Knights of the Round Table is a pretty awesome RPG board game. The players are all knights at King Arthur's round table, and they have to do enough good deeds to win before the games succeeds in killing them. Pretty different from most board games, but we have a blast everytime we play it. 4-8 people.

Munchkin is fun, but it's a little bit crude and fairly cut-throat, so you want to be careful about how you play it with.

For a quickish, co-operative game you could check out Forbidden Island

D&D Adventure system board games are a blast!

Always found Talisman quite good and really easy to start up and play

Savage Worlds is a fun system. Quick to play, doesn't get bogged down in a list of hundreds of weapons and the like. Easy combat system that can work quick skirmishes with 4 people and NPC's (who the players run) against a squad of bad guys, and also can run set piece battles between 10,000 men and 500 tanks.

There are also a lot of specific settings that take it anywhere from the Wild West to Victorian England to Steampunk to WW2 and so on.


Oh, quick comment about Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition (which arusaku recommended) : it IS a great game. BUT :

-It's enormous. It's a Fantasy Flight 'coffin box', so the box alone is two feet by a foot by a foot.
-It goes for awhile. If you sit down to play with 3 friends, the first game or two WILL take you at least 6 hours. Even experienced groups will take an hour per player, and the game can play up to 8 with an expansion.


Doom's out of print, so that's going to be a potentially expensive buy as well.

A few other games that come to mind :

-Summoner Wars. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/93260/summoner-wars-master-set

It's a tactical battle game using cards played out on a board as units. Really easy to play, but a lot of fun. Every faction plays differently. The Master Set I linked to comes with a board and 6 different factions. You can buy individual faction packs for under $10, and there are Reinforcement packs if you want to get in to pre-game deck building. It ISN'T a collectible card game like Magic, so you don't get caught up in a 'Gotta buy em all!' arms race of buying card packs.

-The Manhattan Project. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63628/the-manhattan-project

A race between up to 5 players to reach the required victory point total by building nukes. Turns go very quickly, with players placing workers on various locations and constructed buildings to gain different resources. A lot of worker placement games are somewhat solitary experiences, with no interaction between players. In this one, if someone is pulling ahead, bomb the shit out of their production buildings. Better yet, use spies to use their buildings against them.

-Conquest of Planet Earth. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71882/conquest-of-planet-earth-the-space-alien-game

By the same company that makes Last Night on Earth. Each player plays as a different alien race, trying to do the best job of conquering mankind to gain favor. The game can be played wither competitively, with everyone fighting for supremacy and screwing each other over, or co-operatively, in a race against time to defeat a much stronger human opponent before they manage to build their super weapon. Campy 50's sci fi style comes through very well.

Do you know how well this plays for two people? How fun would it be for two adults? I've seen this in stores and have considered it in the past, but just haven't had the chance to get it. I see it gets pretty high ratings, but just haven't found anyone else who plays it to ask their opinion.

My wife and I sometimes play Arkham Horror and the Space Hulk: Death Angel card game, though I think we must just be terrible at Arkham Horror because we just don't enjoy it so much. Things stack up against you so quickly and everything is just random chance. A few times we just quit mid-game because it was too frustrating. Even now that's how our last game ended and it has been in the box for a few weeks now.

Like you I read a number of favorable reviews and I liked the graphics on the cards, so I brought it for some friends - unfortunately I haven't had a chance since to ask them what it's like.

I brought it from an online store where the people play it, and their short review are pretty honest. You can read the reviews here

You could likely implement some house rules to modify the difficulty. (eg free choice of adventurers at start)

Yeah, Forbidden Island looks like a nice quickish coop game, like you said, and that's really what we look for. SH:DA is a nice quickish coop game, too.

We implemented a few house rules into Arkham Horror, but to no avail. :(

Always remember to explain the rules to a new player! :P

After Sundown RPG
Supernatural horror RPG, think open source World of Darkness

Read for free
Buy ($0.99)
Torrent for free (legally)

From your RPG list Vampire(and Pathfinder) is the only one that I think would interest you in the long run. It was a popular game some years back, and there are a lot of supplements discounted this days. Just be sure that they are Masquerade books and not Requiem books, which uses a different system.
Also, Werewolf the Apocalypse it's my group favourite game from white wolf. If you don't have much rpg exprience, it's more epic and a bit less angsty than Vampire. It's true that a new edition is coming this same year, but perhaps you can find it cheap somewhere...
I always get digitel editions form drivethru instead if physical books this days. If you've got a tablet, you'll quickly find that it's a lot better to carry it than a ton of weighty books.

So after I get the rule books for the RPGs, what's next on the checklist with regards to physical items, like miniatures and tilesets? I just checked out the Pathfinder Beginner Box set, and it's sexy as fuck. Is there like a staple set of items that I should look out for, other than miniatures to represent my characters?

Small World

I bought a lot of cheap miniatures in ebay, im packs of common ones from the D&D board game. I don't think you need anything more, perhaps a map with squares, but again, I bought a pack of them a lot of time ago and rehuse them again and again. I friend of mine uses a washable one, so he can draw on it, but apart from that, you don't need anything.

That's a good list. You may want to add:

Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game (2010)