Hi, me and my cousins had a good thing going for a long time playing Catan but we are looking to shake things up. We have played Catan regularly for over s year, but find that it’s getting a little stale. We are looking for a game that requires a lot of strategy, planning, teamwork but also betrayal and backstabbing, yet also not take half an hour to set up and dismantle.
In Catan we love that the board changes every game and therefore the strategy, but found that once we got to the castles and knights expansion there was one strategy that beat out all the rest which sort of deflated the fun (first person to get science bonus seemed to win 90% of the time).
Any other board games out there for beginners that don’t take forever to set up and put away? Not huge into role playing, but never say never I guess.
Carcassonne is a great beginner game! And it meets a lot of your requirements as well! The board is built as you play and lends to different strategies each game. It has loads of expansions if you decide you like it, but I recommend sticking with the base game + rivers to start.
Aside from that, I recommend for beginners who want to get a better overall board game experience to check out games that are known for doing 1 game mechanic really well to help introduce the new concept and expand your boardgame genre experiences without overcomplicating things. Once you’ve gotten some of those down, it’s much easier to dive into bigger, more complicated games that use multiple game mechanics. You’ll be able to sit down and recognize each mechanic as you learn!
If you ever get to that point, I HIGHLY recommend Eclipse. It’s one of my favorite games that also fits your criteria and is highly rewarding. Downsides are that it has more game mechanics to learn, it takes a while to setup, and you may need to watch a video to play it the first time. Once you’ve played it, it’s easy to remember and you can definitely get through games in 2 hours.
I hope this helps and I hope you enjoy Carcassonne if you end up trying it out!