The game began like most: frenzied trading for resources, roads hastily built toward valued cashes, towns and cities rising to dominate the forests and plains around them.

And the barbarians attacked, razing all but one city and sending the island of Catan to a post-apocalyptic Stone Age it would take years (or a half-dozen turns or so) to recover from. Eventually the mighty herds of evolved sheep rose up and founded a new empire of Sheeple, caring deep within in their wood-obsessed minds a healthy respect for the barbarians looming over the horizon.

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).

Settlers of Catan is one of those games you hear people talk about for years, but somehow never get around to playing. Then when you finally do play it, you wonder why you wasted all that time on sleeping when you could have been playing Settlers.

The premise of the game is simple. Two to four colonists are attempting to settle the virgin land of Catan. They use the natural resources of the island -- wood, grain, wool, bricks and iron -- to forge roads, towns and cities. Each town is worth 1 point, each city is worth 2. The first person to 10 points wins the game.

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.

Every once in a while, our regular Friday night RPG session falls apart. It might be because of sick kids, weddings, extended business trips or just bad luck, but only a handful of our players can make it. If it's a night when the party really needed the resources of the missing players, we ditch the RPG game in favor of one of the board games in my closet. And our favorite one to date is Risk 2210.

Avalon Hill's Risk 2210 is the successor to the classic board game Risk, greatly expanded for a far future age. In this version of Risk, up to four countries have been nuked off the globe, and dozens of new ones have formed in the wake of 21st century conflicts. Armies can once again wage war for control of continents, but they can also seize sea and moon colonies.