Hussar
Legend
Interesting....
You see, while the folks at boardgamegeek are generally correct that the common house rules (or, more often, poorly understood rules) of Monopoly don't generally lead to better game play, I find the criticism a little ironic, and oddly parallel to RPGs. Most of the supposedly "great board games" I see these days need a special turn track monitor, and a person expert in the rules to lead new players by the nose through their first half-dozen games before the player can be expected to get the hang of it.
/snip
I'm really not sure that's true though. There are a huge number of very popular games that don't have much of a learning curve at all. I just picked up Endeavor to play with my ESL students. The way the game is set up, you basically learn as you go. Ten minutes of instruction and we were into play and this was with two of the four players not having played any board games other than Scrabble.
Catan is about as simple as it gets as well.
Are there really complex games out there? Oh, sure. Squad Leader anyone? But, really, from the research that I did when picking a new game for my classes, most of the games are pretty newbie friendly.