Why bother to resist? 
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A great place to do so!
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Ah, so many! But on a typical day I should probably say that it’s this one:
Simple rules, imaginative settings and a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of fiction and articles, free to access on the Internet. We keep returning to it and somehow it never disappoints.
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I love Quantum. It’s in my top 10 and is one of my most-played games.
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War Chest is my #1 for some pretty simple reasons. It plays two and four, my preferred counts. It plays in 30-60, which is a perfect length for weeknight one-offs and a weekend best of 3. Games are immediately tense and never let up; Unless you’re really not paying attention, it’s always a close game.
Less generically, the individual mechanics are heavily interwoven making for a wide and satisfying decision space. You get the satisfaction and strategic appeal of bag building, and your chips represent not only your military strength on the board, but your action pool as well. I love multi-use components and the turn-by-turn challenges they present as you agonize over what you’re willing to lose in order to do what you want.
Units are varied and plentiful (especially with Nobility included), and interact with one another in countless interesting ways, making for a ton of army configurations to explore and exploit. With familiarity, things get spicy as players draft units as much for themselves as to deny their opponent a particularly nasty unit combination. Where the bag handles strategy, the board is all about tactics, and if you’ve been mindful of the former, you’ll be able to pull off some really nasty (and often sneaky) tricks on the latter.
Critically, the bags keep information from ever being perfect, and add a slight “luck of the draw” element. You always know what you’ll be capable of, but not always when. This eliminates the usual “problem” with chess and other chess-likes, where the skill wall hits and an otherworldly level of practice and memorization is required to play at a higher level. You can play well, but you can never play perfect. It’s perfect.
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I need to try this one. I kind of regret not grabbing it when my FLGS was clearing out a bunch of copies awhile back.
It’s interesting they had enough copies to need to clear out! It got pretty good buzz at and around release, but it’s not like it set the world on fire—it is an abstract strategy game, after all. I know my local shop always keeps one copy in stock along with The Duke and they seem to sell slowly but consistently.
In any event, I strongly recommend hunting down a copy if you can find a good price. Plenty to chew on in the base game too, by the way. Mentioning the expansion earlier wasn’t intended to imply it was needed for unit variety.
I also failed to mention one of its other strong points: it is first and foremost an area control game! Very rarely do games grind down to battles of attrition, and when they do it’s usually because of some hotly contested point neither of us could quit on. Every game has dramatic moments and turning points.
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They’re a more typical FLGS; as in they make most of their cash of of MtG and Comics. I don’t think they move a large quantity of games, and they just likely needed the space.
Maybe they brought in a number of copies due to early interest, and it never planned out for them? Unfortunately, they also sell it MSRP, which doesn’t help.
Anyways, I’ll keep my eyes open for a copy.
I have a top 2 that I can’t really choose between, Burano and Indonesia. Maybe it’s because I like games named after places in the real world 
Burano is very euro and very Feldian. Some of what I really like about this efficiency is how each turn throws up a new state to be navigated. It’s really tactical turn to turn and the strategies aren’t specialisations. The game is deep with a high skill ceiling. The market of special abilities are impressively balanced and are quite smart about skewing players incentives while having a cost in tempo to acquire them. On top of all that it’s action selection mechanism around the wooden cubes is novel, fun, tactile and really well integrated in to the game and it’s setting.
Indonesia is a brutal game. The opacity of the game is a delight. Everything you do sends a ripple through the game state and all future actions of all players. The merger mechanic is phenomenal and the generosity of development for all players keeps everything evolving. Not without it’s flaws, the laborious operating round for one, the positives utterly out weigh them for me and I’d love to play this more often.
I think opacity and changing game states are the common thread to both those games. May well explain my interest in 18xx games 
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That’s a tough question! 7 Wonders Duel often finds its way to the table, so it would have to be in there. It’s a very satisfying game when you and can be infuriating if you lose. But when either me or my girlfriend loses we want to play again straight away.
Flash Point would be top for co-op games. The mechanics work so well with the theme and it’s genuinely gripping at times. I do like pandemic, but the theme can get lost behind the puzzle of swapping cards, and moving from space to space.
Out of a new batch of games I’ve bought recently, I’d have to put Taverns of Tiefenthal up there at the moment, it’s getting a lot of play time. I wasn’t sure based on the SUSD review, but I’m glad I took a punt on it. I love the theme, the combination of deck building and dice drafting is great, and you often see some great plays that leave you either smug with your own move or impressed with the other player. It doesn’t have the head-to-head competitiveness of something like 7 Wonders Duel which makes it less cutthroat in the way it plays.
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Roll for the Galaxy has my heart. I adore it so. 
The tableau building, the different starting planets, the gambling on phase selection, the build your own dice Orb.
I love nearly everything about it… except the trading and shipping strategy. That is SO boring and sometimes you’re railroaded into it. I hate it when it’s clear you have to rinse and repeat the same actions without any risk for the rest of the game to be competitive. I would ignore it and do something else, but it’s one of two ways to score any points so that’s not really an option. But I tolerate having to do that excessively in maybe 1 in 5 games for the rest of everything I love.
Brass is definitely top 3 too. It’s tight, intuitive, has a simple but effective market economy. It works together really smoothly. Maybe Great Western Trail or Dogs of War in there too
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Birmingham or Lancashire? Not played the latter. I like BB after 5 plays, but don’t love it.
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My son loves 7 Wonders Duel. We got him the expansion and that confuses me greatly. I’d like to give a whirl again soon.
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I see Birmingham as an extended expansion to Lancashire. They’re different flavours of pizza - essentially the same but focus on different aspects of the core mechanics. Lancashire is tighter and meaner, but Birmingham has more networking options. It really depends on my mood which I prefer!
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I am very keen to get Brass Birmingham to the table a lot more after lockdown. I don’t think it shines at 2 players and want to try 3 or 4 a few times before coming to a conclusion
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Oh yeah, it’s not nearly as dynamic at 2p. The market in particular needs 3-4 to really shine.
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The expansion is good, it gives a more options for a military or science victory. It also makes those victories feel earned, rather than it being a mistake by the losing player. I still play without it though.
It was the leader/ gods cards that threw me.
The last time we played we had 3 players and there was loads of stealing and piggybacking which was awesome.
The problem is that I just built breweries and trains, I think I sold one thing and I won by miles. Seemed a bit weird in what looks like a selling game.
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It gets more competitive once people learn how the engine feeds into itself. Without that it’s easy for one player to leap on one thing and do really well off it - especially if you’re lording the beer while someone tries in vain for some pottery. It’s one of those games where one part of the economy looks really strong, then everyone leaps on it next game, and suddenly a different part becomes really strong. Having a surplus of any resource is just an investment waiting to mature, but if you can get the resources out there early enough for everyone to be tempted to use them it can pay off big. When everyone understands the cogs there’s a bit more reactive ebb and flow in competition and denial - especially for things like when should I build a coal mine or should I just use someone else’s?
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