Like the title! For someone getting into board games, what would you recommend? Bonus points if it is or can be played cooperatively, with 2 players, and double bonus points if it has a sci-fi theme (like, grand sci-fi), though the previous points are more important.
What do you like to play? Arcs and Earthborne Rangers both look cool to me, but wanted to ask here too! Anyone have experience with those two?
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.
Wow, that's really good advice 👍 I'm on boardgame geek and hadn't thought of that.
It also wasn't what you asked for so no shade there. It is the curse of the boardgame haver. You end up playing dungion master. As you are bringing the game to the audience you are responsible for setting it up and examining the rules so the parties involved have a good time. They are probably going to meet you half way but that still leaves half the show boardgame type people are not inclined to prep for. Explaining rules and setup are notorious hurdles in having a nice boardgame eveing. I think one if the cruelist things I ever did to that buddy was get him a very good and fun boardgame that is very difficult to set up and run. So the odds of any attempt to play it living up to the potential was low. It haunted him for quite some time till he got a system down to run it.