Carcassonne

Real quick entry here. I've been getting into strategy board games over the past year or so, thanks in large part to some coworkers. This is a very simple and popular example of that European strategy genre of games, and I'd never played it, so when I found a version of it sitting there on Xbox Live Arcade for five bucks, I jumped on it. (The actual board game retails for something like $25 or $30, so this was, in a way, a real steal.) I learned the rules of the game and beat an AI opponent twice in the course of an hour, so I think I can safely call this one "beaten." And I definitely enjoyed it. The gist is that players take turns placing tiles next to each other that constitute a landscape of sorts with villages, roads, and fields. You score points based on a few simple metrics, like how long the roads are, how big the villages are, and how many towns each field is adjacent to. Simple enough rules, but the create-the-board-as-you-go element makes for a practically limitless variety of ways for the games to play themselves out. I'm glad I bought this for $5 on Xbox, because I think I can now safely pass on buying the full thing for $25 or $30. It's not that I don't like it; it's just that more than anything I was curious to play the game, and now that I've done so, I'll likely buy an entirely different board game the next time I'm in the mood for one.