I purchased Mansions of Madness for my wife for her Valentine's Day present. While I felt a little weird about purchasing a Cthuhlian horror board game for V-Day instead of flowers, she said it was the best Valentine's present she'd ever received.

We've been playing a lot of Ascension and Race for the Galaxy. Deck building games are good for gaming couples. Will probably pick up Thunderspire at some point.

Thunderspire or Thunderstone?

'stone. Sorry. Brain derpage.

Damn.... I thought there was a new game out that I should look into.

My gaming group has been on a RPG hiatus since the holidays. We have been playing Magic and Cadwallon: City of Thieves.

Very fun game for anyone that likes competitive play against your friends. A lot of the missions are cool, not really unique but they hit a different troupe in the fantasy culture, zombies, evil wizards, save the princess (actually kidnap in this game), ect.

Like all of Fantasy Flight's games it's high production quality with some sweet mini's.

Tonight we are finally giving One False Step for Mankind a go. The instructions suggest it may be a 3+ hour game, so we're starting early; and at least two of the players are better at fast rule absorbtion than I am, so that will help; but just in case, we're playing it on a table that we can just leave the game on as is, covered with a piece of clear plastic (decorative and practical. Then the game can taunt us all week.

So we finally played One False Step For Mankind!
It takes a fair bit of setup. Cheapass Games doesn't include the markers and stuff with the game; you really do need as many markers as they say, and each player ends up using a fair pile of them -- and both taking in and paying out large numbers of them per game, so after a short while we started using big white buttons to stand for ten little white buttons.
It takes a quite a large playing area, mostly because of the piles of counters. The playing instructions are, besides, in very small print; I got them photoenlarged before we played.

The rules are quite well written, but unless we misread the rules there's one built-in problem with the starting rules: the first person to get thirty points wins. But you start with forty! You're supposed to be using these points to bid on the cities you need to gain you more points in the long run, but technically, if we hadn't realized this until the fifth round, when we were all below 29, at one point one of us could have said, "Ha, ha, I lost all my bids on cities, now the game hasn't even gotten under way and you've got cities and I don't but I've got more than 30 points left -- so I win!" There are several ways we could adjust the rules to prevent that; we decided in future we'd declare 41 the winning number.
Still think it's a good game, now that we know how to play it, but it did need those tweaks.

Played Arkham Horror last night with the Dunwich expansion. Goddamn that game takes a long time. We won--but it was a nail-biter. Stupid Gate Bursts kept undoing our seals; finally, we had too many gates open and the Old One awoke--just as one of our players was almost back from being Lost In Time And Space, due to a desperation gambit.

Dixit. It's like apples to apples but you use picture cards instead of words.
one player says a phrase or makes some type of noise then plays a picture upside down. Each other player plays a picture upside down. They all get revealed and the players who didn't say the phrase try to guess which picture came from the phrase sayer.

Loved the game and loved the pictures even more. I feel like they could easily be incorporated into creating characters for RP. Using the pictures to generate ideas for conflicts and cohesion in the group as well as just defining character back story.

Dixit is a lot more fun that I expected it to be. It really forces creativity with players but the concept is simple enough that children can play it.