It is hard to stay afloat as a comic book store.

It depends on what I’m trying to maximize.

If I just want the happiness spike ASAP, then I would just buy $15 worth of Magic cards, or maybe a booster pack or three, depending on the set.

If I’m trying to maximize my overall happiness over any amount of time, I think spending $15 on something reusable, like a nice pair of socks or a hat would work out for me.

If I want to maximize happiness in general, then spending it on someone else I care about does double duty. It makes someone else happy, and I get happiness from being involved in the process.

This is real. I saw news about it maybe 1-2 months ago or so. Catan has largely rotated out of my group’s play pool, but I still remember it as the game that kinda got us into resource-based games 20 years ago.

Ticket to Ride unfortunately did nothing for me.

My friends and I had been playing mostly Catan for about 5 years before we tried Ticket to Ride. It just didn’t feel very strategic, but maybe that’s because it was our first time playing. It felt like the cards you were dealt basically determined whether or not you would win, and “blocking” someone else didn’t feel like it was truly worth the effort. Years later, my CS and EE professor would say how it was a fun game because of how it actually resembled some problems in networking, but I just never grasped that level of depth.

The few times I’ve played it (with my admittedly competitive group), we’ve always gone through the entire deck. If a group of 4 isn’t getting through the deck, it means people aren’t calling card draw/card selection enough, and may be plopping down suboptimal cards just to use what they have.

I would also recommend Wingspan, but it’s not the same style of game. Everdell felt a lot like Agricola, but less punishing and more fair about card availability and variance.