Personal favorites:

• Spartacus - Perfectly captures the essence of the gratuitous Starz series. You take the role of Domin(us/a) of a Ludus, a school of gladiators, and strive to become the most influential in the city. You do so by bidding against competing players to acquire talented gladiators/slaves/equipment, using them to win gladiatorial combat against others in The Arena, and of course conspiring against your fellow Domini when they’ve overstepped their bounds.

If you do play this game make sure to use “the blue dice variant” for combat which fixes the main flaw with combat. The game length is also very adjustable by changing the amount of influence a player needs to win so you can go for an epic 3-4 hour game or a quick 1-2 hour phone booth knife fight.

I can’t say enough about how much I love this game. It’s always a good and loud time with players constantly interacting in often literally pokey ways :>

• Lords of Waterdeep - A relatively vanilla worker placement game with a pasted on D&D theme but my favorite way to introduce people into the world of hobbyist board games. The game is very well done and so simple to teach so folks can stop learning and get playing fast. Literally have a few workers to place each round on spaces to get the things. Use those things to complete quests to get points. After 8 rounds whomever has the most points wins.

It’s always gone over well with new players and I personally still enjoy the game but with some expansions that add a bit more crunch to things!

• Quest for El Dorado - A deck building race through the jungle that’s incredibly easy to teach and a favorite of younger kids (6+) getting into the hobby. You use various cards you acquire to get through the different terrain types of the jungle before your opponents do or use them to acquire even better cards. The skill in this game comes from being able to survey the path ahead and acquire the right cards to most efficiently get you through your desired path and knowing when it’s time to stop focusing on building your deck and just race.

• Just One - Incredibly approachable even for people that aren’t into hobbyist board games. One person trying to guess the mystery word using one word clues given by the other players (works best with 4+ players). The catch is any duplicated clues are removed so you’ve got to think of clues no one else is likely to use! We often round out our board game nights with this if there’s at least 15 minutes to spare!