Dixit is also a good fit! It is a very easily explained game, where you have to say a word or short phrase describing a mystery card. The rest then places a card they think that matches the description as well, and then a voting round starts. It is really fun, and playing it would do more justice than this explanation :p
Yeah it is one of those games that I wouldnt play without the expansion anymore. We really like the legendary dungeons, which adds quite some difficulty and allows for multi classes, which can create some cool and strong combos.
Sprawlopolis is very light weight and offers a lot of replayability.
We have laminated (I believe that is the english word) clever, qwixx, knaster and knister so that we can bring 1 set of dice and play those all.
We really like regicide, which is just 1 pack of cards.
Lastly you have some (card)games with a small footprint, such as The Crew, or Cahoots, or Pickomino.
Some that I havent heard but love are Pandemic and Spirit island.
And as a hidden gem: Heroes of Tenefyre and sprawlopolis. Heroes is a deckbuilder dungeon crawler where the new cards in your deck are the monsters you slay. Sprawlopolis is a city builder the size of a small wallet, which you can easily take with you. There are 3 challenges out if 18 which decide how the game will play, which asks for different tactics every time.
We had quite a busy week, so we only played two long Isofarian guard sessions and one Aeons End Legacy. Hopefully next week we will have some extra time
You might want to look at some laminated games with erasable pens. We really like Welcome To, and recently discovered Aquamarine as a 4 dollar game.
5 minute dungeon is a quicktime game that is coop, but was hard to get in Europe.
Picomino (regenwormen in Dutch) is a dice push your luck game that has a small footprint. I know you said no dice but still wanted to give the tip :p
Lastly you have walletgames such as Sprawlopolis (coop) which might be worth looking at, they are meant to be small.
We played a lot of the Isofarian guard last week, finished chapter 2 from the first campaign. They announced a couple of changes to the rules last week, and we really like them.
We also had our first introduction to Arnak at some friends. I like it, but I feel that you have to do too much, without becoming good at anything.
Lastly we finally git around continuing our alphabet challenge with Noria and Onirim :D
The crew! Both versions of it allow for replayability as you have different objectives every game. It is a trick taking game, so they might be a bit familiar with it due to other games like bridge. And it is cheap. Only thing that might take them a bit to get used to is that it is coop.
Another simple one would be take 6 (nimmt 6).
7 wonders duel is such a good basegame. The focus on the limitted ways to victory is its main strength, and the toght card pool. It is difficult to add something equally strong, without adding too many side focusses, or inbalances. We play mainly the base game due to this.
We spent most of our week discovering 2 kickstarters that just landed, The Witcher and Isoforian guard.
The Witcher is very easily becoming a slog when playing at higher levels. We played a 4 player game that lasted 3 to 4 hours. It is a lot of fun, but the sweetspot for the game feels around 1 or 2 players. Lastly we are thinking anout adding some extra homerules, as you can now win the game by only fighting lvl 1 monsters. This is also something I see a lot of on BGG forums.
The Isoforian guard is so much fun! Really like the bag drafting gameplay, and the story. The game is tougher than we thought. We wanted to continue with the story, but we got our asses kicked and learned that grinding might be needed to get some better equipment and abilities.
Apart from the above mentioned, I really love Tainted Grail. Really cool setting, good storytelling, and a nice exploration mechanic. I am curious what the 2.0 version will do to iron out some of the kinks.
In Dutch we have DROL, Dicht recht, open links. So close right, open left as a very strict translation. But DROL is also Dutch for turd.