Sure, I can explain some of these games a little.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a game I would highly recommend to anyone who likes comics. It's a cooperative card game about a team of superheroes fighting a supervillain. There are a bunch of different heroes to choose from, each of whom has their own unique deck of cards with different abilities and playstyles. The cards also have really fun flavor text and images that reference issues and storylines from that hero's fictional comic book. There are also a bunch of different villains with different powers and win conditions, and different locations to fight them in. So there's a ton of replayability, as every game is a completely different mix of heroes, villains, and scenarios.





Betrayal at the House on the Hill is a personal favorite. it's a semi-co-operative game where the players play a group of people exploring a haunted house. You start in the foyer, then as you go through doors, you flip over randomly shuffled room tiles to see what you discovered. So the layout is completely different every time you play. Eventually you discover the nature of the haunting; when this happens, one of the players turns out to be the bad guy! So the first half is co-operative, but you're never sure how much to help each other, because anyone could turn out to be the villain, including yourself. Then, there's 50 different scenarios with completely different stories and win conditions to play through depending on how the house is haunted, so there's a massive amount of replayability. It's very much a storytelling game, it's a lot more fun if you get into the spirit of the game, which is telling spooky stories.





Last Night on Earth is a zombie survival game. One player or team of players are the zombies, and one player or team of players are the humans. There are a bunch of different scenarios to play though - sometimes you're trying to escape, sometimes you're trying to kill the zombies, whatever - and iif you play with just the base set it's amazingly well balanced. Almost every time we play, it comes down to the last turn, and either side has a chance to win. The mechanics do a great job of emulating a zombie horror movie as you have to decide what your priorities are - running, fighting, or searching for ways to survive. It's a lot of fun.





Mysterium is almost exactly like Clue, but with two key differences: it's co-operative, and all the clues are revealed through dream interpretation! One player is the ghost of the victim, the other players are investigators. The ghost sends dreams to the players, who then have to interpret those dreams to figure out who the killer is, where the killing took place, and with what weapon. The ghost can only communicate through images, nothing verbal. So the ghost gives you abstract dream cards and you have to figure out how they match up with the suspects. It's really different. In this image, the card at the top is the location and the three at the bottom are the dream clues that somehow led the investigator to pick that location:





One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a great mutli-player game when you have a few minutes to kill but not a long time. It's perfect for when you're waiting around for other players to show up or something, because it only takes about 6 minutes start to finish. It's a game of lying and incomplete information. At the beginning, everyone is given secret role cards. Most of the players are villagers, but one or more may be werewolves. The object is for the villagers to guess who the werewolf is; if they guess wrong, the werewolves win. So you have about 5 minutes to try and figure out who everyone else is while also trying to cinvince them who you are - or trick them into guessing wrong. It gets a bit crazy when you add in the specialized roles, because they can really screw up your information - people can switch other people's roles without them knowing, for example, so someone might think they're a werewolf but they actually aren't, or vice versa.






Touch of Evil is kind of like Arkham Horror, only with a gothic horror feel instead of a Lovecraftian vibe. And Innovation I'm not sure I can really describe. I guess it's kind of like Civilization, only as a deck builder.

For those interested in board games, Will Wheaton (of Star Trek fame) hosts a show called Tabletop where he invites several minor celebrities every time to play a board- or cardgame. Even when not interested in the banter between the players (depends really on who the guests are), it's nice to see various games played and the presentation is pretty good (editors add in graphics, arrows and so on), so you quickly get an idea how the game is played. Quite a few games I'm considering buying because of this show.

This was actually my gateway of sorts when I was a kid to actual D&D, I think I got this around 1979 and started playing D&D in 1980. Many years later got a more recent version that my wife, kids, and I would play all the time (and still do from time to time), everyone always gets a kick out of it.

That's great! I'm happy to hear you have those plans, there really is something about sharing company and relaxing with old school board games. Despite all the technological advances that have transformed the world in our lifetimes, some of the old traditions/activities still hit that spot, don't they?

I kid you not, we pulled out Mouse Trap for this first time in YEARS and played it a couple of weeks ago. It was cute playing it when the kids were little, but it was a bit of a rough go getting into it this go around!