Some of my favorite board and card games:

Some of my favorite games played with playing cards:

• ♠ Spades ^W - preset trump; trick-taking
• ♥ Hearts ^W - "evasion-type" trick-taking
• Euchre ^W - 24-card; trick-taking
• Pinochle ^W - 48-card; trick-taking
• Spite and Malice ^W - competitive solitaire (Skip-Bo ^W is a variation of this game)
• Egyptian Ratscrew ^W - speed; matching

I feel reasonably knowledgeable about the following games, and own many of them (alphabetical order):

• Bang!
  • Dodge City expansion
  • Fistful of Cards expansion
• Castle Risk
• Blokus
• Blokus: Trigon
• Bohnanza
  • High Bohn expansion
• ♥ Hearts
• Memoir '44
• Pirates' Cove
• Risk
• Scrabble — I stink at it, though!
• Sequence
• Skip-Bo
• ♠ Spades
• Spite and Malice
• Ticket to Ride
  • 1910 expansion
• Ticket to Ride: Switzerland
• Ticket to Ride: The Card Game

My least favorite games:

• Monopoly* — It lasts hours, it's not very intellectually or socially entertaining, you have all sorts of house rules (many of which break the game or prolong an already insufferable game), people say they don't like board games when they really just hate Monopoly and haven't discovered better games....
• Risk — The game is actually quite fixable, it's just that it's normally not very enjoyable. I think it's the worst when people make alliances based on factors outside of the game, or when people change how they're playing because they're losing and they decide they (don't) want a certain person to win. I also don't like how strong of a factor luck is in the game. A person with poor strategy can often beat a person with good strategy just out of luck. However, playing on the computer with nearly-instant attack resolution and playing with missions are both improvements. So are the variants like Risk 2210 and Castle Risk.