My wife and I are obsessed with different versions of the German game
Carcassonne:
These games require players to establish control over an undefined territory by placing tiles on a flat surface. It is somewhat like the Chinese/Japanese game Go, except that it is less esoteric and philosophical and tries to employ stronger medieval and historical issues about control of resources and balance.
We had been playing the two-player version of
Settlers of Catan, but the games were long and difficult to set up. I bought
Hunters and Gatherers for my wife for Christmas. It has a prehistoric theme in which players compete to complete different landscape features: forests, rivers, meadows. My wife usually focused on completing complex forests while I hope to control the meadows and get a huge payoff at the end of the game. We are about even in out performance.
We recently bought
The Castle. This game has taken over our lives. It is based on developing resources within a fortified medieval enclosure (perhaps something like a city growing within a burh). Whereas players of other versions of
Carcassonne expand the playing space outward, this game is more clautrophobic in that the shape of the playing space is already defined.
BTW, my wife has kicked my ass in every game of
The Castle that we have played.
