I meant to post this last night, but got rather involved in Guild Wars 2 instead so I completely forgot. For years now I've been meaning to get back into board games. As a teenager I played some war games that I absolutely loved. Now that my eldest is near 13 I've been hoping to get back into it and - obviously - involve him.

Last night my son and I played our first game of Mage Knight. (Associate link below. ;) It was an incredibly cool, but complex game. It took about 2 hours of setup to get started and my son was definitely running low on patience.

But then something magical happened. We both went form struggling to "get it" to, well, I still don't think we get it completely, but we got to a point where we could actually play, and his face lit up, I got excited, it was just fun as hell.

That being said, while we plan on playing again, I'm curious what games folks would recommend that are a bit simpler. If Monopoly has a skill rating of 1, Mage Knight is somewhere at 100. That's cool and all, but I'm hoping for some middle ground in terms of complexity.

Any suggestions? I'll point out that no one else in the family is that interested, so 2-player support is kind of required. Nuclear War is already on my list to pick up.