Chat 3 pm EDT on the four-letter. ESPN 710 Seattle at 2 pm PDT. AllNight later on tonight. Waiting for confirmation but I should be on ESPN 1250 Pittsburgh tomorrow at around 11 am EDT.
Back when I did my original post on board games, several readers recommended Puerto Rico
The game takes a while to explain but is very simple to play. In each round, there are phases (one per player) that allow players to build new buildings, produce goods, sell goods they’ve produced, or draw extra cards from the deck. The cards serve several functions: a player can use them to pay for buildings, a player can build the building on the card’s face if he has enough cards, and a player can stash them under a Chapel to sock away some bonus points for the end of the game. The game ends when one player has built twelve buildings in his settlement, after which the player with the most points is the winner. Having the most buildings doesn’t mean you’ll have the most points, as different buildings have different point values, and some buildings are worth bonus points based on what else each player has in his settlement.
Once you’ve started the game, it’s easy to follow and moves pretty quickly; as you add to your settlement, the rate at which you can produce, build, and sell improves, since each building has some bonus feature like reducing the cost of certain buildings or allowing you to produce an extra good during the production phase. All of the other two-player games we regularly play take far longer, so it’s great to have a fun alternative when it’s late and we want to play something fast.
The game also has a good mix of strategy and luck. There are clearly better and worse ways to build your settlement, and you have to make major decisions like whether to build another production building or whether to start building the violet-card buildings, which have the bonus features I mentioned above and are generally worth more points. You have to decide which cards in your hand to use as currency and which to keep so you can ultimately play and build them. The prices of goods change slightly from turn to turn, leading to sell-or-wait decisions. But you’re also at the mercy of the cards you draw, making the game different each time but also perhaps preventing you from always using the same strategy.
And since it’s just a big deck of cards and a few cardboard pieces to mark phases and prices, it’s extremely portable, which never hurts.
I still have to write about Carcassonne, after which it’ll be time to revise the board game rankings.
is the simplest, even with 
. The game board shows the U.S. and Canada, with about 30 cities connected by train tracks of varying lengths. Each player receives 45 trains and begins with a handful of “destination tickets,” with two cities and a point value that represents the minimum number of trains required to connect them; if you complete a route between two cities on a ticket, no matter how convoluted the path, you receive the number of points shown on the card, but if you fail to complete it, you lose that many points. (You do have some flexibility around the tickets you keep.) The tracks come in different colors, and you have to collect train cards of each color to be able to lay trains on those tracks; the longer the track between two adjacent cities, the more points you receive for placing trains on it. Of course, the tracks between cities are limited, so you may end up blocked from your intended route. There’s also a bonus for the longest continuous route (regardless of tickets), and in the “Mega” game variant, a bonus for completing the most tickets. It’s a pretty simple concept and everyone we’ve introduced to the game has picked it up pretty quickly, but the game is completely different each time because of the mix of tickets you receive and the way the board develops. A complete game with two people takes 30-45 minutes; a complete game with four people takes an hour or so.
, which brings the same basic mechanics to a new map, that of Europe in the early 20th century, but with several twists to make game play more complex. The differences include routes through “tunnels” (where the exact number of train cards required isn’t known until after you start building, so you may have to use as many as three extra cards) and “ferries” (which require the use of locomotives, which are otherwise wild cards that represent every color), and train stations that allow you to use someone else’s route between two adjacent cities as part of your own larger route. I found it to be slower to develop, but it requires more route-planning strategy, and the flexibility of the stations means it’s easier to adjust on the fly.
. This map is smaller, designed for two or three people using 40 trains each (you use the trains and train cards from the Europe set, so the Switzerland expansion just comes with the board and new tickets). It was obviously issued hastily, as the instructions are woefully incomplete. Many tickets are extremely short – some require just two trains – which means you end spending a lot of time pulling new tickets, and you will almost certainly end up blocked by an opponent at some point during the game. A smaller board for a quicker game sounded appealing to us, but this implementation didn’t work for me.
. Used to love this game, and the simplicity of it leads to a fair amount of strategy in the setup, but the gameplay itself is pretty heavily determined by luck. It’s probably the most dated of the games on my list, but has the advantage of being very easy for kids to learn.
. Haven’t played this one in a while, unlike the others on the list. The Acquire game board is a grid, on which you place tiles (hotels) to form chains. You can also buy stock in chains and engineer mergers or takeovers by placing tiles that connect certain chains. Once all chains on the board are “safe” – meaning they’re too big to merge – or one chain has reached 41 or more tiles, the game ends, shares are liquidated, and whoever has the most money wins. The version I have includes a two-person variation, but Wikipedia says the newest edition of the game only includes the standard 3-6 person rules.
. We bought this game on a trip to Austria in 2003, which meant getting the German rules, which meant I had to translate them … so who knows if we really played it correctly. But it was fun. It’s a fairly simple two-person game where each player is trying to build temples using five “tribes” at his disposal, but at the same time that you’re building, you’re using those tribes to try to slow down your opponent’s building or knock down his temples entirely. Our favorite move was the “Wanderung,” where you can make one of your opponent’s tribes wander off.
. Tough not to include the granddaddy of them all. I hate all the “special editions,” though. Leave Boardwalk alone.
. Different type of game entirely from the others here – this is a “party game,” and maybe the only one I really liked. For those of you old enough to remember the TV game show Password, Taboo takes that general format (one person gives clues, the rest of his team has to guess the keyword), but adds the twist that there are five words the clue-giver can’t say. The challenge of trying to describe something without saying the five most obvious words is what makes Taboo fun. Our friend Pete was a whiz at giving clues because he had an endless supply of bad pop songs and commercial jingles on which to rely.
. Described by one friend of mine as “Risk for grownups,” Diplomacy requires seven players, but removes the luck element entirely after the initial setup. Players represent the seven “great powers” of Europe, set in 1900 (although there are endless variations), and must scheme, ally, attack, and backstab their way towards control of at least half of the map. The rules are incredibly simple, and there are a few thriving online communities of “Diplo” players, although playing online means that the normal etiquette of live play (such as “don’t stab the guy you just allied with thirty seconds ago”) goes out the window.
. I guess this is part party game, but it’s more clever than most games in that genre. On each turn, one player becomes the “reader” and reads the first half of an incredibly obscure (but real) proverb. The other players have to fabricate plausible or funny second halves, while the reader writes down the real conclusion to the proverb, after which, all players must guess which conclusion is the correct one. You get points for getting it right, and for fooling other players, while the biggest bonus goes to the reader who reads all the completions so convincingly that no one gets the right answer. It’s like Balderdash, but the opportunities for silly answers are greater, and the problem with Balderdash is that you can often guess the definitions by looking at word roots.
. Another German board game – Germany seems to be where all the good games are designed these days – Metro is almost comically simple. Players compete to build the longest subway lines on a grid that represents the city of Paris. There are different types of tiles, some of which include straight tracks, while others include all manner of twists. You can extend your own tracks on your turn, or you can use a tile to screw someone else. The game ends when all tiles are played; the player with the longest total track lengths across all of his lines wins.
. It’s not the simplest game on the list, but it’s the smartest, and it’s simple and quick enough to teach someone by playing a game with them, after which they’ll probably be hooked. Three or four players compete to settle the island of Catan, which involves tough decisions about placing settlements, trading for resources, developing units or towns, and overall strategy. There’s not much confrontation, and players are never eliminated. The first player to reach 10 “victory points” – achieved through a combination of building towns or cities, building the longest road, raising the largest army, or special one-point cards – wins. The game was such a success that there are multiple add-ons, including 
, as well as a very good 
(since the board game requires three players).
, and I see that 
is the hot new German game of the year, but haven’t played any of them (yet).