cellio | gaming outreach?

My congregation is trying to increase community-building activities beyond conventional religious activities like services. For example, we're¹ going to start a vegetable garden and use the produce in cooking get-togethers. (We already organize meals for people in mourning, with a new baby, dealing with illness, etc; we're now planning to do more joint cooking alongside the individual cooking that already happens.) A few other plans have been announced recently.

Noticably absent from these plans so far is gaming. I've already talked with the other boardgamers I know in the congregation and we all agree this would be a good thing to try. So now I need to pitch it to the powers that be and, if successful, the congregation. That is, I need a brief and catchy way describe the class of games that are popular at BoardGameGeek and Origins and GenCon, the EuroGames and rail games and worker-placement games and card-drafting games and so on, without implying "classic family games of yore" like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.²

Even if most of the actual "recruiting" ends up being one on one -- if we decide to start with "those who know" and expand gradually -- we'll still need to describe what we're doing in internal communications so that anybody who wants to can show up. Any suggestions for how to characterize these types of games when talking to people who don't know about them already?

(Yes, when it comes time to actually do it we'll lead with the gateway games, things like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico and Pandemic, and are prepared to teach and facilitate even if it means we don't get to play as much at first.)

¹ Exclusive "we"; gardening and I do not get along.

² Many years ago (before the other gamers I know were part of the congregation) there was an attempt at an afternoon of board games. I was one of four people who showed up; the organizer and the other two people (of my parents' generation), it turned out, really just wanted to socialize and didn't want to play anything outside of their (fairly narrow) comfort zone. I don't want to repeat that, so I'll need to somehow indicate (a) we're actually gonna play some games, and (b) you might not have played them, but (c) that's totally ok and we're not going to make you struggle.