Ya, the XCOM board game sounds cool. I guess you aren't really controlling the troops in a tactical way, but instead you and the other players are like the administrators of XCOM, and you do budgeting and research. I still don't exactly get it, but people are saying it's fun.

Jon: That's a tough list! Mage Knight, especially. But it looks like a good balance of doable ones and some harder ones. Saga also sounds difficult because it's dependent on Elzar and maybe Menace or whoever else. The RPG one I'm fully behind. 

I'm still mulling over what games to shoot for. There's a bunch of light weight games that my wife and I play pretty regularly, so it almost feels like cheating to include them. The toughest one I'm going to put on the list is Robinson Crusoe. I only got through 1.5 solo games of it, and it was pretty brutal. I want to get my money's worth, so that will be great to play 10 times to completion.