Ask HN: What board game do you like?

Also note that boardgamers consider Settlers to have once been something but that its time has passed -- they feel it has too much randomness due to the dice and can go on too long.

As for games worth considering, it depends on the types of people playing, their interests and how much time they want to devote to a game (as an extreme example, Twilight Imperium is supposed to be a deep, rich experience, but it takes 10+ hours to play).

Anyway, with that in mind, some suggestions I hope prove helpful in getting your collection started. All these games have entries at BoardGameGeek.com. There are reviews there and/or video reviews/playthroughs to get a feel for them.

Anyway, here we go:

Main Games

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7 Wonders -- on the lighter end, this one goes over well -- it's a gateway game, possibly the Catan of our time. All types of gamers are open to playing it. The game plays 7 (I think 8 with an expansion) and games can be played in 30 - 40 minutes each, so you can find yourself playing 3 games back-to-back. There are 2 or 3 official expansions to keep it fresh. Probably worth having in the collection.

Lords of Waterdeep: another lighter game which is a popular D&D-themed worker-placement game.

Dominion: perhaps a little bit more complex, but not by very much; it's a modern classic which popularized the deck-building mechanic. It's all about looking at a tableau of cards available for use during the game and figuring out which combos will enable one to succeed -- analytical types tend to be good at this. It has a lot of expansions (people shy away from the small ones and go for Intrigue, Prosperity and perhaps the newest/last, Dark Ages) and can play up to 6 or so.

Agricola: a classic worker-placement game that adds a bit of Dominion-like thinking about creating good card-combos. It has a lot of replay value -- and there are various expansion decks, etc. to add variety. It plays up to 5. It takes a bit of getting into though -- there's a learning curve to understand the various card-combinations in addition to learning which actions to take when.

For some people, this game is something of a cult.

Other more games that have been very popular lately include:

Tzolk'in: a recently-published ingeniously-fashioned worker-placement game with interlocking gears on the board that represent the movement of time (tzolk'in is the name of the Mayan calendar and the game came out in 2012, when that was in the news). You put your workers on the gears and the longer you leave them, the better stuff they'll be able to get or do. But you don't have many, so you'll need to pull them off in order to put them elsewhere. People are drawn to this one.

Battlestar Galactica -- a cooperative game with a traitor mechanic -- you're trying to get to Caprica but one or more players may be a Cylon. There's a lot of player interaction and it's tense. There are people addicted to this one. It has 2 expansions.

Space Alert: a very social game where you are trying to run a spaceship with the other players while various threats are coming in -- you talk through what you want everyone to do but play your action-cards face down and then, after the mission's 10 minutes are up (there are soundtracks for them, announcing where various threats show up, etc.), everyone reveals their action cards and you get to see if everyone did what they planned to do at the proper time or if your ship dies because someone didn't get power to the laser cannon when you were trying to fire it or didn't get to the ship's computer to jiggle the mouse to make the screensaver go away...it's a fun, humorous game and it has an expansion to add playability.

Galaxy Trucker: by the same designer as Space ...