I have played some boardgames recently! Largely this is thanks to me visiting Spritelady and her partner.
I think my favourite was probably Call To Adventure, a boardgame about creating heroes and their backstories before fighting a final boss - it's got some interesting mechanics in that you need to beat the boss to win at all, but the winning player is then the one who got most points according to a range of other markers. As such often the ideal strategy is to contribute as little as possible to winning so you can focus on filling out your other goals (I personally felt this could have been improved by making a player gain score according to the amount of damage they dealt the final foe). It's nice how the game builds characters and an implied story though.
I also played a game with very unlucky dinosaurs the name of which now escapes me, it was quick but fun, one of those where really the humour in the cards is the actual point of the thing.
There was also Smallworld, which I'd played before but not with the sky islands expansion: I had a pretty strong early game but a pretty weak late game, it's a fun one to play regardless and again I like the narrative/switching bit. I wasn't super keen on all the expansion's new races: scarecrows seemed a bit odd, and I'm never convinced about Wendigos just being transmitted as forest monsters (where the key part of them is really more a matter of emobodying social taboos).
Also in "I played this but now it has islands", played the Catan islands expansion for the first time, and one other expansion attached as well, with the commercial goods etc. I didn't actually get to use any of the commercial goods stuff, that expansion really rewards the three resources that give commerce goods (sheep->cloth, ore->coin, wood->paper) over clay and wheat, and I was mostly running a wheat economy and desperately trying to expand onto the islands in the hope they'd reveal the resources I needed, which they did not, they revealed more clay and wheat. I liked the island/exploration section though, and my main strategy ended up being about building lots of boats and getting the extra VPs for exploring islands which was enjoyable.
Not sure what if any boardgaming I'll get done over Christmas, we'll see.