dominion
kate learned to play this game whilst in new york called Dominion and she liked it enough to buy it. her, bryson, and i ended up playing it for a few hours last night.
i think i like it a lot. the entire principle of the game is developed around taking the Magic The Gathering deck building idea and making it an integral part of the gameplay, and there's this intricacy in how you have to build your deck in various stages of the game in order to try to win. In the early game you have to make sure you buy enough resources to be able to buy more things later, but you also have to buy things that give you more buying and action flexibility, and you might have to buy things as a reaction to what other people buy that could potentially fuck with your actions. in the mid-game you have to be careful about what cards you add to your deck because you don't want to spread your deck too thin and get cards that are less likely to be playable and useful for your strategy because they don't come up as often as you add more cards to your deck. in the endgame you have to start flurrying for victory points and then strategize based on your perception of whether or not you're ahead or not whether you want to steer the game towards ending or towards dragging on.
there are two flaws of the game. first, the opening rules could be designed a little better. The game starts you off with 7g (money) plus 3v (victory points which are useless in the actual game but is how you win the game). gameplay involves picking up the first five cards in your deck and finding a configurable way to play them, which is fine for midgame when a deck is more established, but for the beginning of the game creates a random element that feels a little off. the four possibilities of opening hands (5g0v, 4g1v, 3g2v, 2g3v) are *vastly* different given the huge difference of strength of cards that you can buy for those denominations, and i feel like it would make more sense to not give the player any g cards and instead tell them 'you can spend xg on whatever cards you want to create your initial deck."
second, some of the card abilities are horribly imbalanced and don't cost enough resources to justify how powerful they are. one example: three cards that cost 5g each: first card is a +4 cards to your hand/+1 buy. second card is a +2g, +2 action, +1 buy. third card is a "give everyone else -1 points"/+2 cards. all of those are theoretically similarly powerful but just in different ways, but the power of the third card is negated by the fact that you only need to spend 2g to get a card that makes you immune to all attacks which makes it easy to stockpile on that card and makes it likely that your five-card hand draw will have that card in it as a defense, *and* when you use it to defend you still have it in your hand which has a +2 cards property. for only 2g that's an extremely powerful card and diminishes the value of any expensive attack card thus making it not worth the waste of a turn and a buy to get offensive cards at all.
(granted, this depends on what cards you decide to employ for that particular game, so choice of cards to use is important and balances out some of the imbalances.)
it's a pretty well-crafted game, and if i had a crowd of people here who i played games with on a regular basis, i'd buy it and teach it to them. too bad i don't have that sort of crowd here, or maybe not; i have enough distractions and responsibilities right now as it is.