Race for the Galaxy is my other favorite game along with catan. It's a card game where you play cards for victory points and some cards synchronize in cool ways. What's holding it back is that it is missing a lot of player interaction that Catan does have through trading and building roads. There's an expansion coming in a couple of months that adds a board and may fix it and it might become my favorite. Lost Cities is an extremely clever 2 player card game made by a math PhD. Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne are really fun but not worthy of hundreds of plays like all of the above games are. I have some other games like Puerto Rico that I don't like but I'm not sure why so I'll save judgment.
You have to be pretty careful getting board games though because I think there are two types of people who enjoy board games. One type is like me, and I like games where everyone can express themselves through their strategy, and I'm willing to let unpredictability into the game to help make divergence an advantage. There are games out there like power grid that (IMO) have no strategy and depend only on how well you can do mental math, and I think people mistake this for deep gameplay. I hate Chess for a similar reason in that it's based on how well you can think about how the board will look a few turns ahead, which might as well be a different kind of mental math. It's only a matter of time before these games are 100% solved by computers just like connect 4 and checkers, as there's no difference besides complexity. I expect Power Grid and Chess do have some subjective styles of play from different players but I'm pretty sure it's only visible at the highest levels of play, and at low levels the best you can hope to do is to either recognize a good move or not recognize it. I don't really want to fight anyone who likes Power Grid or Chess because I haven't played them much. Some games like Scrabble have the same boring flaw where whoever has played the most has an unstoppable advantage, but are still good games because of other traits (learning vocabulary is fun, the game is party-friendly, and the game is strictly linked to the real world. Trivial pursuit is another example of a game that isn't beautiful but is still fun).
What I'm trying to say is to be careful when looking for board game recommendations on the internet. Some people just love being competitive and they'll play anything they can use to battle and match egos with each other even if the games aren't inherently interesting. Nothing wrong with it, just can be disappointing to get a game that isn't made for you. I think Catan is inherently beautiful and I would gladly play it and lose terribly a thousand times and never get bored. If you're like me then stay away from games that don't have any cards or dice.
I'm pretty much talking about boardgamegeek's board game popularity rankings and how I've bought some games I've been disappointed in.
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