A small gamespace setup with Dominion, or 7 wonders (parallel turns, multiple paths to victory) are better intros imo.
Sushi Go! is another good "getting people into not-awful board games" game.
I'd counter the recommendation with something like
Also not surprised to hear that our group isn't the only ones playing a "Razz" (poker variant where you try for the weakest hand) variant of Sushi Go.
I found reversing points to make the game chaotic and more casual.
Looking into buying a dungeon crawler now (cool map and miniatures preferred) and another game like 7 Wonders, perhaps Puerto Rico.
Can you recommend any games?
Dominion. The strategy arises from observing how the specific cards that are part of any given game interact with each other.
Agricola. There's a lot of "designed" complexity here too, but a good deal more arises, particularly when you look at planning the critical eight first actions, and the path to the first additional family member.
Tigris and Euphrates is an old classic that has very few tile types to place, but they result in complex outcomes. I can't say very much about it because I only played it once on a game show, but it's on my to-buy list.
Neuroshima Hex! is a bit nerdy looking, but it's simple without expansions. Retro apocalyptic setting with mutants and evil robots. A knife fight in a telephone booth, plays well up to 4 players. You fill up the hexagonal board with your troops (they mostly don't move) rotating them so that they will hit the most enemies. Then it either fills up completely or one of players plays Battle token, and everything goes off like a chain reaction. Units hit in melee or shoot in order of their initiative. High interaction, tight mechanics. Most people prefer it as a duel game though. You can play it online too.
(There is no "beginner's luck" in boardgames. There's "rule explainer's curse". The player doing the explaining is distracted, not just by explaining but also watching over anyone and often plays badly).
There's probably a more comprehensive list somewhere on BGG (Board Game Geek), but the website is so hard to use I can't find it...
There are more accessible and more strategically meaningful ways to introduce player interaction into a game.
The most promising sign is that most people want to play it again.
Nice depth of strategy as well. Probably my favorite game in years.
All that said, I almost always use an expansion or two (or three) to keep things varied and add depth.
Then there's the management of liquidity of meeples through the lifecycle of the game. You want to invest a lot, early; but you need to try and get them back towards the endgame, so you can steal fields and place in micro-fields.
There's a surprising amount of subtlety that emerges from the gameplay. In particular, learning how different growth patterns make your resources easier or harder to steal, or worse, block from completion.
Learning all the tiles, and tile counting, both just seemed too dull and annoying to actually do.
It is a fun game if nobody learns the tiles :)
1. Is someone else about to win the game? Reserve their card if possible. 2. Can you buy a card? Buy the highest point value card you can. 3. Will taking two chips win the game? If no, take 3.
Splendor is all about efficiency (Which is why taking 2 chips is baaaad. Reserving is situationally good, but usually bad.) At higher player counts, the most efficient player almost always wins. At 2 players, reserving becomes much more strategic and isn't such a generally terrible action.
Side strategic note: Aim for the nobles with the most overlap with each other.
That said, there are games that level the playing field without yielding entirely to chance; such as Dixit, where advantages are rather gained from knowing the other players.
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Board_Game_Gift_Guid...
I found it particularly useful to start with games that are good for two players. That way, you need to find only one other person who can be bothered to learn the rules.
Telling someone how to play a game and then going through the motions of playing isn't really fun. Most of the fun is trying things for yourself and figuring stuff out. If a game (like Catan) doesn't allow players to do this, then where is the fun?
Games have a lot of things that are fun.
If I'm a rookie playing chess against someone who knows the game, I don't stand a chance without some pointers along the way -- no fun, for me. I'd much prefer to be taught basic strategy (common forks, "walking the king" to end a game, traditional openings) than struggle through it on my own. That's because the interesting/fun part of chess, for me, is the execution. Of course, I wouldn't want to be told every move, especially once I learned the basics.
Catan (C&K expansion) has only 3 strategies I can think of off the top of my head: Expansion, Development, and Resource Monopolization (typically Sheep Empire, since if another player gets gets enough yellow cards, your wheat or ore monopoly is suddenly an oligopoly instead). Even with the randomness of the starting board, it's not hard to figure out what the best strategy would be, so I don't mind if someone teaches me. The interesting/fun parts are the politics and improvisation that happen when you add other players and it's no longer possible to execute the perfect strategy.
Dominion has much less PvP (your interaction is limited to attack cards and competition over a limited supply of cards) but a wide variety of strategies[1]. With an expansion or two, you probably won't play with the same exact set of action cards more than once, unless you choose to. So while I'd appreciate a veteran giving me some pointers in general ("Don't forget about coins, even if they're less exciting than action cards", "Don't buy VPs early; they'll just clog up your deck"), I'd prefer to figure out my card combination strategy for that game on my own.
Spider Solitaire is strategic like chess (it's fun to try to spot good moves). However, you're fighting incomplete information instead of an opponent -- there's fun in deciding when to deal and how to arrange the board beforehand. Lost Cities is fun for similar reasons, but includes a bit of PvP, mostly competition like Dominion; Stratego takes the PvP up another notch, putting it somewhere between chess and Dominion.
Risk, like chess, is PvP with static starting conditions. However, like Catan, it has a very limited set of strategies. There's variance in rolls of the dice, but it's mostly luck and adds little strategy, so it's only fun for the politics (ever tried 1v1 Risk? Boring). Lux Delux (Risk computer game) is more fun because it allows you to choose from a wide variety of maps, giving it a similar appeal to Dominion (trying to figure out which countries are best, where to stockpile troops and how many, etc).
Or maybe the simplest example: some people want to figure out how to solve a Rubik's cube on their own; others prefer improving their speed.
[1]: You might nitpick that Dominion actually has similarly few strategies but much more varied starting conditions; either way, the main attraction is figuring out which strategy to use this time around.
I have never won a game using expansion alone, but once I did win without ever building a third settlement. I ignored wood and brick altogether, and got largest army and longest road (to nowhere). Everyone else was expanding, and thought I was no threat.
Also it can be over in 15-30 min, so it's easy to play a couple sessions.
With 4 players, you have to weather 3 rounds of potential attacks to get the 2 stars for endurance, whereas in a 2 player game, you only need to survive one round of potential attacks to get the bonus. Furthermore, as you are yielding more often in order to not-die, other players are getting a star for it, so the advantage is less.
"Codenames Duet" though is an example of a co-operative game where the two teams are working together but have to make their own decisions - it's also very easy to pick up for new players, I highly recommend it.
Co-operative games are a tonne of fun but they tend to have complex mechanics and a bit of a set-up time in the beginning. This may be a discouraging factor but they are a lot of fun because everyone comes out of it with a sense of accomplishment after having done something together (if you win of course).
All the good aspects in one.
And any one can get a come back at any time. Hasn't this ever happened to you? You get a lot of sheep/wool, you build a 2:1 sheep port, and exchange all the sheep for stone, etc to upgrade to cities, and so on?
Ever play Dominion with a kid? Their slow shuffling kills.