Hello and welcome. I'm Walt Brannigan. I am fifty-three years old, I sell insurance during the week, and on Friday nights my dining room table turns into the most contested territory in the county. The closet in the hall has not held a coat since 1988; it holds games, floor to ceiling, and my wife Carol has stopped asking where the new ones are going to go. (The answer is the garage. Don't tell her.)

This page is for three kinds of people: the folks who come to game night and want to know what we're playing this week; anyone who has a copy of Monopoly in the closet and wonders whether there is anything else out there (there is, and it's wonderful); and members of the Hobby Horse WebRing, which I started this spring for people who make, collect, fix or play something purely for the love of it. The ring hub is right here.

Every Friday, 7:00 until the last person gives up, at our house. Regulars are Carol and me, our son Danny and his wife when they're in town, our neighbors Pete and Rosemary, Carol's sister Joan (who cannot be beaten at Scrabble and knows it), and a rotating cast of four or five others. Anywhere from five to eleven people show up. We usually run two tables: a long game at the dining room table and something quick and loud at the kitchen table.

This fall's schedule, subject to change if somebody brings something new:

Newcomers welcome, honestly. If you know one of the regulars, come along. If you don't, write me and we'll figure it out. Carol makes a seven-layer dip that is reason enough to visit.

I rate everything on my Closet Scale, which runs from one to five shelves. A five-shelf game gets played every month. A one-shelf game is in the garage.

This is the game that changed our Friday nights. Danny brought it home from college in the spring of 1997 and we have played it, I would guess, two hundred times since. The board is nineteen hexagon tiles (forest, hills, pasture, fields, mountains and one desert) laid out differently every game, with number chits on them. You build settlements on the corners and roads on the edges. Each turn the dice are rolled and every tile whose number comes up pays out its resource, lumber, brick, wool, grain or ore, to anyone with a settlement next to it. You trade with the other players, build more, upgrade settlements to cities, and the first to ten victory points wins.

What makes it wonderful: nobody is ever out of it, nobody sits around waiting for their turn (you collect on everybody's roll), and the trading turns the quietest person at the table into a horse trader. What makes it maddening: the robber. Roll a 7 and you move the robber onto somebody's tile and steal a card, and anyone holding more than seven cards loses half. Carol says the robber has ruined more friendships than money. It won Germany's Game of the Year in 1995 and it deserved to. It is the first game I hand to anybody who says board games are boring.

The game of world conquest: 42 territories on six continents, armies, dice, and alliances that last precisely as long as they are useful. Everybody knows Risk. What everybody does not know is that it was invented in France by Albert Lamorisse, the same man who made the short film The Red Balloon, which I find delightful. Rules of thumb that hold up after forty years of playing: hold Australia early, never hold Asia early, and the fellow who sits quietly in South America is the one to watch. We use the newer rules where the card sets increase in value each time they're turned in, which gets the game over before breakfast.

One hundred tiles, a fifteen-by-fifteen board, premium squares for double and triple letters and words, and a fifty-point bonus for using all seven of your tiles at once. Q and Z are worth ten; the two blanks are worth nothing but they win games. If you play with my sister-in-law, know that she has memorized every two-letter word in the official dictionary and will use QI and ZA on you without mercy. (Editor's note from Joan: QI and ZA are not in the dictionary and she has never used them. She uses XI and XU. I stand corrected.) The dictionary is the law at our table and the dictionary is the one we bought, not the one you have at home.

Medieval Spain. You are a grandee placing your caballeros (little wooden cubes) into the regions of the map to have the most of them there when the scoring rounds come around. There's a wooden king who blocks the region he stands in, and a castle (the "Castillo") where you can hide cubes that come out later to a region of your secret choosing. The rules take one evening to get, and then it's all bluffing and card play. My favorite of the German games for the long table. Pete refuses to play it because he lost by one point in July.

A card game about planting beans. You have two bean fields, you must plant the cards in your hand in the order you drew them, and the only way to get rid of the ones you don't want is to trade them away, loudly, to the other players. The joke is in the names (the German edition has puns; the English one has the drawings). It sounds silly and it is, but the trading is as sharp as anything in Settlers. Great for the kitchen table.

Hotel chains grow across a grid as players lay tiles; when chains touch, the bigger one swallows the smaller and stockholders in the swallowed chain get paid off. You're not running a hotel, you're buying stock in the right ones at the right time. The best of the old American designer games, in my opinion, and I have the old edition with the plastic tiles, which I will not trade for any amount of your money.

Yes, I know. Everybody has it, everybody has played it, and everybody remembers it as taking six hours, and that's because everybody plays it wrong: see house rules below. Played by the actual rules (with auctions when somebody declines to buy a property, and no money under Free Parking) it's a decent ninety-minute game. Played the way your family plays it, it's a lifetime sentence. Two shelves because I don't reach for it; it's in the closet for the grandkids.

• We play by the printed rules first. A designer spent years on those rules; your uncle spent one Thanksgiving on his. The famous "money in the middle for Free Parking" rule in Monopoly is not in the rulebook and it's the reason the game never ends. Neither is skipping the auction. Read the rulebook. Then, if you must, change it.
• Settlers: we play the standard setup from the box for anyone's first three games, then random. The Seafarers expansion comes out only when Danny is here, because he's the only one who can explain it.
• Risk: a player who is eliminated gets the dip. Alliances are permitted but cannot be written down. Nobody may say "I'm just going to sit here in Australia" out loud, because then everybody attacks Australia.
• Scrabble: the dictionary is the one on the shelf. Challenges cost a turn if you're wrong. No phones, no other dictionaries, no "my mother always said it was a word."
• Any game: if a rule question stops the game for more than three minutes, the host rules, play continues, and we look it up afterward.
• The Danny Rule: the person who suggests a game with a rulebook longer than twelve pages is the one who teaches it, sober.

1. Show up on time. A four-player game with three players is a two-hour wait for the fourth.
2. Bring something to eat that doesn't leave grease on the cards. Pretzels yes, barbecue potato chips no. Carol has a rule about red wine near the Scrabble board and she is right.
3. Learn the rules before you sit down if it's a game you've seen before; if it's new, listen to the whole explanation before asking "but what if I..."
4. Play your turn when it's your turn. Think on other people's turns. Nobody minds a long think at a big moment, everybody minds one at every moment.
5. Don't coach. If Rosemary wants to trade her ore for a sheep, that's between her and her conscience.
6. Don't gang up on the leader out of spite, and don't gang up on the newcomer at all. Beat the leader because it's good play.
7. Win graciously and lose the same way. The best thing anyone can say at 11:30 is "same time next week?"
8. Help put the game away. Every piece. Count the Settlers roads. There are fifteen per color and I know when one's missing.

The count as of this month is 127 boxes, not counting card games in the drawer or the ones in the garage. I've been meaning to type up the whole inventory and I have got as far as the letter D. Where I buy: the two hobby shops within an hour's drive that carry the German imports, the toy store in the mall for the standards, mail order for the ones nobody stocks (the catalogs are a hazard to the household budget), and rummage sales for the old Avalon Hill and 3M bookshelf games. If you find an old 3M bookshelf game at a sale for a dollar, buy it and write me.

Where I find out about new games: a couple of gaming magazines, the fellows at the hobby shop, and lately the Web. There's a whole world of people out there writing about this stuff. Some of the best are on this ring.

• The Chess Corner — Norman's club, Monday nights, the oldest game on the block.
• The Atari 2600 Shrine — Ron and his 211 cartridges, one step back on the ring.
• Pinball Wizard's Basement — Sal and his four machines, one step ahead.
• The Crossword Constructor — Ruth Ann builds puzzles the way I build a Settlers road: slowly and with grievances.
• The Henderson Family Home Page — Bob and Linda run the Front Porch ring, which is where I got the idea for mine.