Designer board games

This ain't about your Monopoly or Life, this about those $45 monstrosities that come with 800 cardboard counters or a few hundred plastic game pieces and take a few hours to play. Our usual RPG session fell through this past week due to a couple of no-shows, so our host offered his ample board game collection and we killed about five hours with a game called Ticket to Ride. You basically try to finish train routes between cities, all the while trying to block others from finishing theirs while they try to do the same to you. The first game we played, we were still learning the ins and outs and were fairly good-humored, but the second game got tense and cutthroat as all hell.

So the next day I wandered down to our local game/comic shop and just browsed everything they had, and it's amazing the depth and breadth of product out there. Want a game where you're building an Egytptian palace? Got it. Want to recreate every obscure Civil War or WWI battle? Check. Want 5000 variations of Settlers of Catan? It's out there. The production value on many of these games is absolutely beautiful, and it's remarkable how many have such seemingly simple rules yet have nearly infinite strategies and permutations. Their prices may seem high, but so is the return on the investment. And I've always been a sucker for little cardboard tiles and hexboards.

Rambling aside, anyone have any recommendations? Or just any good stories/memories of these games?

We actually had a Formula De league going at our game shop (before the owner sold the place and it turned into this heartless warehouse that doesn't want gamers who aren't playing MageKnight or Magic). We kept rankings while playing on multiple tracks and it was an absolute blast. Clever dice mechanic too.

Someone there that night mentioned a few sites where you could play these games online, but their names escape me. Any ideas?

I had an older War of the Ring game put out by SPI back around the time the Bakshi film was out. Came with a beautiful three-piece hard-mounted map of Middle-Earth and lots and lots of counters. You could play a character-based game that pitted a Fellowship player against a Sauron player and focused mostly on the Fellowship trying to get to Mt. Doom (they won if a Fellowship character finished the turn on the Mt. Doom hex). That version took about three hours to play. Then, for some real fun, you could throw all the armies on both sides in and not only play the quest but also the war itself. That took about six hours. And then you could use the optional rules and add a third player playing the Saruman side of things (he was folded into Sauron's group in the two-player game). I think I only ever played two full games of it, but I would constantly set it up and just look at it.

Attrition and time ate away at the counters, and after a while all I had left was a tattered rule book and the game board.

I like the time-consuming nature of these games, although some of them can be a little ridiculous. I have a couple of friends who were playing a game of Advance Squad Leader and said they were making good progress -- they'd played four hours and reached turn four.

Apparently, Settlers of Cataan and Ticket to Ride are going to be added to XBox Live soon.

And while not exactly a designer board game, we spent almost six hours playing Liar's Dice (the game from Dead Man's Chest) a few weekends ago. One of our group found the actual rules, whipped up a game board (useful for keeping track of what's been bet), and got some cheap dice cups and away we went. It started off as a way to kill some time before our RPG session while waiting for the rest of the players to show up, and we all got so into it we just kept going and going, and before we knew it it was midnight. Once you get down to two or three players left with only one or two dice each, the game gets downright brutal.