Catan

Every time we play Catan, I know I'm going to spend the next hour+ thinking about all of the ways I could be having more fun, like jamming a rusty ice pick up my urethra. I've never had even a little bit of fun while playing it, and I cannot for the life of me see why people like it.

Catan. The luck in it drives some people crazy which is totally understandable. I usually hate lucky games but Catan is the expection to rule because how interactive/competitive it is for such a simple game and expansions give it more variety, fix the core issues of the base game, and add more replayability.

With 2 players I find the game easily stalls with the frequent robber dice rolls. Sure, with trade tokens one can easily get rid of the robber, but 7s come up way too frequently with 2 consecutive dice rolls (with only one roll of 7 considered) so we always end up at the scenario in which all trade tokens are depleted and the other player is just waiting to roll a 7 again to remove the robber. But aside from these Catan is fun to play. I liked the resource-gathering and trading aspect of the game.

It's a good starter game to get people into the hobby or just to play with family or friends who don't play a lot of board games because it's pretty easy to learn and games tend to be neither too short nor too long. Although many board game enthusiasts find that Catan is a bit shallow and a little too luck-based, I think it's generally agreed that it's a much better experience than other big-name mainstream games like Monopoly.