Last summer, after reading an article in Games magazine, I picked up a copy of a board game called Puerto Rico, made by Rio Grande Games.
Warning: this is not a game that you can learn in 5-10 minutes. Reading the rules takes about 20-30 minutes, and you really don't get the full sense of how the game operates until you play a few rounds.
The premise is that you are in charge of settling a portionof the island of Puerto Rico, which involves planting and harvesting crops, constructing buildings, selling goods and attracting colonists. You get Victory Points for a variety of different accomplishments, and whoever has the most victory points at the end of the game wins.
The trick: there is no clear winning strategy. There are many paths to collecting a lot of victory points, and while there is very little pure luck in the game, how well you can execute on a given strategy is very depednent on what the other players do. So a strategy that works well in one game may be a complete failure in another.
It's a fascinating game. The rules are not so complex so as to make it impossible to learn (my pre-teen daughters have both mastered the rules), but the designers did an excellent job of balancing different aspects of the game so as not to favor any one over the others.
I highly recommend Puerto Rico. It's won many awards and rightly so. You can buy it online -- the Rio Grande site has a list of retailers, and you can also find it online.
I just walked my dad through the rules today, and we're going to play a game through tomorrow morning...
12:10:45 AM  ; ;
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