Myrmes allows you to play as an ant colony. In short, you need to put your workers and soldiers to work to make your colony and territory larger, while keeping an eye out for winter when you need to pay a certain amount of food or loose points. Each of the three rounds I had the feeling I was barely surviving, yet at the end of the game you got a nice colony going. Well done game.

keeping with the theme: Hive is a great little 2 player 30min game.

simple and strategic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hive_(game)

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"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Market forces are a good servant but a poor master." - Zaune

Tzolk’in is an innovative worker placement game. Your workers are placed on small cogs which are located around a large central cog. During each round, the central cog is turned, allowing that the workers on the small cogs are moved to different actions. When a worker is removed, the specific action on the cog location is done and usually, the longer a worker stays on a cog, the better the action becomes, so it's a bit of investing time (lots of small actions, or wait for a big one).

CopyCat is a nice hybrid of Agricola (worker placement) and Dominion (deck building) with elections as a theme. The may look ugly (typical to 2F-Spiele imo), but the satirical humor in the game is excellent.

Zombicide may be deserving of the title "best zombie game". Very simple yet fun, and the zombies really feel like zombies.

It has rapidly beocme the only game my student household plays. Although Adam and Chris refuse to play unless I'm playing, since without me to, ahem, "get into the spirit of the game" it's not as fun. This makes me feel smug. Though not as smug as having my survivor wielding two chainsaws at once

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

I enjoyed playing as Machete and taking on a horde of 30 at the street intersection.

"CHOKE ON ME!" *chops*

Ah, the madman El Cholo. We usually let him be our sacrificial goat, until we realised that side from Molotovs he is the only thingthat can kill Abominations. Speeaking of molotovs, my housemate insists that Dave is in fact Sheldon Cooper. Although the thought of Sheldon with molotov cocktails is...alarming to say the least.

As I said above, I like playing as Doug. Being Ambidextrous at the Red level is awesome! First time I used two shotguns which was pretty sweet....but the next time I found the aforementioned two chainsaws. Had a bit of a Gandalf/Picard moment as I stood in the street being charged "You shall not pass! I draw the line: this far, no further!" Like I said, I like to get into character

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

Zombicide looks good but it's stupid expensive here right now (75 euros). Got City of Horror instead.

I've been playing the Star Wars X-wing miniatures game lately.

X-Wing. Fantasy Flight bought up Wings of War, and released a WW-II version. But they also tweaked it and fit it into the star wars universe. Several refinements, as well as customization options. The original wings of war had no real equipment or pilot customization, but the star wars version does, including various pilot options that offer lots of choices. Vader for instance can seriously improve the coordination on your Tie pack. One of the biggest improvements over the original is replacing the movement cards with a movement template. This basically doubles the movement ranges you get each turn, this means that where you would normally spend four or five moves getting into dogfight range, you can be rolling dice and hitting each other within two rounds. Another change is instead of drawing from decks for damage assignment each ship has an evasion and hit rating. You roll hit dice, defender rolls evade dice, evades cancel hits, and the remaining hits plink away at shields or hull points; with crits dealing system disabling damage (like the old smoke or burn cards from Wings of War). The skirmishes are quite fun, in general the numbers on the table are about 3 TIEs to 2 X-wings, and it makes for some fun fights, as the more maneuverable TIEs usually end up sacrificing a wing mate to get into pursuit position on the slower rebel units. I've never really gotten into collecting Wings of War (although I'll happily play other people's sets), and I probably won't collect them, similarly my board-gaming friends that already have W.o.W. probably won't pick this up, but have jumped right in and understood it easily. Hopefully some of the refinements from X-Wing will work their way into Wings of War, the movement templates for instance make the game much smoother. The game really shines when it comes to playing point games, trade offs of equipment and pilot rating are quite fun.

Only real downside about my experience; Fantasy flight has released several collectible series (Lord of the Rings Card game, Warhammer invasion, to name a few), which they have nicknamed Living Card Games, instead of needing to filter through booster packs to get the card (or figure in some cases) you need you just buy the booster and get all of the cards in that expansion, to make up for this generosity Fantasy Flight will pick a good card that should form the basis of a good deck in the starter set and give you one of it, so in order to play as competitively as you'd like most people end up getting 2 or 3 starter sets of a lot of these Fantasy Flight games. X-wing seems to be along the same vein; the army building aspect of the game is quite fun, but in order to get enough of the equipment, and hulls, most people are going to need two sets. That's not that horrible, just a warning for anyone who's thinking of trying it.

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The rain it falls on all alike
Upon the just and unjust fella'
But more upon the just one for
The Unjust hath the Just's Umbrella

I just got 4 boxes of Catan.... now if only I could tap into my evil imagination and we could have The Doom that came to Catan.....

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The scariest folk song lyrics are "My Boy Grew up to be just like me" from cats in the cradle by Harry Chapin

I love Catan, but I can never get it on the table

Been playing it and it's quite good.

Zombiecide is (as I have stated before) a great game that is highly addictive (at least to the astronomer sci-fi-nerd students I hand out with). Relatively simple, easy learning curve but great fun nonetheless.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

It's got a ton of scenarios (both official and user-made) too.

Finally got to play Tikal, an area control game that's quite brilliant in its simplicity.

Does anyone know of any good board games built around stock trading and such?

I'm after something like Wall Street/Margin Call: The Game.

I bought my friend two core sets, two TIE X1 Advanced starfighters, an extra TIE fighter and a Y-Wing for Christmas. We've been playing a few games off and on Christmas day and just earlier today. I chose the expansions according to the builds suggested on FFG's site. And just yesterday my friend picked up two X-wings. I have to say it was really fun. You can learn the basics of the game by watching a 15 minute tutorial on their site as well as playing the quick start version of the game. We did that a couple of times before we moved to the regular game.

Honestly, I didn't have too much luck using the elite Imperial list. I found that I have less defense points than his X-Wing swarm (16 versus 20) and less attacks on average (8 versus 12). In a battle of attrition, the elite Imperial list seems to statistically lose out to the rebel swarm. In one of these games, I decided to concentrate all my fire from four TIEs of various makes on one X-wing, and ended up taking down only his shields... Got walloped later on that resulted in a rebel victory.

Alternatively, the Imperial swarm seems to be more evenly matched with the rebel swarm than the elite Imperial list; 20 hull/shield points versus 16, and 12 attacks on average versus 8. Pretty much matches the X-Wing swarm with the exception that because there are more ships in the Imp swarm than the rebel one, you get more chances to hit since you can basically get more focus tokens. And losing one TIE only deprives you of 2 attacks. Played the swarm for the last game. Couldn't finish though since time ran out. Only got to round three. However, I had at least taken down some of the shielding on three of the X-wings, and had inflicted one hull damage on one. Conversely, he had only taken down one shield point off of Darth and one hull point off a noob TIE pilot even after using all his target locks and proton torpedoes. So we ended the game prematurely with me being slightly better off than he. As an aside, that last game was where I finally got to try cluster missiles. It had stats of three attacks that could be made twice in one phase. I rolled six damage dice and whiffed on all of them... Yes, we seem to get horrible dice rolls... In any case, the game's a lot of fun, especially since we also had the Star Wars marathon on Spike TV playing in the background.

Too bad I missed out on the Kessel Run event. Could have played with other folks and maybe had a chance to win second wave expansion packs. Well, maybe not much of a chance considering my dice rolls...

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Dear Lord, the gods have been good to me. As an offering, I present these milk and cookies. If you wish me to eat them instead, please give me no sign whatsoever *pauses* Thy will be done *munch munch munch*. - Homer Simpson

You might want to check out Black Friday. I've tried it and it's from the same designer as Power Grid.

A bit on the cynical side though, as the game's premise is that you're trying to ride a stock bubble to fortune (by earning as much money as possible and then turning that money into more secure gold / silver holdings before the market crashes).

Played a couple of games of Suburbia now and it's really neat. Tile Laying game meets Sim City. Easy to explain in 15 minutes but gameplay is deep enough to be a brainburner. All about to find the right equilibrium between population, income and popularity + end-goals for extra flavour.

Well, plyed my second game of BSg now that my housemate has it. It was just as fun as I remembered. I thought we were royally screwed when Apollo revealed himself as a Cylon and threw me (Adama, both Admiral and President) in the brig. Fortunately Baltar pulled us out of the fire with a forced jump to win the game. Galactica was in bad shape though.

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

Thanks Zinegata. I'll look out for it.

As another question, has anyone played Die Macher?

After an afternoon of sorting, cutting and pasting, I've managed to fit my Dominion collection into a wine box. I'm quit happy with the results and much more compact compared to the 6 separate boxes.

Well, that was an entertaining game of BSG. Managed to screw up the loyalty deck so all three of us were Cylons, although each of us thought we were the only Cylon. Eventually we managed to get the Galactica destroyed. Mwahahaha!

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You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

I never played Die Macher myself, but some friends have and they did not find it a very happy experience. Too long and complex for the payoff it gives.