Also
Mystic Vale is pretty cool. It is a card building game, which I guess is an up and coming genre. Pretty similar to deck building I'd say, but cool stuff.
Yah yah! My wife and I bought this game about a year ago. It is one of the most played games in our collection. It's a cool variation on deckbuilding that plays relatively fast. I'd love to get the expansions for this (there are three), but they are like MSRP $30 for what is basically more cards. I will wait until they have like a complete pack or something.
Catan is my jam. I played the game once with some friends at a board game cafe and instantly fell in love with it, I've played it a few times after that and enjoyed each subsequent session. Despite that, I'm not very good at it.
I had previously played stuff like Monopoly and The Game of Life but those games always seemed to be more "the winner has fun at everyone else's expense" than anything else. They can also get incredibly heated which detracts from the overall enjoyment for me.
Catan was my introduction to modern board gaming. I've since moved on from it, but there's a lot of great things about this game. To get good at Catan you have to
get lucky remember that it's first and foremost a
negotiation game, and everything else comes second. If you're not making trades with the people around you, the odds of you winning go down. So don't be afraid to cut a deal even if it isn't completely ideal for you. Making alliances in this game can boost you later down the road.
You should try out some more modern board games too!
Ticket to Ride and
Dominion are two of the most popular ones, but you can really just search lists of favorite board games and see what all pops out at you. Also, the later expansions of Catan are pretty good and add some extra zest to the game, especially the Explorers and Pirates one.
My personal favorite game is Betrayal at House on the Hill. Super fun, totally different every time you play, great party game in general if you have a group of people that can focus for about ~45 minutes to an hour, less if they've played before and you don't have to explain everything.
I wish that my local store had better pricing. Unfortunately, everything is increased ABOVE MSRP, making it a no-brainer not to buy from them. It's a shame, because I'd like to support their business, but it's almost inexcusable that they charge close to $30 more for a game than MSRP, which is often $20 more than what you can get a game for on Amazon. I recently made an order from CoolStuffInc that should have cost me around $160 for roughly $100, so I feel alright about that. But yeah, usually I just buy from Amazon and search for deals online.
Betrayal is a staple at our house too. We have the expansion,
Widow's Walk, which adds in another 50 haunts and provides some mechanics for moving around the house a little easier. One of our favorite games, but in my opinion, you really do need someone to be the "dungeon master" of the rules, meaning someone who knows the rules inside and out and can explain them to the group if they have questions. There are lots of "what if" situations that can arise in this game, and being unfamiliar with the rulebook can make this game way longer than it needs to be. But yah, it's ultra thematic and is always different every time we play.