This weekend, the Ars Cardboard crew is drowning in a sea of tabletop games at the annual Gen Con gaming convention in Indianapolis. We’re filling our bags with the newest, shiniest titles and demoing everything under the sun to bring you a thorough cataloguing of all the hot titles you should be looking forward to in the coming months.

But before we unceremoniously abandon all the games on our shelves to fall headlong into the new hotness, we thought we’d take a moment to reflect on a few of the games we’ve been enjoying a lot lately. Some are new, some are old—but they’re all great.

We’ve been hitting the Spiel des Jahres games pretty hard, and we can’t get enough of Scythe, but we’ll keep this list focused on titles we haven’t been talking about ad nauseum for weeks.

We’d love to hear what’s been in heavy rotation on your table, too. Recommendation party in the comments!

7 Wonders Duel

Game details Designers: Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala

Publisher: Repos Production

Players: 2

Age: 10+

Playing time: 30 min

Price: $29.99 (£24 Amazon UK) Antoine Bauza and Bruno CathalaRepos Production10+30 min: $29.99 ( $27 Amazon US

Stop what you're doing right now and go buy this game. 7 Wonders Duel, a two-player version of the modern classic 7 Wonders, retools the civ-building-with-cards mechanism of the bigger game into something quick, tense, and interesting from turn one. I've been playing this game with my daughter recently and have had nothing but a great time with it. (She would like me to mention that she won three of our first four games.)

On every turn, spread across three "ages," you select an available card from the table in front of you and either build it with resources, discard it for money, or use it to build one of the game's titular "wonders." Building cards gives you wood, stone, glass, bricks, parchment, scientific achievements, military power, or luscious, unadulterated victory points.

You win the game in one of three ways: victory points, military invasion, or complete scientific dominance. (A clever military track across the top of the game spaces uses a "push-pull" mechanism between players to track military supremacy; move the shield pawn all the way into the opponent's base and the game ends immediately.) Along the way you'll build your personal set of wonders to provide powerful bonuses, more resources, and occasionally additional turns.

While the full 7 Wonders uses card drafting to make these same mechanisms work, Duel relies on drawing from specific geometrical card arrangements, such as a pyramid in which every other row of cards is face down and certain cards are only available once the cards below them are removed. This turns the process of card collection into a puzzle of its own, as you don't want to expose powerful cards that you want (or cards you want to deny your opponent) until you're in a place to snap them up.

Best of all, the whole thing offers a meaty experience in around 30 minutes and stores its goodness in a small box. It's a two-player board game only, of course, but if that's the way you game, definitely give this one a look.

—Nate Anderson

Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game

Game details Designer: Stefan Feld

Publisher: Alea/Ravensburger

Players: 1-4

Age: 12+

Playing time: 30-60 min

Price: $14.99 / Stefan FeldAlea/Ravensburger1-412+30-60 min: $14.99 / £19.99 (currently out of stock at many online retailers)

When I first heard that designer Stefan Feld was making a card game version of his modern classic board game, The Castles of Burgundy, I was pretty skeptical. Early previews showed a game that seemed to hew very closely to the original... but with cards. Why wouldn’t I just play the real deal? As it turns out, my initial impressions were at least partially correct. The Kartenspiel version feels very similar to the board game original.

But I failed to realize how easily this little game could slot into my collection. Its $15 price tag and cool solo variant meant that I had to pick it up and give it a shot—and boy am I glad I did. Just like in its bigger brother, you’ll be using dice (here represented by cards) to buy and place buildings and pastures into a growing kingdom. The fun comes in chaining together combos and watching your simple one-action turn explode into a cornucopia of bonus moves. The card game version puts its emphasis on set collection instead of the spatial puzzle of the original.

My only real complaint about the game is its ludicrously outsized table presence—you can hold the entire game (a small deck of cards) in one hand, but when set up, the damn thing is bigger than the full board game. It could still function as a nice travel game, but make sure you have ample table space at your destination.

It takes less than half the time of the original to play, but it still feels like Burgundy. To be clear, though, the game isn’t as masterful as the original, and new players wondering which version to get should unquestionably pick up the full board game. But if you need a quick Burgundy fix, this may be the best $15 you spend on a game this year.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Dungeons and Dragons: Curse of Strahd

Game details Writer: Chris Perkins

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast

Format: Hardcover

Price: $49.95 (£27 Amazon UK) Chris PerkinsWizards of the CoastHardcover: $49.95 ( $30 Amazon US

I’ve been playing D&D 5E for the last couple of years, and overall I am very happy with the system . I've been playing just one character for most of that time, though—a rather overpowered half-elf sorcerer—so when a friend said he wanted to run a campaign based on the new Curse of Strahd sourcebook, I leapt at the opportunity to try a new character in a different, darker setting.

Now I’m playing a dragonborn paladin. I am the bright light of goodness and purity that holds back the doom and gloom and malignant madness of the denizens of Ravenloft. I lay my healing hands upon bereft wailing mothers and smite down the unholy. It’s pretty great.

I’m just a player, so I can’t speak directly about the quality of the Curse of Strahd sourcebook, but from what I can gather, the DM seems to like it. He’s never DMed before, and yet the world he has constructed is rich and detailed. The characters seem fleshed out, and there are many hints of interesting things still to come as we investigate the curse of Strahd (the infamous vampire lord who dates back to the AD&D days). Obviously, though, it’s hard to separate the DM’s imagination and preparation from what’s in the book.

The book itself is as lovely as you’d expect from a modern Wizards of the Coast production: beautiful full-color art, nice paper, and even some neat pull-out maps and player handouts (it does feel weird to pull stuff out of an expensive book, though you could photocopy instead if you want). As an added bonus, the DM can even buy a deck of tarot cards that… well, you’ll have to play to find out.

The Curse of Strahd sourcebook takes you from level 1 to 10, but you could presumably keep on playing afterward. We’re having a grand old time. If you’re into gothic horror, you should definitely check it out.

—Sebastian Anthony

The Bloody Inn

You've had enough of just scraping by as a poor farmer in 19th century France—you were meant for better things. So you’ve decided to finally open that inn you’ve always been talking about. Your whole family is on board, and each of your siblings has agreed to manage one of the hotel’s rooms. And what’s a family-run business without a little friendly competition? It’s settled, then: you’re going to find out who can make the most money out of his or her piece of the enterprise.

Sure, you could focus on earning repeat customers with elegant interior decorating or excellent room service. But you’re not that kind of family. You know there’s a much quicker way to wealth: you’re going to murder your guests and rob them blind.

The Bloody Inn isn’t your typical card game, at least as far as its theme goes. But the game is essentially an engine-building Eurogame with multi-use cards, and anyone familiar with the "discard cards to buy cards" mechanic found in games like Race for the Galaxy will feel at home.

Each round, you’ll be deciding what to do with the spread of guests who have stopped by for the evening. You could just straight-up kill them, of course. But maybe you'd rather recruit them to become part of your personal criminal enterprise. Or you could use them to help build an annex on your side of the inn (you’ll need plenty of space to bury the bodies of your hapless victims). You could even force them to help you bury someone you’ve already killed, as you won't be able to pocket a victim's money until the evidence is disposed of.

But watch out—if you have any unburied bodies on your hand at the end of a round and a policeman shows up, you're in deep trouble. You can only do two actions each round, which makes the game extremely tight and tense.

Whimsical art ensures that the game's macabre theme stays light and funny. Sure, you'll be burying corpses and laundering money, but you've got to make a living somehow. Fun for the whole (twisted) family.

—Aaron Zimmerman

Listing image by Ibrahim Rodríguez