What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.

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I really don't like Monopoly. It's very widespread in the US, I'd guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.

I think that it's actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn't appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.

Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I've looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they're going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it's not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
There's a limited amount by way of strategy and it's not very sophisticated. There aren't a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it's not your turn, there's not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is roll.
It has a high RNG depenedence.
Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren't very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like "everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn't interesting, it should be removed from the game". I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work -- they aren't making interesting decisions.

The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn't principally to entertain.

I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.

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Catan is nice because you spend 90% of the time building your stuff, and only 10% losing to one of the other players.

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Honestly, it depends

My favourite board game without a doubt is diplomacy, but those games go for like 6+ hours and requires 7 people. Also everybody will be yelling at everybody at some point, so yeah probably not a good pick lol

That being said, my favourite game to bring out for people not too into board games is wingspan. Fairly simple board game with enough depth to it. Also it has cute drawings of birds

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Yeah that's exactly it. It's also kind of nice that all the players are working together against the app, so no one has to DM or be the "bad guy".

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It depends on the group. Sometimes you have people intentionally cutting you off, revenge robber placements, and politics.

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We have a rule at my house: Never Monopoly.

It really is the worst.

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I'm sorry, but if you have this problem, it's entirely caused by who your players are as people, not by the games itself. Even cooperative games leave people that get pissed, pissed at each other. For example, if one person wants to do something that another person finds suboptimal, and then the cooperative game is lost some time later.

I love Deep Rock Galactic, Terra Mystica, Mysterium.

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I really like Mysterium. It's kinda cooperative, but players also work independently. The premise is that one player is a ghost, and the rest of the players are psychic detectives who have their own vision of how the murder happened. The ghost gives out clues using surreal, dream-like cards for the psychics to figure out their personal guess on what the weapon, location and murderer was. At the end the ghost gives clues to which psychic was right.

I personally like it because it isn't just logic and strategic thinking, you have to use your creative/artistic part of your brain as well, if not moreso.

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Dead of Winter - The co-op variant of the game, without a traitor. Zombie apocalypse game.

Meeple Party - A co-op game about throwing a party and making sure personality types don't clash. Perhaps on the nose for your group, but I still recommend it.

Mental Blocks - Once again, play the variant without a traitor. This is a game about solving a 3D puzzle from different perspectives with limited abilities to communicate or touch certain blocks.

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In order to get good recommendations you're going to need to provide additional information. How many people are playing? How complex can a game be? What games have you tried and loved? Is there a favorite mechanism? What is the game duration you're going for? 10 min? 30? 3 hours?

Generic recommendations based on my library:

Just One - Favorite party game
Brass Birmingham - My favorite; Beware it's quite complex and lasts around 3 hours
Blood Rage - Cool dude's on a map game with very nice minis
Turing Machine - Good puzzle game
Slay The Spire - If you love slay the spire, you'll love cooperative slay the spire as well
Menara - Favorite dexterity game

boardgamegeek.com is the imdb of boardgames, check it out.

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Oh, I'm going to have to pick up a copy of Mists over Carcassonne. Thank you!

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Looks fun, just ordered the game now!

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I didn't think anyone else knew about Menara. It's so good, and no other game has made me laugh that hard.

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Newer cooperative games mostly avoid the quarterbacking issue by having secret info, or just making it complicated enough that it's impractical for 1 person to track everything.

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I guess it is better to go for games that are cooperative and where everyone can contribute how they can without pressure. So I would suggest strategy games where everyone decides together what to do and all the players are united against the game, but in a way that it's harder to put the blame on someone if they fail to do what's expected of them (Ex : Hanabi). Here are some of my favourites that corresponds to this :

Pandemic

Horrified

Forbidden Desert

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Here’s some great cooperative games that either have big groups working together OR have the whole groups:

Escape from the Dark Castle - a fun little dungeon crawler where you flip cards and roll against dangers as you try to overcome obstacles. Completely cooperative but mechanically simple.

Wavelength - the base way to play is technically a ‘competitive’ in that there are teams and points but it’s relatively chill and I’ve often played this at parties with large groups cooperatively cause it just makes for a great conversation starter.

Phantom Ink - two teams but the mechanics are very fun and the game overall has a great tone.

Ravine - cooperative game where you try to survive after a plane crash.

I would also maybe recommend looking into some light roleplaying games like The Zone or Fiasco. These are almost always gm-less or easy to run and focused on building a fun narrative together.

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It's definitely an underrated game!!

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Spirit island is my favorite game to play with a group. It has you trying to protect an island from colonists who damage the island with their expansions. Each player has different abilities that force you all the work together & requires a lot of teamwork to win especially some of the higher difficulties.

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Oh yeah. Dead of Winter is so good!

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My favourite board game without a doubt is diplomacy but those games go for like 6+ hours and requires 7 people. Also everybody will be yelling at everybody at some point, so yeah probably not a good pick lol

Yeah. Diplomacy is fantastic...and we can strongly recommend that OP avoid it, anyway. Lol.

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What are your favorite board games? I'm looking for games that are satisfying and lead to a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment or connection.