I know this forum is mainly for chess, but if you can have a thread about Monopoly, you can certainly have a thread for recommending other board games. (If Ryan Beal disagrees, feel free to scrap this.)

To start, I pick Race for the Galaxy. This game is like crack. It's a card game, 2-4 players (5 with an expansion), where you earn points by playing cards--but the cards also function as money, so you have to pay cards out of your hand to play them. Some cards produce goods, which you can then sell for more cards or more points. There are five phases that can happen each round (draw cards, two play-cards phases, consume stuff, produce stuff), but each player chooses one phase, and only the chosen phases happen. Various cards give you bonuses for each of the phases.

The cool thing about this game--and why I would recommend it to poker players--is that, as players get better, some leveling starts happening. Maybe you have a card you want to play in the Settle phase, so you might want to pick that phase. However, if you think someone else might pick the Settle phase for you (because of the cards he has down, his hand size, a read), you could pick Consume to immediately consume the good off the world you settle. But if the other player thinks you might try to do this he may not pick settle...etc. When you first start, you're just playing your own cards because you don't know what anything does or how the cards work together, but eventually you start playing the players and their boards too. It's excellent and you should try it.

I also love Pandemic, but a cooperative multi-player puzzle is less likely to go over well with a poker group, maybe.

Feel free to add your suggestions of fun board/card games that other people may be missing out on.

I like Tigris & Euphrates myself. Race for the Galaxy is good, quick fun, as is Dominion.

Settlers is great until you find out how horrible it is.

Brettspielwelt.de has about 100 of these "German board games" to play online, haven't played there in a while but it's a pretty fun site.

I really got bored of American board games when growing up. So it was great for me to discover www.boardgamegeek.com and the joy of Eurogames. Definitely turning my 7-year old daughter into a Eurogame snob. It'll be weird when she's older and she's never played Monopoly though.

Anyway, I've only bought a few board games and they are all geared towards the simple end. They have to be, my wife doesn't play board games and my daughter is my only regular board game opponent.

* Carcassonne--I've played the Hunters and Gatherers version and the original version with the Rivers expansion. This is a tile-laying game where you build cities and roads, claiming the cities and roads by placing your meeples on the appropriate place. Can be played almost solitarily, with you building your cities while your opponent builds there's. Or can be played more competitively, as you actively attempt to block your opponent's developments.

Surprisingly playable for a 7-year old. Without even guiding her, she quickly learned what pieces are rare, which are common and the strategy for not letting me expand my areas. Highly recommended.

* Battle Line. A card game where you build 3 card poker hands to claim pawns. The game play is simple: you put 9 pawns in a row on the table. Each player is dealt a 7-card hand. Each turn, you put a card in front of one of the pawns. The goal is to win the pawn by having a higher hand in front of the pawn. The hand ranks have themed names, but I call them by their poker names, in order: 1) straight flush; 2) three of a kind; 3) flush; 4) straight; 5) no hand. Simple enough for my 7 year old to understand, yet it seems to be deep enough to have a lot of strategy for more sophisticated players. Recommended.

* Gulo Gulo. My first foray into Eurogames. Unfortunately, not much depth to the game. You build a path to a nest. Each turn, you turn over a tile, which reveals a color. You then try to grab that color egg from nest. While it's more interesting than the children's board games my daughter has tried (e.g., Candyland, Chutes & Ladders, Mousetrap), it gets boring quick. It's supposed to be for ages 5 and up and my daughter outgrew it by age 6.

In no particular order, all very good games:

Puerto Rico
Agricola
Power Grid
El Grande
Thurn und Taxis
Stephenson's Rocket
Ticket to ride (we play the variant with the passengers)