One of the highlights of our skiing vacation was a board game called Settlers of Catan (Naseljenci otoka Catan, Die Siedler von Catan), which was suggested to me be a co-worker. I haven't heard about the game before. If that's the case with you, the author is Klaus Teuber, obviously a huge name in board games with couple of "Best game of the Year" awards. The game is very popular, there is even a world championship played each year.
At first we weren't impressed since it looked quite boring, but once you are past your game one, you start to love it. And you can hardly wait for spare hour so you can blow it off on Catan. It's not just the game of chances, tactics and negotiations skills have a lot to do with it. It's kind of similar to Settlers and other strategic computer games.
Few days ago I discovered there is a nice computerized version of the game available from Microsoft and through Yahoo! and MSN, and there are a lot of web sites dedicated to the game: