Citadels: A game of repeatedly drafting different secret roles while trying to puzzle out what your opponents have taken. I don't know how to describe it in a w

Citadels: A game of repeatedly drafting different secret roles while trying to puzzle out what your opponents have taken. I don't know how to describe it in a way that makes it sound exciting, except to say that it can be very tense and interactive. The box says 2-7 players, but I don't recommend it with more than three. Codenames: A fun word association party game. The play area is a grid of 25 words, and two teams compete to identify their team's words based on clues from their "spymaster". It's a good game for large groups, and has lead to many amusing stories we still talk about months later. Bohnanza is a classic trading game. You're trying to plant beans, and to do that best, you want to play multiple copies of the same bean card in a row. The hitch is that you must play cards in order, and you can't rearrange your hand. You need to trade with other players to wind up with a workable hand. Sol: Last Days of a Star: This game has some really cool mechanics. Honestly I think it's probably the most exciting euro of the decade. You launch "sundivers" to build infrastructure and exploit the resources of the sun. But your infrastructure can be used by all the other players, who share with you some of its benefits. Your mothership from which your sundivers are launched is constantly moving. You need to carefully time your actions so your sundivers don't waste time flying across the map, or sit idle in the hold. And the game's clock is controlled by players. The deeper you move into the sun, the faster you bring about its destruction, and the end of the game. Brass (Lancashire) is another mid-heavyweight euro with a cool shared infrastructure mechanic. You're all industrialists in the English midlands circa 1800. Your build factories and mines. What's cool is that these industries do nothing until you can find a market for them, and that market is often generated by the other players. You can build a coal mine, for example, knowing that everybody is soon going to need lots of coal for their railroads, or corner the market in ports and profit when other players go to ship their cotton. But it's also possible to misjudge demand, or be to late to market, and find that your developments are completely worthless. High Frontier is my favorite simulation-type game. It's about industrializing the solar system. You can build all kinds of rockets (chemical, electric, nuclear, solar heated steam, solar sails, mass drivers...) to fly factory components out to asteroids, moons, or planets, possibly stopping to refuel along the way, if your rocket is equipped for that. The rocket equation is modeled, along with different efficiencies for different kinds of thrusters. The map is innovative in how it presents the trade-offs between delta-v and time for various missions. It's also gorgeous: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2585121/high-frontier-third-edition https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2585121/high-frontier-third-...