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Friend of mine celebrated his birthday this weekend and - boardgamer as he is - several games were played. First Ants. In BGG there are several threads about playing it without player elimination... I dunno... it kinda breaks the game then for me. It's fast, there's almost no strategy/thinking involved (if you don't attack, sooner or later you have to defend - but there's component limit so you can't build large defences) and it's quite fun in some brutal way. I'd call it a light-ish wargame for up to 6 people.

Rex: Final Days of an Empire. I knew only two things about this game: (a) it's a remake of some famous boardgame "Dune" and (b) it's based now in Twilight Imperium universe; thus it must be very-very good. I remained cautious because of such hype and started the game with pretty low expectations... but behold - it was even more boring than I even thought it might be. There are 5 strongholds on board, whoever controls 3 of them, is winner. If there are alliances made, more strongholds need to be controlled. And that's it, plus 3 simple race-related special victory conditions with one as "If nobody wins, you win". Strategy? Naaah. Negotiations and breaking the alliances? Didn't see them. And it's not a sore loser's speech - I (my alliance actually) won the gorram game. On Turn 1 built all my troops to my starting base... fast-forward many hours... and at the end of last turn my alliance won, as I had the "nobody wins, you win" condition with my race. At meantime there was nothing to do for me than to defend the stronghold with all my troops and wait for the game to end. I'm quite sure that playing 1856 as dedicated banker is also more interesting than this. (Remark: there are also some optional rules available with Rex that add more variability in victory conditions but those were not used this time)

The Adventurers. We started this game appr. 1AM and the person reading the rules left out some important bits in game play... so as it appeared at the end it was "houseruled" a lot. Everybody reached the end safely, nobody was hit by boulder. If I hadn't played it once before, would've left quite a bland impression.

Elder Sign. From all the Arkham-related games this one I like most. Reason is simple: it takes the best parts of AH - monsters and dice-rolling - and leaves all the rest. No more boring downtime, this is fast and fun and no-AP-prone dice-rolling ancient-beating game. Really good experience in short timeframe.