Sample of cool things I found out:

- Hanabi is now the "frontier of AI research" with both FB/DeepMind working on it

- Magic the Gathering is Turing complete

- Kingdomino is NP-hard

- There is published endgame research for RISK (similar to how you have endtables in chess)

- There's a lot of interesting research on catan and monopoly. Monopoly seems to have a lot of research around teaching language-skills to kids, in particular.

- There is research on generating new maps for Ticket to Ride!

- Lots of interesting research on 2048, the mobile game.

- There is a mathematical model for Mafia.