if the link isn't working. Here's the crude one.

Quarriors is a great game. It is a game built around a lot of dice. Every player starts with the same 12 dice and each turn you roll 6 dice. You buy new dice (monsters, spells, money, etc) and attack each others dice. Once you know how to play it takes 30-45 minutes to play and any game where you have a bag full of dice to play has to be a good one.

I might be biased, seeing as a friend is one of the creators, but Velociraptor! Cannibalism! is an awesome game for awesome people. And Wil Wheaton likes it.

Two of the best casual games for me are these:

Bang! Dice which is a faster paced version of Bang! that most people are able to understand very easily and play again and again.

and

Sandwich, a game of trying to grab ingredients with which you need to make 3 sandwiches for the people sitting next to you. Depending on the order of preference of the sandwich each player got, the players who gave them said sandwiches gain points. It is hilarious to see people having to choose between camamber oyster & mustard sandwich, banana crickets & wasabi sandwich and broccoli nuts & natchos sandich and have to pick an order of preference.

For more hardcore games, I hearty recommend:

a)Suburbia A tabletop version of SimCity against your friends.

b)The extraordinary adventures of Baron Munchausen, an amazing storytelling game where player is a nobleman/noblewoman in the times of Baron Munchausen and you challenge each other to recount facts of your life: "Pray tell me Archbishop Robert of Titania, is it true that you single-handedly conquered Constantinople using only a peeled grape that his imperial highness's the Sultan's daughter had peelled for you?"

c) Eclipse a 4X hexagonal tile board game of space conquest.

Lords of Waterdeep is fun, and relatively quick pased after everyone has worked out how to play. It's a dnd themed resource management game where you lead a guild to get victory points by completing quests and building buildings. I've never actually looked at the rule book, but had the rule explained to me in around 5 minutes.

Battlestar Galactica, with one rule put in.

Everyone has a can of beer..and anytime an accusation of Cylon is made, joking or serious the accuser has to take a drink.

>.> I want to see this done just to see things go horribly off the rails as people's judgments are slowly made worse and worse.

Rob, what are your thoughts on Hidden Identity games?

See: Avalon and ONU Werewolf

7Wonders

If you haven't tried it, please do. The unique mechanic of everyone building at the same time creates a new twist on the old city-building genre.

Also, very well balanced and beautifully executed

Machi Koro

A light city building card game with lots of dice rolling. Everyones turn could effect everyone else so there is very little down time. Quick to learn and quick to play, well worth a try.

I will second prior comments of Seven Wonders, Lords of Waterdeep, Baron Munchausen, and Pandemic. These are all excellent games, not too intensive mechanically but loads and loads of fun. A caution: Baron Munchausen starts to drift into RPG territory (which is great and I love it to bits); it might not always gel with everyone at the table.

For my own recommendations, I will toss out:

1) Sentinels of the Multiverse. Completely cooperative superheroes game - players each select a premade superhero deck based on entirely new heroes*, then team up to fight a villain. The villain's deck is automated, so that it effectively plays itself, with nobody having to work against the table. Great fun, though it takes some trial and error to get familiar with how a given hero's deck is designed to work. Takes 3-5 players, but 4 players is really the sweet spot.

*many expies of existing heroes, but no less fun. The Wraith = female college-age Batman, Tachyon = Flash plus Mr. Fantastic's science abilities, Ra = Thor, but Egyptian, etc.

2) Shadow Hunters. Team-based game. Monsters and Hunters are trying to wipe each other out, while the Neutrals are bystanders caught in the crossfire with their own weird win conditions. Team affiliations are completely secret, so you have to figure out your allies and enemies through the course of play.

Oh, wow, there are far too many good, simple games to list, but here are two I really love:

Modern Art - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/118/modern-art

Ave Caesar - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/494/ave-caesar

Pandemic has already been mentioned, and Ticket to Ride is also worth looking out for.

My favorite game right now is The DC Comics Deck Building Game.http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/125678/dc-comics-deck-building-game The rulebook is absolutely awful, but once you actually start playing, it's intuitive, easy to learn, and allows for a wide variety of strategies.

I have two recommendations.

First, Civicus Dice Game by PlayCo Games is a fun little dice based territory control game that is currently on Kickstarter until July 8, 2015. The best way to describe it is if civilization and Settlers of Catan had a baby. You build camps, which you up grade into villages and eventually cities. By upgrading you can get more points and potentially remove opponents’ settlements from the board. Location matters a lot because the dice you have and victory points you get depend on what territories you control.

It is currently only a 2 player game that takes about 20-30 minutes to play, but if it gets enough funding it will become a 2-4 player game.

Secondly, Soulfall by Small Box Games is another nice little game. Well, I shouldn’t say nice exactly since it is a very attack oriented game. The players are each a tribe of nomads fighting over land, shards, and the favor of the mysterious “Lords” in a post-apocalyptic landscape. It has a board to mark territory, but the focus of the game is more on manipulating the cards in your hand to play them at the best time to increase your tribes power and influence.

The game has an interesting scoring mechanism. Your score is two sums multiplied together, so it is a balancing act of trying to increase both sides of your equation will reducing your opponents sums. Due to the multiplication and constant changes, scores swing wildly and it is often quite hard to determine who is really in the lead.

As the host of 2 weekly game nights, with a continually shifting group of people with different levels of experience; I wholeheartedly recommend Betrayal at House on the Hill

It's a very simple to learn game, that is completely different every time you play. You're a group of explorers wandering through an old haunted house, when all of a sudden it all goes wrong. It does an incredible job of being easy to get into (The entire first half is literally just "Explore the house, and see what happens") then getting really interesting once the "Haunt" begins.

Ticket to Ride is a fantastic little strategy game. It can feel overwhelming the first time you play, but once you get the hang of it it is fun. Kind of reminds me of Clue in a sense of watching your opponents to try and figure out where they are trying to go, then going out of your way to screw them up and throw off everyone else of where you are attempting to go.

A little more casual is Chronology. It's an absolute must for anyone who loves history, but a lot of times it really comes down to being good at making educated guesses. I haven't played in awhile, but instead of knowing (for example: when Canada Dry was invented) the exact date, you have to put it in chronological order with all other events you have down on the table. It's a fun but simple game.

Kick in the Door, and Grab the Loots...: Munchkin - http://www.worldofmunchkin.com/cardgame/
and/or
The game of Hilarious Comparisons: Apples to Apples - http://shop.mattel.com/family/index.jsp ... Id=3768132

I realise this may qualify as forum Croakamancy, but I DID get here via a link at the front page, so it seemed a safe assumption that this was fair game. If I messed up... oh well. Don't learn without making mistakes.

I'm gonna use my first post on this forum ever to suggest Secret Hitler. It's a social deduction card game in which the goal is to prevent the fascists from coming to power in c.1932 Germany! Unless, of course, you are one of the fascists...

The pros: You can download and print a copy of the game for free at the moment. It's all in greyscale, but it's usable. Update #2 of the Kickstarter involved the release of black-and-white print-and-play PDFs. Requires a little bit of sticky tape and/or glue, but nothing massively strenuous. You can also play it online if you have Tabletop Simulator.
The caveats: It's not actually possible to buy a physical copy of the game yet. The game made it through Kickstarter fairly-recently, and they're not into production phase yet. Possibly the biggest caveat; The game is 5-10 players. Yes, five players MINIMUM. It's not playable with less than that, and really works best with more.