Tile Placement

Somewhere out there, there is a list of tabletop games that everyone should play. On this list, I suspect, is Carcassonne. Themed after the French-walled city of the same name, this German-designed tile-laying game consists of just under 100 tiles and tasks players with building castles, roads, and farms. Players score points for staking a claim in and completing various things like castles or surrounding a cloister with tiles. At the end of the game, incomplete projects as well as farms -- tracts of land that serve one or more completed cities -- are scored, and a winner is crowned.

A four-player boardgame of resource management, Space Junkyard is set in, well, a space junkyard; the game is a free PDF, though you'll have to print out the components (I suggest printing onto blank, full-sheet labels, mounting on cardstock, and cutting apart).

The game is played on a 6 by 6 array of tiles, with each tile representing either an asteroid or an abandoned ship part. Each player controls one ship, which begins only with a "bridge"; the bridge can store three of each resource type, and produce one "radioactives" resource each turn. Each ship part is worth some number of victory points (from zero to four), so the ultimate winner is the player who is most successful at collecting ship parts and connecting them to his bridge.