Comment by bena
I'm not a big fan of Catan. Players can get locked out of the game with no way to meaningfully play.
Ticket to Ride is decent though. Simple, straight-forward rules. Enough strategy and randomness to make playing interesting. No one can gum up the game by being intransigent.
My Ticket To Ride games are usually very passive, everyone has a sort of truce that lasts essentially throughout. But sometimes someone gives up on a big route and devotes themselves to messing up other people, and then things get spicy. Then again, I think we play wrong, because we don't ever use Stations (I think those are only in Ticket To Ride Europe though)?