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Great Western Trail was new to us when we bought the 2nd edition and it's a top 5 now.
Tiletum -- we really love Lorenzo il Magnifico and Tiletum although a bit lighter is just as fun.
Furnace is a neat filler. I'm interested to see what the expansion adds and whether it elevates it to a mainstay.
I like your picks! Make sure to check out Newton if haven't already. I almost passed it over because of the boring looking box and only picked it up because of a sale and "well, it's a Luciani, can't be too bad".
It's one of our favorites now. It has tracks and map (and a tree!) similar to Tiletum, card market and play which is different from Lorenzo but very cool in its own way and neat interactions between parts of the board. The 2nd edition has some expansions included that are easy to mix in. There is also a digital version on Yucata.
What's your usual player count? I skipped Furnace so far because I am not sure how well it would work at 2.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out.
We play mostly at 2. Furnace functions, but obviously isn't its best at 2 players. It becomes a tiny bit Chess like b/c you can often see exactly, "If I place this number there, that'll force this and there will force that". I still quite enjoy it and would play it for a quick game or two on an evening when we're not up for crunching a bigger title. But I don't know that I would recommend it for just 2p (unless you found a good deal).
I quite like Nova Luna as a game that everyone can play, but that has a fierce optimization aspect, if you are into that.
I was pleasantly surprised by Lost Ruins of Arnak - I don't think there is any other game that has this combination of worker placement and deck building. I was a bit worried how the very low number of turns would interact with the deck building elements (generally cycling through the deck very often is expected in that genre), but it works surprsingly well!
You should check out Framework too if you liked Nova Luna. I found it a little easier to understand visually.
Thanks for pointing that out to me. I didn't know they made another game using a similar mechanic. I will certainly check it out!
We sadly did not like Arnak, it felt a lot like min/maxing from turn one. We had a couple of 2 and 3 player sessions but none was very convincing.
Oh yeah it is certainly a bit on the dry optimization side of things. I haven't played it enough to be certain, but it definitely feels like there is some degree of snowballing going on depending on how your first few turns went.