[Gaius]

I own about 80 board games. I've been collecting them since college. :) I actually demoed Dead of Winter at GenCon the year it was released after making the horrible mistake of not preordering it, so I bought it off a friend a year later. It's one of my favorite thematic games!

Betrayal is a lot of fun too. Gameplay is a bit random and I wish there was more choice, but it does execute the theme really well, so it's an easy game to get immersed in.

I highly recommend Battlestar Galactica (even if you're not a fan of the TV show!) You play as a crew of pilots, military and political leaders on a journey to another planet, responding to invasions of evil robots while trying to conserve your food and fuel. It's an incredibly thematic experience, and the best part is that a few of the players are secretly traitors, working on the same side as those evil robots, trying to screw the crew over without giving their loyalty away. This traitor mechanic works differently from Betrayal in that the traitors often know who they are at the beginning of the game, and they can choose when they want to reveal their identity. It leads to a lot of paranoia and dramatic moments. As far as more complex games go, this one is easily my favorite.

I would also recommend Tales of the Arabian Nights. It's similar to Betrayal in a lot of ways; you travel around a map and have a random encounter each turn. But unlike Betrayal, you choose how your character reacts to the encounter! Meet a handsome prince? You can offer to help him, or try to win his hand in marriage, or you can rob him blind. Encounter a mysterious creature? You can try to capture it, or you can follow it and see where it takes you. The encounters can seem rather disjointed and often the reactions you choose have completely unexpected consequences (for example, you expect robbing the prince to be easy because you have the stealth skill, but your character for some reason decides to charge right at him and attack even though she doesn't know how to use a weapon), so the game can get very silly. But if you like all the random events in Betrayal, Tales will not disappoint.