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[cskau]

Junta is also an old favourite of mine.
It's a game of running a success junta through constant overthrowing the current regime, oppressing the opponents, and plotting against and backstabbing your friends. 

[Dacke]

Old games like Monopoly and Risk is seriously crap. Risk works on the computer, but not really as a board game. There have been so many advancements in board game design it's almost silly. In modern games you usually don't have to wait as much, stuff stays balanced throughout the game and people don't get eliminated early on. I would recommend against getting any semi-old-boardgame. I've actually gotten the 15-minute-monopoly cardgame to play if we ever get the monopoly-itch.

I have gone by the recommendations on http://boardgamegeek.com/ and picked up some fun stuff in flee markets. Some of the more interesting stuff I have:

Puerto Rico is an incredibly interactive game about farming and town-building in . Everyone acts almost all the time once everyone knows the game. But I made a mistake when reading the rules so we have never played it properly and it fell out of grace because of that (we ran out of slaves almost every game). I'm hoping to reintroduce it again, with proper rules.




Carcassonne (preferably with a few expansion packs) is really lovely. You get to build a beautiful countryside and add wooden figures to the landscape.




Power Grid focuses on bidding on power plants. We've only played it once so far and struggled with all the basic arithmetic required, but it is supposed to be really nice and deep if you get into it.




Tien Len (the vietnamese national cardgame) played with a Alice in Wonderland-themed Borogove card deck. The combination is perfect; the Borogove cards have 13 suits (instead of 4) and 4 values (instead of 13), making Tien Len much more intuitive.




Citadels is a cardgame that effortlessly supports up to 8 players. An excellent game when there are lots of people; it's easy to learn, quite beautiful and includes a decent amount of strategy and trickery. Like most other modern games it has lots of mini-turns, so that everyone is included all the time even if there are 8 people playing.




Blokus is like a 4-player inverse Tetris. Everyone I have ever played it with has loved it. I am the only person I know who dislikes it, but that's only because I think too much (and win most of the time :/)

[Radix]

Hm! Care elaborating?

Like Uno it basically plays itself; the players are mostly irrelevant. In the case of Uno it's because it's so stagnant and random-draw that the players can't do anything meaningful, but Fluxx achieves the same effect by being chaotic (the appeal of the wackiness wears off) and just as random. You have maybe a bit more control but I feel that any tactics you manage to pull off are still pretty much flukes.

Some people like it, if you really love Uno maybe you will too, but I'd hold off buying a copy. Generally I think you'd be better off playing pretty much any other party game. If you want something that has a similar crazy flow with mutable rules, look into Nomic, Mao, or 1000 Blank White Cards. Fluxx is basically like Nomic with all the fun and creativity and game sucked out.

[Dacke]

A general tip is to get card sleeves for cards that will be shuffled a lot. In my case, I have sleeves for my Borogove cards and the character cards in Citadels. But I haven't put sleeves on the building-cards in Citadels, as they are only shuffled once every game.

[Netsu]

I'm gonna comment on some games I played recently:

Citadels
As Dacke said, great game for lots of people. Don't bother playing it in a group smaller than 4 players though. It gets boring after a few sessions, at least for me.

Neuroshima Hex
Dunno how easy it is to buy one in the US, but it's a Polish board game that earned quite a lot of awards and became kind of big in some parts of Europe, with tournaments and shit. I seriously recommend trying it if you ever get the chance. It has lots and lots of strategy, very diverse and balanced factions (4 in the base game, but together with all the expansions it can easily be more than 10) and easy rules. Great mechanics too. One session usually lasts 30-90 minutes (depending on the number of players) and can be played with up to 6 players. Not much randomness.

Bloodbowl Team Manager
One of the prettiest games I saw. The cards and tokens are very well made, plus it has those neat score counters that you assemble yourself. The gameplay is rather relaxed and fun, we had a laugh or two when using the more ridiculous cards. A pity it would be hard to play with more than 4 people, even using house rules, as it seems like a nice party game. Maybe when/if an expansion comes out.

Twilight Imperium
BEST
BOARD GAME
EVER
You would think that 12 hours is too much for a single playing session. It isn't. In fact, after playing TI for 10-12 hours straight we would often go on and discuss the game for another 2 hours. We once managed to wrap up a game in 4 hours playing the quick rules and with only 4 players, but it isn't nearly as much fun.
Basically, each player controls an alien race (or humans) in a Dune/Fading Suns kind of setting and fight each other for galactic domination using politics, war fleets and cunning. There's a LOT of room for player interaction: bribing, threats, secret deals, peace pacts (that later explode spectacularly) and trade. You have a technology tree, racial abilities and pretty much everything you would expect from such a game.
I still haven't played the new expansion, but it seems to be beyond awesome, as it expands the least explored, but most interesting, part of the game - politics.
I recommend playing in a group of 5 or 6 people, preferably not strangers and no couples either (you can't play the game right without fucking other players in their asses).

The Game of Thrones
A nice strategy game, some very interesting mechanics. I won't comment more because I suck terribly at it, I can't think quick enough and the people I played with do their turns very fast and still put a lot of thought in them.

[Dacke]

Citadels
As Dacke said, great game for lots of people. Don't bother playing it in a group smaller than 4 players though. It gets boring after a few sessions, at least for me.

You can find special rules for 3-player-Citadels on Board Game Geek. They are supposed to turn it into a "proper" game, as it becomes much more viable to attack your opponents.

[Netsu]

You can find special rules for 3-player-Citadels on Board Game Geek. They are supposed to turn it into a "proper" game, as it becomes much more viable to attack your opponents.

Oh, I'll take a look, thanks

EDIT: Actually, I can't find it, can you post a link?

[Dacke]

Hm, I remembered wrong.

Apparently there are official 3-player-rules included with the game. So you could check those out.

Then I have this page, that suggests a few changes to the standard 3-player-rules, claiming that it'll make the game more balanced:
http://zuiderkwast.se/citadels/c3p

I haven't played any of the 3-player-variations, though. So I can't guarantee that it'll be any good.

[Netsu]

We played the 3-player and even the 2-player variant, the way they are described in the rules, but it wasn't very good. That's why I don't recommend it. It wasn't even an issue of balance, there just wasn't enough interaction for it to be interesting.

[Dacke]

Damn my faulty memory!
I'm sorry if I got your hopes up.

[Yougiedeggs]

Risk Legacy
Original Risk IS only good when a PC handles it. Risk Legacy however, is unique.
It encourages you to break rules, make new rules, destroy rules permanently (tear the card up,) rename countries, choose bonuses for specific countries, and more.
What you get is a game of Risk that you and your friends will customize to your liking as you play. This creates a strong feeling of creating a campaign with each new game affected by what happened in previous games.
With all the writing on the board, it may only last ten to fifteen games, but it's worth it.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/105134/risk-legacy

[Inanimate]

Cards against Humanity - If your Apples to Apples games always seem to descend into dark humor and sex jokes, but you wised the cards mirrored that, this is the game for you.  Came out of a successful kickstarter project.

I completely forgot to include this in my post, but it's been on my wishlist since I heard about it.

Cash and Guns - Bank robbers get in a series of mexican standoffs to decide how to split their ill gotten gain.  Comes with foam guns for maximum John Woo style pointing guns at people action.

I like the sound of this.

Risk Legacy

Yeah, this goes under my "Risk" category. Very very worth it. I'd probably use post-it notes. :p

Neuroshima Hex
Bloodbowl Team Manager
Twilight Imperium

These all sound cool! Thank you!

Generally I think you'd be better off playing pretty much any other party game. If you want something that has a similar crazy flow with mutable rules, look into Nomic, Mao, or 1000 Blank White Cards. Fluxx is basically like Nomic with all the fun and creativity and game sucked out.

I love 1000 Blank White Cards, and I didn't know Fluxx was so chaotic. Shuttled off to the low-priority section of the list, for now.

[oyog]

For the most part I agree that Fluxx isn't always that much fun. I'd suggest Pirate Fluxx, personally. Of the variations I've tried it seems to be the most interesting.

We Didn't Playtest This at All is bizarre and rarely takes more then five to ten minutes per game. From the couple of times I played it seemed like there was a little more skill and strategy involved than Fluxx.

Another game from Looney Labs, which I prefer over Fluxx, is Chrononauts, a game in which players competitively screw with history to try to get back to their respective alternate timelines.

If you ever run across a used copy of Time Tripper buy it immediately. It's my all time favorite game and a hell of a lot of fun for a group with a couple hours dedicated to gaming. Al is an American fighting in Vietnam who accidentally sends himself and his friends back in time when he creates a time machine that tripping on psychedelics and tinkering with his radio. For some reason the time machine only sends them to historical battles of both past and future. This game often results in hilarious scenarios.

I've enjoyed Agricola a number of times and I'll third Pandemic.

[Tanner]

The Resistance is a social deduction game similar to Werewolf or Mafia, except there's not really a roleplaying element to it and no one is eliminated. It's definitely more of a filler game for in-between bigger games (my friends don't listen to me when I try to tell them this and they are going to run the game into the ground) but it's super fun.

Cosmic Encounter is maybe the best board game ever made.

[ChevyRay]

Oh man, I totally recommend Space Alert.

Space Alert is a team survival game. Players take on the role of a crew of space explorers sent out through hyperspace to survey a dangerous sector of the Galaxy. The pace of the game is set by 10-minute soundtracks on included CDs (or by scenario cards, if you don’t have a CD player). During these 10 minutes, the crew must defend the ship while it scans the enemy sector. If they succeed, the ship brings back valuable data. If they fail… it is time to train a new crew.

Players do not compete against each other. Instead, they work together against the challenge presented by the game. The difficulty of this  challenge can be chosen by the players themselves. Completing the most difficult missions requires close teamwork.

So basically, it's a co-op board game where you play along 10-minute long "Missions" (sound files), which cause ships and monsters and viruses to attack your ship with growing urgency! SUPER fun, especially since the enemies and locations are randomized (read: you can replay missions and still have trouble)! :D

It's also real time, so you don't actually find out if you won until the very end, when all your actions are totalled up and you find out if you successfully pulled off the mission or ended up compromising yourself or other players without knowing it.

Really communicative game (except when the audio file plays static, which means radio communications are blocked meaning the players aren't allowed to talk to each other for a short period, scary!)