played three games of Princes of Florence over my vacation last week.  Wow!  I was very impressed wirth this one.  for a 12 year old game, this has a nice mix of mechanics, with the auctions and the limited number of priveleges creating some interesting player interaction, combined with the puzzle-like element of fitting your buildings and landscapes onto your game grid, and then the resource management of watching your cash supply and deciding how many VP's to take and hopw much cash to take every time you create a "Work"

I am glad I got a chance to try out this gem!

tried a first game of Lord of the Rings living card game on Tuesday this week.  my buddy owns it but wasn't ready to teach it so we watched the handy tutorial on the fantasy flight website which got us started.  Need to get a few more plays of this in but I think I will enjoy it more than Thunderstone, although with all the expansions it could be a more expensive option and I will happily play it but won't be investing in it myself.

I have just unboxed copies of Eclipse and Manhattan Project which hopefully will make it to the game table in the coming weeks....

played two games of RATTUS last night. the first time we have taken that one off the shelf.  We quite enjoyed it and I think it makes a nice filler game, in a small box.  Requires a decent amount of strategy,  and compared to Kingdom Builder, another light game our group has been playing lately, I think it gives a much more "gamey" experience, in a smaller box, with a better price point for sure.

I highly recommend it!

thanks Dana for that input.  two of us in our game group have Kingsburg, but I find it a bit light for my tastes.  my buddy has the expansion but we haven't opened it, but I have heard it adds quite a bit to the game.  I have been wanting to get a dice allocation game with a little more complexity and maybe we should start with the kingsburg expansion.

I have found myself slightly disappointed with Alien Frontiers and also it only plays 4 and my game group is usually 5.  I think we need to play it a few more times so I can decide if I like it

I have been eyeing up Castles of Burgundy, if I recall it plays 5.  also looking at Troyes

opened my copy of Wiraqocha last night and played a learning game by myself.  It looks promising, the board art is a little crowded and busy, and the rule book is way too long for what the game really is, but I can see it having similar replay value to Alien Frontiers.  I may like it better after a few plays. deinitely more opportunity to screw your opponent and I think game time and build-up will be shorter than Alien frontiers.

Anyway. I was thinking of picking up 2 or 3 new games over the summer, and Castles was going to be one of them, along with Eclipse and Manhattan Project, but maybe I will get Glen More instead of Castles.  Troyes was another dice game I was thinking about, but something tells me castles would be better   

great idea for a thread!  I don't think I 've checked this site for a few years and was directed to it from a thread on BGG.

I have a small group that meets 2-3 times a month for short sessions of 2-3 hrs and one to two weekends per year.  All of us are relatively new to the hobby although I have gone all in so I have a closet full of games that half of which will nver get played.  Democratically we takes turns choosing the game we will play, so I may get a chance to introduce 8-10 new games per year.

I've been able in recent months to introduce:

AGE OF EMPIRES III: which I loved and I think the group enjoyed as well.  The bits are quite nice and I am ken to get a few more plays in.  I won the game by a small margin without gaining a single discovery token.  I simply kept flooding the new world with missionaries and colonists to gain control of the colonies.  I am interested to try again and send a number of soldiers to the new world and explore geting the win by using the war action.  However, my group may not ask to play this again because they love...

SHOGUN: I introduced this about a month before AoE III, and we have played it twice more since.  There is just something so fun about  dropping those cubes into the battle tower.  I think we will get quite a few plays of this before it gets old.  However, a game that might be our new favorite (supplanting Puerto Rico), is

HANSA TEUTONICA.  I think it took us 6 or 8 plays to get all the rules and all the scoring correct, and we still enjoyed every play of it.  the newer edition has a better rule book, the earlier edition I have is not a great translation to english, and finally now we are playing correctly.  The amazing thing is that this game is actually ridiculously simple to teach, but there are just so many ways to win, and you can switch strategy on the fly.  We love Power Grid too but we end up playing this because we can rip out a game of HT in about 1/3 the time, and after every game we want to play again, to try out a new srategy we thought of during th elast game.  We haven't even bothered to unwrap the expansion for this game because we are still having so much fun with the original.

QUARRIORS has become our "go to" filler game, with occasional games of Citadels and Innovation.  I was lukewarm on Quarriors but it is better with the expansion, and I hope the latest exansion will improve it more.  I also hope it expands the game to 5 players, which is the usual size of my game group, which is why I plan to get the Innovation expansion.

I will probably start a separate thread, but In case someone sees this and can help me: 
I have acquired a copy of Space Alert in a BGG trade and was dismayed to find out it is a French edition.  I have downloaded the english rules and sound files for the CD, and even the missions logs, but Rio Grand won't help me out or even sell me a card set.  Would anyone be willing to make a copy of their english card set for me to paste up on my set?  You could suggest a  reasonable reward.  On BGG I posted a request offering up a trade of my extra unplayed copies of Anomia and the Resistance.

any takers?  heck I will even trade my french set for the english one although I can't imagine anyone taking me up on that offer.