yay board/card games! I've been getting steadily more into these, as several of our friends are board game geeks, and my wife has shown a marked interest in board games that she does not harbor for video games.
We play the hell out of some Apples to Apples, mostly with variant rules. One of our favorite variants is to mix the red cards that are submitted, deal them back out, and force each player to argue their case for the card they receive. A successful case earns the arguer a point and the originator of the card a point. If by chance you get your own card, you can score double points. Hilarity often ensues, and we're left with some epic-level bullshitting. One of my best ever was successfully arguing that "Being In a Coma" was the best match for "Blissful", by way of comparison to Buddhist nirvana. My wife is infamous for using her own idiosyncratic "logic" as a judge. Such as picking "Beets" over "Berlin, 1945" for "Dangerous" because:
1. You could choke on a beet. And they stain everything.
2. She doesn't like Nazis and doesn't know WWII history.
We recently played a French game called Dixit, which is similar to Apples to Apples in a lot of ways. Each player has a hand of cards with surrealistic artwork on them. On each player's turn, they make up a sentence (or in our variant, even just a phrase or a single word) that in some fits or describes the art on their card. Each player then puts down a card, they're shuffled, and then turned face up. All the other players record which card they think was the speaker's. If they ALL get it right, they get point but the speaker doens't. If NONE of them get it right, nobody gets points. If some get it right, then those who get it right gets points, and the speaker gets points for each person who guessed correctly. And, if somebody guessed your card, you get points even if you weren't the speaker. Thus, you have to be ambiguous enough that it's not obvious but not so obscure that nobody gets it. And you're hoping that somebody has a card that sorta could be a match for what you're going to say. It's really cool when you have a very literate crowd playing.
Other than that, some favorite games I've played:
SmallWorld
Gloom
Shadow Hunters
Risk: Lord of the Rings Edition (adds some major wrinkles such as heroes, and the hunt for the Ringbearer)