Taking Stock: New Games with the In-Laws

I was lucky enough to receive lots of great new games from the Mrs. this year for Christmas. (You really are the best!) I also picked up a couple games from my brother Christopher who got me in my family's secret santa.

I'll delve into all of my new additions soon, I'm sure, but of immediate interest are those that should be a great fit with my most frequent gaming group--the in-laws. Thus far our favorite games seem to be those that are interesting, interactive, not too heavy, and are great with five players--The Resistance and Cosmic Encounter, for instance, both work pretty well.

There are three new additions to my collection that could be ideal for this group:

• Panic Station. I'm hoping that this one fills a niche similar to The Resistance. One player starts as the alien host and tries to defend his hive against human exterminators. The two twists here--the humans don't know which one of them is the host, and the host may be able to infect the humans to force them to switch sides and join forces with the host player. We played for the first time on Christmas, but we got many rules wrong so the game we played was not anything like the actual game.
• 7 Wonders. This title is a light civilization style game that can supposedly handle up to seven players quite well. I'm hoping my love of Through the Ages translates to a much lighter and quicker playing civ game, especially since we can get all five of us involved.
• Space Alert. I've been thinking this one could be an excellent fit for our group for a while. We haven't played any fully cooperative games together, and since Space Alert is quick, lively, and can support five players I think it might work beautifully in this context.

I've also been meaning to introduce a few of my heavier strategy games to this group, including El Grande, Puerto Rico, and Shogun, and some heavier thematic games as well, such as Fury of Dracula and Battlestar Galactica, but those are all longer and more difficult to teach than the above three, so all in due time!