Twilight Imperium – it’s expensive but if you have nothing to do for a weekend (or week) well worth investing in. It’s ridiculously long, and is kinda like catan and civ 2 mashed together. You get a randomly generated board with hexes, the plants supply different resources (ok 2) and you use them to advance a tech tree and beat the crap out of each other with space ships. It is also highly complex by having to pick which actions you will be good at or can even perform each round. But doesn’t move to a players turn and everyone can wander off as there is nearly always something to do. I would recommend trying before you buy as it is expensive.

Game of Thrones board game – Pretty much an easier to play Diplomacy (in that you don’t have to write anything) or a much more complex Risk. If you like the book/tv show its worth a try, although Targs aren’t available.

Star Wars miniatures game – Lots of people will avoid this because it screams fan boy. I am not really into star wars that much (I have seen the films ofc) but for a tactical maneuver shooting game its balls to the walls fun. Sort of like a really easy super quick Warhammer game.

Anything with Fantasy Flight games on it is pretty awesome.

I am glad you are leaning towards mansions of madness as I love that game. The guy with the dog is broken… turns out in HP lovecrafts world hunters are op too!

For just a couple players, though, I highly recommend checking out anything made by Cheapass Games – Give Me the Brain, Lord of the Fries, and Kill Dr. Lucky are a couple of my favorites.

Guillotine is a fun card game for two (or more), and Munchkin is a fun one as well (though typically works best with more players, 2 people can still have a good time).

For Dominion, I have a somewhat love-hate relationship. The scenarios they suggest and those I found around with google more or less invariably sucked. I’ve come up with an approach to generate scenarios which (after some refiining by friends) works well. If you’re interested, I can share

I always enjoy an heroic-mode Pandemic, even if at the hardest level it tends to end badly, being a PvE player I enjoy the cooperative gameplay.

Ah and we always end the evening with Settlers of Catan, which brings out the worse in us, with games ending up with backstabbing, victimism, screaming and hate (not very long lived ).

Here’s a review on bgg http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/861428/table-top-tango-reviews-camels-beware

(Sorry, don’t really know how to explain it well in english! But that’s really good for some quick game in between more serious stuff, like Arkham Horror ^^)

Betrayal at House on the Hill – I really like this game, it sounds similar to Arkham Horror. In the game you explore a haunted house (you lay tiles so the layout is always different). At some point int the game one player becomes the betrayer and you need to play out one of many different scenarios to escape the house or defeat the bad guy.

Thunderstone – this is a deck building game similar to Dominion, but has a dungeon-crawling, monster killing theme. It’s pretty good even if you only have 2 players and there’s also an online version at yucata.de

The Great Space Race – This one is simple but a lot of fun. You race the other players around a space track, and try to hinder them by dropping mines or giving them space amoebas.

http://tabletop.geekandsundry.com/

New episodes coming in January, too, so you have plenty of time to catch up on older episodes if you haven’t been watching.