Board games!

Growing up, I had a board game night with my family, where we played the classic family games like Clue, Sorry!, etc. I started to get into the more obscure 80's & 90's games like Nightmare and HeroQuest, but I rarely had anyone to play them with (I grew up in the middle of nowhere).

I set board games mostly aside until college, when a roommate showed me Dominion and Cosmic Encounter, which are now perhaps my two favorite games. Now that there's a resurgence in board games, there's a lot more variety, and you're able to find games even in Barnes & Noble. You can get the basic sets for Dominion, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and more just in a bookstore, and of course specialty game stores offer a ton more.

There are a ton of great games out there, some simple, some very complex. Carcassonne is simple as pie to learn, and Descent: Journeys in the Dark is more like a dungeon-crawling RPG. There's a huge variety of board games genres, too. Heck, there's tons of games just about trains and railroads! (And I have no idea why.)

If you've only ever played family board games, and that's your comfort zone, I recommend trying Carcassonne out. It's a game where you make a little map with other players by sticking tiles down and claiming farms, cities, churches, and roads with little wooden people pieces called meeples.

If you're looking to go for something more complex than that (but still being relatively friendly), I'd suggest either Dominion or Settlers of Catan. Dominion is a card game where you're trying to build a kingdom before the other players. Settlers of Catan is a game where you're colonizing an island, and you have to trade with other players for resources to build cities and such. Both of these games offers a ton of expansions, so you can build up quite a collection just on those two games alone!

If you get bored of those and want a game with more player cooperation, there's a kind of game where all players play on a team against the board. The best one I've played is Shadows Over Camelot, where each player plays a Knight of the Round Table, and you work together to save the Holy Grail and Excalibur, and defeat the Black Knight, a Dragon, Picts and Saxons. You can also add a variant where one player might be a traitor!

Or, if you want to get devious, Cosmic Encounter is possibly my favorite. Each player plays an alien race out to colonize other planets, and you form alliances, attack each other, and negotiate treaties. The best part is that each player randomly chooses a race, and each race breaks a different rule of the game!

So see if you can get a board game group together, or find a group who'd be happy to add you in, and have fun!