An Old-School Board Game Goes Viral Among Silicon Valley's Techie Crowd
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Of course, the luck in Settlers is actually why it appeals to people. Nobody likes feeling like they lost because they played poorly or because somebody else is better than they are. That said, there are games like Carcassonne and Ticket To Ride that actually balance luck and skill, and so help to provide that social insurance against feeling pathetic while still making the time spent making decisions actually feel like it was worth something.
There are lots of great board games out there, check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame. I like Puerto Rico myself although I would say it's too tactical to be a good simulation of running a business.
Update: I haven't played it yet but "Power Grid" is on my purchase list and probably would be good for the entrepreneurial types. There is a "Board games with Scott" video on it (with the designer, cool).
(It's true that if you get the initial placement wrong enough you're pretty much screwed for the rest of the game, but I don't often observe that happening except to first-time players, so I try to help newbies set up. One exception is when a couple of players deliberately box you into a corner at the start so you can't expand, but I don't see that happen much.)
What I find interesting about Settlers is that while every player is susceptible to chance, you can control how much so. You can choose to bet strongly on certain resources or strategies, or try and spread yourself around so that most rolls of the dice get you something and you can gain points in multiple ways.
I hear good poker players sometimes lose hands purely due to a run of bad luck, but if you think poker is "largely all due to luck", you're probably doing it wrong.
My one pain point is that people who are indecisive about trading make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon, since play slows... to... a... crawl.
For me Settlers is at the sweet spot for board games where "casual" and "serious" intersect. You can play it with non-gamers, games last an hour and a half (Monopoly never finishes that quickly!), and pretty much everyone enjoys it on their first play and understands it on their second. On the other hand, board game geeks happily play it and the game rewards skill. It scales well with player experience.
The rules are no more complicated, either. Just make sure you're getting them right so that balance isn't thrown off, which can make the game not fun. Play a few games online at http://games.asobrain.com/ where the program will teach you the correct rules.
This is why I like skill-based yet luck-dependent games like Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. Even if you're 150 points behind in Scrabble, there's always the chance you're going to get two great racks in a row. And even if you're six pie-slices behind in Trivial Pursuit there's always the chance that you'll get a long run of questions you happen to know the answers to.
The diplomacy aspects of this simple card game don't become apparent until you start playing.
As for the humor on the cards, you'll have seen it all in two plays (especially since the game drags on for a while). This explains the healthy market for expansion sets.
I'd also recommend Tigris and Euphrates, Ra, Puerto Rico, and a host of other "German-style" games.
Does anybody know of a good tactical game, preferably playable by two people who used to have time for Risk and Monopoly, that can be finished generally in about an hour?
It's designed so that the longer the games goes, the more likely it is to end. Also, three seems to be a reasonable minimum number of people for a "social" game.