Waiting for the price of
Terra Mysticato come down, but then I'll be grabbing that game for sure. Keep the reviews/recommendations coming!
Haven't played The Resistance: Avalon (never been a huge fan of the Werewolf/Mafia style games), but if you like LoW and Tzolk'in, I expect you will *love* Terra Mystica. I have been playing that game like mad. Probably my favorite game to come out in years. Pure strategy (the game has a semi randomized setup, but after that, there's no randomness or hidden information), resource management, multiple factions with distinct strategies for winning, good theme, potential to play relatively quickly once you have it down (depending on group) It hits all the right notes for me.
Some of my favorite games are:
Most of the Uwe Rosenberg games (Agricola, Le Havre, Ora et Labora especially), though I veer from the crowd a bit and prefer
Le Havreto the widely regaled Agricola. It's an excellent resource chain game. You use buildings to turn resources into other resources, and eventually into victory points, all while keeping an ever increasing demand for food under control. Has some of the multiplayer solitaire problems you see in this genre, but it's partially mitigated by being able to use other players buildings (for a fee)
Caylus. An older worker placement game with lots of moving parts about building a castle in France in the 1300s. Another strong economy/resource chain game with lots to think about every turn.
On a less hardcore gamer-game note, I've got a soft spot for
Sentinels of the MultiverseIt's a cooperative superhero game. The art is a little goofy, and it's highly random and not entirely balanced, but it captures the theme of the superhero genre. Every player gets to pick the deck of the superhero they choose, then you pick a villain to fight against, represented by another deck, and the environment you're fighting them, which is yet another deck. The villain and environment decks play themselves. You just draw the top card and do what it says. The superhero turns are effectively playing a card, using a power, and then drawing. With all the expansions, you've got a wide range of characters to play against or as, and the villains are very disparate. Each villain also has an easy and hard mode, so you can notch up the challenge. It's a simple game, but there can be a *lot* to keep track of once there's several cards out on the table, each modifying game state in a different way.
I think anything by Vlaada Chvatil is worth looking at. I like all of his games that I've played, in very different ways.
Mage Knightis a hardcore fantasy game that can be played competitively or cooperatively depending on the scenario you pick about running around a map, finding treasure, fighting bad guys, leveling up, etc.
Galaxy Truckeris probably Vlaada's lightest game. It comes in two main parts. First there is a timed tile placement phase where both players are drawing pieces of spaceships from a central pool and making ships out of them as quickly as possible. Then all players go through a quick race phase where your ship is tested by asteroids, space pirates, invading aliens, etc. and you watch it all fall apart.
Dungeon Lordsis a serious hardcore gamer game about being an evil overlord and constructing a dungeon to foil the obnoxious heroes who try to invade it every season, all while competing against your fellow dungeon overlords. I'm really not joking about this being for serious gamers only. There are a series of tutorials you need to go through to even begin to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various monsters and traps and have some idea of how to fend off the heroes, and the game is so tightly balanced that any wrong move in the early game is going to ruin you. Not for the faint of heart. There's sort of a sister game set in the same universe called
Dungeon Petzspecifically about raising monsters and dealing with their demands. Slightly less hard to grasp, but still probably too convoluted and brutal for non-gamers.
His other big game is called
Space Alert. This is a timed cooperative game with an interesting gimick. The game comes with a series of audio tracks, and while you play the game, the audio will do things like tell you what trajectory enemy ships are appearing on, things that have gone wrong on your ship, emit crackles of static, indicating that you can't talk to other players because your comms are down, etc. So while the audio track is playing you are trying to work with your fellow players to plot out how to deal with the various threats. You do this by laying out movement cards, very much in the style of Robo-Rally. Once the audio track is over, you go through and actually execute the turns you plotted out and see how hilariously poorly you did. The game provides several learning tutorials where it steadily introduces new mechanics. It is very, very, very tense. You effectively need to plot out the entire game while the audio is constantly yelling at you and emitting annoying siren noises. I tried to play this solitaire once and I think I almost had an aneurysm.
Another designer whose games I will pretty much always buy sight unseen is Stefan Feld. He's very good at developing games based around interesting systems. His best rated at the moment is called
The Castles of Burgundy. Every turn you roll dice and the dice restrict what actions you can take. If you have a 5 you can take one of the tiles available in the 5 section or use one of the tiles you have set aside and place it in the 5 section of your palace, and so on and so forth. There are also resources available that let you modify your roll, so you're not entirely at the mercy of the dice. I generally like more strategy than luck in my games, so the fact that I like this is telling.
My favorite Feld game is
Trajan. Trajan is set during the Roman Empire, and you're all Roman leaders trying to accumulate power (ie, victory points) in a variety of ways. The interesting gimmick of Trajan is that set the central mechanic that determines what action you do every turn is essentially a game of mancala. You have a series of bowls that each contain two different colored markers at the beginning of the game. Each bowl is associated with an action. On your turn, you pick up all of the markers in one bowl and then place one in each bowl clockwise of the bowl you picked them up from. Then you take the action of the bowl you placed the last marker in. This is really interesting, because it means that your past actions influence what actions will be available to you in the future in a completely deterministic, but not incredibly obvious way.
I could probably go on for hours, but I'm sure I'm already into TL;DR territory.
