Definitely a board gamer here! I run a monthly game night and try to attend others around town. My favorites in my collection include Caverna: The Cave Farmers, Fields of Arle, both Arkham/Eldritch Horror, Dominant Species and Robinson Crusoe. I tend to lean towards heavier Eurogames. Hoping to add Scythe to my collection once the price gouging stops.

A game I do own but really can't get into is Pandemic, which has been mentioned here a lot. My friends like it so I've played the standard Pandemic dozens of times and the entire Legacy campaign once, but in the end Legacy is still Pandemic. A game where even the best strategies can and often are totally ruined by random bad luck. Our Legacy crew has played a metric ton of Pandemic if you add all the individual's hours and we still only won about 70% of the time. I dislike it if you can play each turn optimally and still just lose a third of the time to things that were impossible to save against. I'm more understanding if it's a game like Caverna where everyone is against each other. Having 4 people working optimally on the same goal and then losing because "shuffling results in two epidemics within 3 turns" is demoralizing and aggravating.

I mean almost every game has an element of luck, but Pandemic has such wide swings it's completely ridiculous. To me. One turn everything can be completely fine and three turns later the game is completely upside down and you've lost.

Robinson Crusoe that I mentioned does have elements of luck in the events you draw every turn, and what dice rolls you get once the storms start hitting, but with proper preparation and optimal play I'd say about 90% of the time you can be prepared to adequately react to the things that happen. When you lose it's more because "we didn't properly prioritize hunting and building a structure" instead of "we drew this card so we lose". Which allows you to learn how to prepare better next time. I can't learn from "we drew two epidemics in a row so we lose".

Eldritch Horror is another really good example. There is randomness for which items will appear in the reserve, what events you will get when you do the expeditions, what monsters will appear, and what mythos you'll have to face. But through proper movement, character selection, and actions, you will almost always be prepared for whatever comes. You just have to play and lose enough times to know what to prepare for. Usually when I lose now it's because I ran out of time because I spent the mid game waffling around trying to get more upgrades.

I'll have to teach my cats to do the same What's funny is I AM still planning to buy the Legacy Season 2 next year. While I'm a little sour on the game's base mechanics, I like how they handled the story progression in Season 1, and my friends really do love the game. I don't want to deny them of the continued experience. I'll just keep a grin on and curse in my head and look forward to our big group nights where Pandemic doesn't make the table

Just backed the Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5 kickstarter today. This is what I get for browsing BGG. I was perfectly content not knowing this game exists, and now a few hours later I've backed an expensive project. On the bright side, the publisher has already released the game before this and the project has already earned 81x the required funding. I feel like the risk of not receiving the game is very, very close to 0 at this point. So I basically just have to sit back and wait for my 20 lb game to arrive sometime in mid 2017.

... and then pray I can get it to the table 25 times.

Since the new year I've picked up Last Will, Biergarten, Quadropolis, Raise Your Goblets, Unfair, Lanterns, New York 1901, Dead Men Tell No Tales, and just yesterday Vast.

Gotta say they're all great! Haven't played Vast yet, but it's incredibly unique. 5 player asymmetrical game, from what I've seen each role plays like an entirely different game.

As a fellow Cthulhu fan, check out Eldritch Horror (or Arkham Horror which is almost the same game as EH but more complex, some would say needlessly so), Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, and Mansions of Madness. Three very different Cthulhu experiences, all fantastic games.