I also just played Codenames for the first time, on Saturday, and it was fun. A little light for my ideal, but a good party game without being too brainless.
What else? Patchwork (2-player only, good), Category 5 (always a good filler), Continental Express (train game a bit like Ticket to Ride but with no board; you're building trains instead of tracks). Then the "hard stuff":
Dice City - Sounds like it ought to be a modern city-building game a la SimCity, but actually more medieval themed and more in the empire-building style (like 7 Wonders, say). Each player has a 5x6 grid of spaces which start occupied by basic resource-production, weak military, and so on. The idea is to build up your city by buying better cards to place over the starter spaces. Each of the five rows has a different color die, and each turn you roll the 5 dice to see which spaces get activated.
In a way it's also like a deck-builder; you start out with a random limited set of options and have to make do with what you roll, but as the game progresses you get more and more control by customizing your city to your style. Do you want more military? More resources? Some ability to modify your dice rolls? And where should each of these buildings go in your city to take best advantage of the dice rolls?
I foresee having a lot of fun with this one...
And speaking of 7 Wonders, the other cool game was a drafting one called Medieval Academy. There are 7 tracks you need to make progress on, each with different effects on end-game scoring. In each of the 6 rounds, the players draft a hand of 5 cards, of which they'll be able to play 4; each will give them progress on a single track. But only the top couple of scorers on a given track will get the benefits; everyone else will just have wasted some of their limited plays for nothing. Plus, some of the tracks have limited short term rewards and then reset, while others have larger but only long-term rewards. Where in 7 Wonders, each player is building their own little economic engine with very limited interaction, in Medieval Academy the play is very much about guessing at and responding to what the other players are doing.
John
