The Xbox Live version of Ticket to Ride is a faithful port of the popular board game, recreating the train-themed game on Microsoft's game console. The game board features a map of the continental United States with its major cities connected by different colored train routes.

Players draw different colored tickets from a deck each turn, which can be used to complete the corresponding routes. Most routes require one to six tickets to complete, though a few are grey, and can be completed by any color tickets (though you still need the right number of said tickets).

Completing routes scores points, but that's just the short game. The long game involves completing completing enough routes to reach a destination. At the start of the game, players draw three destination cards -- e.g. Seattle to New York, Los Angelos to Miami -- and then pick two. The rest of the game sees players vying to complete these destinations. Each destination is worth a certain number of points; relatively short-haul ones might only score six or eight, but long ones -- like the Los Angeles/New York run -- can yield upwards of 20.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers is a tile-based board game in which players assume the roles of hunters and gatherers attempting to glean resources from a prehistoric landscape. It's a great game for geeks, but it's even better for families.

The game uses a mechanic similar to the original Carcassonne game. The game "board" consists of 79 random land tiles, each of which can contain up to four kinds of terrain: forest, plain, river or lake. Players randomly draw a tile and then place it on an ever-growing board, always seeking to match up like terrains (forest with forest, river with river, etc.)

Players can exploit the resources on these tiles by placing hunters (which stalk the plains for deer, mammoths and aurochs) gatherers (who collect food from forests and rivers) and huts (which are placed on rivers or lakes and gather fish from an entire river systems).

Vanished Planet is a cooperative board game in which players struggle to prevent an ever-growing, inky-black entity from enveloping the galaxy.

At the start of the game the Earth has been consumed by the entity, and has apparently been transferred to another dimension. The creature has already begun expanding beyond the Sol system, and it is only a matter of time until it envelops all of Earth's allies as well. But all is not lost -- the Earth may be gone, but she hasn't been destroyed. Her scientists have discovered a way to communicate with those remaining in our galaxy, and have come up with a plan to defeat the entity and return Earth to normal space. Now all the allies have to do is complete Earth's missions before their own worlds are consumed by the entity.