Catan is good, but with 2 expansions even better. I play the base with this 2 all together and it's fantastic. Big board, many ways to set your strategy. I love it.

Azul is very very good. One thing that is top, is that is very fast to set up the board. For Catan with expansions i take 10-15 minutes to set everything. Azul is 30 seconds.
The game is simple, to set patterns in Portuguese Tiles "Azulejos". You have different colors with different patterns and you have to combine them, horizontally and vertically. you can do your board but you have to look at your opponent to try to stop him. Very Easy to learn, very relaxing, an excellent game.
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I f.ex. think that Catan is way overrated. There's just so much better. A lot of people that got earlier into board games just got stuck with it.

I think I gave you many better options
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I already play Catan for a long time. It's just my family I can't convince to play it.
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I bought Carcassonne for Christmas and we are really enjoying it.

It looked far more complex then it really was and games don't take very long to play. Not many rules to learn and the strategies to block others scoring don't seem to cause arguments like some games do. The version I bought came with a couple of expansions, rivers and abbots, which add a bit more interest to the game.
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I discovered a new boardgame store near me this month. I don't really go shopping much in physical stores any more since Covid, and never go into Chichester much since we moved 7 years ago, but I took Tom Christmas shopping and we got sidetracked by this shop.

Called Comics, Games and Coffee Ltd
https://www.cgc-emporium.com/

The website doesn't really do it justice and show what it's got. It used to be an independent toy store, but now it's packed from floor to ceiling. One side is full of comics and graphic novels, and the other side has every boardgame you could ever think of, from family games like Monopoly and Risk, to RPG one's like Heroquest. They had everything I've ever heard of.

They also had a sectiin near the back dedicated to Games Workshop figures and Games. And out the back is a coffee shop and room where they set of gaming sessions. They were running a Warhammer 40k tabletap campaign when we were there.

This is like my ultimate dream when I was a teenager, and Tom was really interested and spent ages looking at everything. We will definitely be visiting again soon.

Sadly I showed Tom some of the Games Workshop figure sets and he wasn't that interested in something he would have to paint. Only in playing the games they were linked to. Oh well, can't have everything.
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I just can imagine Tom seeing all those big colorful boxes, must be awesome for him to look at, it's still for us

I have the Carcassonne big box, never opened it though

Just check Jamaica out, he would love that, very easy pirate ship racing game with canon fighting, I definitely would have loved that as a boy.
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We are still playing Carcassonne a lot and have since bought a couple more expansions for it. The one where you can add castles is great because you can position them to steal your opponents points, so makes it even more strategic.

We took Carcassonne with us when we went to stay with some family in the summer. They are really into boardganes but hasn't played it. They instantly liked it.

They introduced us to another boardgame we hadn't seen before called Ingenious. A hexagon based coloured tile game that's very easy to learn. You score points by placing colours next to each other and block others from continuing coloured lines. I bought the games as soon as we got back.
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For Christmas this year I added 2 more board games, Azul and Jamaica. My wife and son were uncertain of both but once I worked the rules out Tom enjoyed Jamaica, but didn't like Azul as much. My wife really got into Azul and it's quite good that games don't take too long.
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