Settlers (and Seafarers, and Cities & Knights) of Catan is a great game. My girlfriend and I also like Ingenious. It's a very simple and quick game (and the only one I've found that's still interesting with two players), yet there is some fairly interesting strategy to it.
Yeah, the primary reason I stopped gaming as I reached adulthood (I was a huge RPG and other tabletop games fan as a kid) was that the games simply took too much time. Settlers wraps up in about 90 minutes, while still providing a reasonable amount of time for strategy and development. It's a very well-balanced and quick to play game. And the rules are simple enough to cover in about 10-15 minutes.
I've played both a little Reversi/Othello and Go. If you haven't tried Go I'd give it a shot. It is good to start by playing a little against a computer (and don't feel bad about using a handicap) until you the basics click. Then find other humans I guess...
[I always had trouble with chess, my "ADD" always got in my way. I'd end up making a mistake I had previously ruled out, because I had forgotten where I was at, felt rushed, and eventually just made a move.]
In Go, all but the very best players in the world play with a handicap depending on who they are playing. It balances the game so that players who are not as adept have an equal chance at winning a particular game. This is an advantage that Go has over Chess, where removing pieces would just be silly.
> This is an advantage that Go has over Chess, where removing pieces would just be silly.
It used to be rather popular, actually, to play at pawn-and-move odds. If you search through old games, you'll eventually come across one where black starts without an f pawn.
There's also a famous Capablanca game where a young Capablanca is given a queen by his opponent (he wins, of course.)
I'd say the two biggest problems with chess are:
1. Too many draws.
2. First move has too big an advantage.
Neither of these is a problem in Go (draws are extremely rare or even impossible in many rule sets, and the second player is now given enough points that the game is almost even.)
I like how it seems to tap into some preternatural intinct to guard, protect, and incur against other "theoretically" boundaries...
It's like you can see the player's minds working sometimes (maybe if I was better it would be more often), an interesting game to be sure.
I don't know if it's true, I could just be stealing a line from the movie Pi; but people in a movie once said that no two games are like, and thus the game serves as pseudo microcosm for the universe. Either way you should watch that movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/ , and give the game a whirl.
I like monopoly but mostly because its a game of persuasion. I'm highly competitive, and always trying to make impossible deals happen in that game. Which is why I love it.
Go. Another very simple game that takes forever to master, and yet the rules can be tought in under a minute. It's also so complicated that the Go players of today are far better then the Go masters of 1000 or even 500 years ago because of all the strategy in the game that has been discovered and passed on. You can tell a lot about a person based on how they play Go... are they timid, aggressive, unwilling to make mistakes, willing to move without all the information? It comes out in a single game of Go.
I like www.kdice.com. It's a distillation of the best elements of Risk down to the most minimal essentials. You'd have to be crazy to try playing it on an actual board though. I believe it is the largest public installation of Google Web Toolkit. I'm kevin143 there if you want to play sometime. It is not an easy game, but I believe it is close to perfect.
I'm also very fond of Scrabble. Like others have mentioned, Othello and Go can be fun.