TrueAnon storm the capital

(I haven't actually played it)

Wingspan! Fun engine builder that is simple enough to introduce new people to it at a game night but can get more complex and deep with expansions. Also if you're a bird nerd it's a great way to memorize names (and calls/songs if you play the pc version)

Settlers of Catan! Funny how badly choosing your starting loc can leave you hardstuck on a resource.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a lot of fun. Coop haunted house exploration, until part way through, the haunt happens and maybe your friends a vampire now! Maybe there's a ghost stalking these halls! Maybe there's a zombie dog that you can distract by throwing meat at it!

Pandemic is also a lot of fun and coop, but I was gifted it mid-2019 and my friends quickly found it too "topical". Also lmao, it acts like the whole world would unite in the face of a horrible pandemic and now we know that that's a wild fantasy.

Op here is a tip Get whichever is cheapest and slowly build a collection Board games can get really repetitive if you don't have variety I would recommend secret Hitler, really simple premise and rulesets

Wingspan - easy to learn, playing with more of your friends makes it even more fun, lots of people play it, not cooperative but you don't fuck each other over, game revolves around collecting bird cards

Spirit Island - Fairly complicated, but if someone knows what they're doing it's easy for them to carry newbies, very fun & strategic, also quite popular so easy to run into people who play it, theme is kill whitey

Hegemony - A new lesser-known game that simulates the dynamics of a democratic-capitalist society, one person plays as the capitalist class, one the working class, one the middle class, and one the state; it's cool and very didactic to play these roles but requires a lot of buy-in to convince people to play it. I bought this on the recommendation of some person here. I had to study the manual & mock-play it for probably eight hours before I felt comfortable inviting others over. It definitely is not the sort of thing where you can invite people over to communally "figure it out as you go".

I have a buddy that is too into board games. Go to boardgame geek. Pretty much any game with a "push your luck" mechanic will be a crowd pleaser. Just find whatever one looks cute and is being sold reasonably cheap. It probably won't be good but everyone will have a good time when you bust it out here or there. The first one he got was monopoly go. Which is fine, but for any given evening playing boardgames the most hype moment is likely to be people pushing their luck to hard on a big roll of that game. You sound like you were asking for more big event games which I think everyone else here can get you set up with.

Dune, unlike its terrible luck for computer games lately, have actually great luck for board ones. Dune: Imperium is hands down best board game i ever played, and the reboot of old 1979 game is also great.

Neither of them is really for only two players, though Imperium have mechanics to substitute players by special deck draws so it can be played solo or in 2 players all right. The other one can be played even in 12 players if you're crazy (normally 2-6)

I haven't had the opportunity to play Arcs or Earthborn Rangers, but the group I play with loves them.

I usually like very adversarial games, kind of the opposite of what you're looking for. Anyhow, here's some current favorites:

Dune - a classic from 1979, it's super thematic and cuthroat, and established a lot of modern game mechanics. It's a sci-fi theme, and a good one, but it's really only playable with 5 or 6 players.

Inis - Celtic tribes clashing with one another about who's gonna be king. Super interesting card play combined with area control. Mega bonus points to this game for being really good with any player count from 2 to 5, a rare thing!

Imperial and Imperial 2030 - similar to Risk or Diplomacy, but where you the player is not representing any particular country, but rather are the shadowy billionaires who pull the strings behind the scene to affect world affair for profit. Great fun, it's basically like Diplomacy, but where the goal is to get rich off of the wars of the great powers. This is a 3-6 player game.

The Estates - play as crooked developers trying to build a new housing subdivision. This is one of the most insanely cuthroat games out there, and it's entirely possible for the game to end with everyone having negative points. A 3-5 player game.

Love Letter - a really simple 15 card mini game where you're trying to pass a love letter from person to person until it reaches the princess. A 3-4 player game.

1830: Railways & Robber Barons - part of a series of train games where the focus is on stock market speculation. When you're starting out, you think "oh, this game is about running really good train companies". Once you get some experience, you realize "oh, this game is actually more about obstructing other people's train company so you come out relatively ahead". Once you get a lot of experience, you realize "oh, running good companies is irrelevant, this is all about just being an absolute menace and using underhanded stock manipulation". Not an easy game series to get into, but a great one for people who want to play competitive spreadsheets against other train nerds. Mainly a 3-6 player game.

I also have been playing a lot of the COIN series of games, which are about historical counter-insurgency warfare. These can have pretty problematic politics if you actually read the playbook (the designers are sometimes chuds), but they're pretty interesting for storytelling an alt-history. My favorites of these so far is People Power, which is about the fall of the Marcos government in the Philippines in the 80s, and then A Distant Plain, which is about the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan. These are mainly 3 or 4 player games, but they have very good bot players (you follow an action flowchart), so you can play these as 2 player games. These are pretty meaty and difficult to get into, but they're a blast to play.

If you like deck building, Dominion is one of my favorite board games. You build your deck along the course of the game and every game you choose 10 different card types to have available to players so each game is a little different depending on which cards are in play. There are a few expansions that add some cards that have really interesting mechanics.

Spirit Island is a great coop game where you play slumbering nature spirits who have to wake up and kick all the colonizers out. There's some funny elements to the component designs as well; all of the tokens for the spirits and indigenous peoples are wood or cardboard, while the colonizers are white plastic.

Pro-tip: most boardgames have mods on Tabletop Simulator on Steam, which makes it a decent way to "demo" games before you go out and spend $50 on something you might not like!

I like cooperative games! I'm the only one I know who liked the first iteration of The Captain is Dead (too complex, too many things to keep track of), but the sequel The Captain is Dead: Dangerous Planet has been a hit with every group I've tabled it. You're the crew of a spaceship and you need to gather the materials you need to escape the planet before the bugs get you.

Competitive games I love are Quacks of Quedlinburg, Clank!, Azul Summer Pavillion, Colt Express, Dune Imperium

If you don't have a set of Looney Pyramids, I'd suggest getting some. There's dozens of games you can play with those.

Lately, however, I've been into the classics. Mancala, Nine Holes, Shogi, that sorta stuff.

ascension is one of my favs, its a deckbuilder similar to the more popular dominion, but has really cool art (at least with the early expansions, the later ones i dont care for).

basically any game in the oniverse is also good like onirim, sylvion, cyberion, etc. those ones are made for single player but they also have two-player co-op (never tried it though).

tiny epic galaxies is also pretty good if youre looking for a small fast paced space adventure

theres probs better introductions to board gaming lmao and i dont know many co-op games aside from aeons end and spirit island (both of which are very good) but i like to play these personally

Cosmic Encounter is like the only board game my friends play that I am actively excited to play. It's not glacially slow, the basic game is simple enough but some of the factions have a wacky power that determines how they play. Once you get a game or two in, you can start introducing some more mechanics that that make things spicier. Multiple players winning is possible, and so are betrayals and war crimes, it's really fun.

gonna give a shoutout to the night cage. one of the few board games that's legit creepy. games are fairly short too which i always like

Astro Knights hits a lot of what you want, and is a very solid game. It's not grand sci-fi, but it is sci-fi. It's a cooperative deckbuilding game about working together to defeat some giant enemy.

I think that both Astro Knights and Astro Knights: Eternity are good, but since you say you're just getting into board games, go for the original, it's definitely more accessible.

I also suggest Spirit Island, but it can definitely be hard to pick up. Quite complex, but definitely worth playing. If you want to, shoot me a DM and I can try and teach you it sometime?

don't let the woke libs lie to you. Monopoly is the only boardgame you'll ever need. don't even think about playing another one all of them were designed by DEI hires. they are all filled with woke shit such as "fun"... WHO CARES ABOUT FUN I NEED MY RENT AND I NEED IT NOW!

m-monopoly

its the only one i got to play more than once

Slightly off topic but the Netrunner card game had its hooks in me deep for a long time.

Also thematically it fits with the Hexbear vibes.

Terraforming Mars is a classic. I also like Santorini, Cascadia, Verdant, Fjords, and Azul

I really like Lords of Waterdeep. It kinda hits that sweet spot of complexity and ease of learning for the friends and family I occasionally play board games with.

I mostly play digital copies of board games right now, and I like Root and Scythe quite a bit. I would maybe get Root if I had to buy a physical game today-today.

This War of Mine, it is cooperative and soul crushingly good.