Just returned from a holiday with some friends - we all play board games, though not as regularly as we might like
I brought two games with me to play while we were there - Cosmic Encounter and 7 Wonders. None of us had played these games before, though I'd looked CE up ahead of time (and was why I bought it) and 7W was bought for me at Xmas.
Had an absolute blast playing Cosmic Encounter. I think the other three people were a little intimidated at first by all the rules and pieces, but it didn't take too long to pick up. We played a lot of this over the holiday, and we're sorting a meetup soon to play some more (and I'll probably grab the first expansion to see what this reward deck is all about).
Before playing it, I thought 7 Wonders was going to be the 'safer' of the two games, but to my surprise we were all pretty lukewarm on it. It's not like it doesn't play well or isn't fun, but for a group who only played it a handful of times, it was quite hard to tell if we were 'playing it right'. One of our group mentioned that the reason they didn't like it as much as CE was because "I don't really feel like there's much of a narrative in anything I'm doing".
Kinda curious to ask folks here who play 7 Wonders regularly - is there an expansion I should be looking at, or maybe a variant that might make it go down better, or does it just seem like it's not to our tastes? Would also appreciate any game recs if you happen to have them - besides CE we've played a lot of Pandemic, Ticket to Ride, Catan and TIME Stories. Thanks!