Braggart is nice and simple, doesn't take too long to get the hang of. There are cards which are literally just a rules summary - you can give one to each player for their own reference when playing the game, so consulting the rules leaflet thingy shouldn't be necessary once you've had a quick look through it at the start :). Meanwhile you can have fun in the game pretending to actually be people boasting about your achievements, until someone else goes "Hmm, nah I think that's a load of..." and plays a Liar card ;). You can play a full game of it in maybe half an hour, maybe less if you really zoom through it quickly. It's a deliberately silly game, with Foes ranging from mighty dragons, demons, undead lords and stuff, all the way down to the Vicious Village Cat, an Angry-Looking Chicken, and an Unfortunate Trout ;).
If I ever get to meet up with you again Ameena, I'm so bringing Dixit.
Hmmmm. I imagine sending a small package of meeples within Europe is probably cheaper, right?
my brother is going to the Nerherlands on November 9 I am sure I can have him mail them to you from there.
PM me if interested.
Dixit with a good group is a friggin' riot. With the wrong group… It's pulling teeth
I do like the sound of that Dixit game, from what you told me about it on Sunday - I'll look forward to playing it with you if we ever do meet up again :).
Dixit's one of my favourites. And it's brilliant for non-gamers too - my dad loves it and he's not interested in anything that isn't an easy traditional card game like Brag or Sevens or Queenie or similar.
I introduced my parents to it a few Christmases ago expecting my mum to like it and my dad to tolerate it just because I asked him to play. But he immediately wanted to play again, and now he asks me to bring "that game wi' t'funny pictures" (Derbyshire accent) every year.
I strongly recommend K2. Mountain Climbing and making your opponent's meeples die in high altitudes.
Dixit is wonderful, but I am so very bad at it...
You might want to look at Snake Oil. You have a hand of cards, and each player is trying to sell one two card combination to the current player who has a character who's buying. How can you not love a game where there's a possibility of trying to sell a self-cleaning hat to a cowboy?
Also, Kingsburg: This is a resource game with dice, so may alienate the hardcore stretgist in you. You have 5 'years' where you're gathering resources based on the die rolls, building up your little province and the nat the end of each year having to fight an invading horde (no wargame elements, though). Several cubes, though.
Colossal Arena: a betting game where you're playing cards to make sure the creatures you've bet on survive to the end. Very fantasy. Fairly quick.
Rattus: A fun, friendly game about the black death. Moving a plague piece around a map of Europe (in very hard to read stupid faux medieval font). The more character cards youi've got to make yourself more awesome, the more likely you are to get hammered by the plague. Lots of cubes.
If you make it back to London and are interested, let me know and I'll try to pull you into the boardgames club to play some of them.
EDIT: And +1 to BlueHairedMeerkat
Snake Oil: Looks very much like The big Idea, which my friend has and which I enjoy a lot. It's ridiculous and fun and my friend likes to refer it is as "Dragon's Den: The Card Game".
Kingsburg: I don't mind dice as long as they don't have the ability to completely screw you and stop you from playing, like Settlers can do sometimes despite your good initial placements. I'll check this one out.
Colossal Arena: We actually own this one, but have never played it. I really should try it out, especially as I've previously enjoyed some other Knizia games.
Rattus: That sounds pretty cool too! Will look up that one as well. 
And we might well get back to London at some point in the not-too-distant-future, so playing with you guys would definitely be fun!
If your dice consistently hate you, Kingsburg is not the game for you. A few bad rolls you can compensate for, but it you're rolling low a lot and no one else is, you are very likely to lose. I still enjoy the game, but the randomness is a significant factor you may not enjoy.
I'm not sure exactly which days we can get to London - at the moment I think Sundays are okay for us, because Ja'Ph' is working on Saturdays and Mondays so I'll go to his house from Saturday evening till Monday morning. That's easier than him going to my house because he goes to work on Monday morning so we'll both go to the station and get our trains going in opposite directions (I live in the Medway area). Chances are he's gonna be working the same days from now till after Christmas so we're probably not gonna be available on Saturdays. Well, I suppose I would be, since I don't work weekends, but I live further from London than he does and I don't know if I fancy going up there all by myself :P.
Here's a good one: currently the only 2 games that trump Sentinels for me and my friends. the 2 games based off of the BattleCon system, War of Indines and Devastation of Indines. It's a pretty unique game, so it doesn't have a WHOLE bunch of the things you explicitly DO like, but it has absolutely NONE of the things you DON'T like.
The premise is that of a 2D fighter -- picture King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, etc. -- put in a card/board game form. you have a 7-space, 2D plane on which you move your characters back and forth, and each turn you pick 2 cards from your 8-card hand to make your attack for that turn. You'll pick 1 base and 1 style out of a total of 5 unique, character-specific styles and 7 bases (1 character-specific Unique Base and 6 Generic Bases that everyone has), meaning that each character can turn their 12 cards into one of 35 unique attacks. There are also 2 discard piles that your attacks cycle through after each turn (called "beats," since they happen simultaneously), so you can't use a given style and base until 3 turns later.
As for your preferences: It's not a CCG -- all the characters are fixed-deck, like Sentinels.
No decisions are made for you, except for the fact that each move you make has a 2-turn cooldown, forcing you to vary your decisions rather than spam a single move. That still leaves you with 15 options each turn; plenty of choices to make yourself.
No space theme; it's a fighter.
Not a "war" game, despite its name. (I assume you mean area-control, like Risk or Axis and Allies? Yeah, they aren't even in the same GENRE)
The theme is there, and very well-implemented, but the mechanics are ROCK SOLID.
The only luck involved is guessing what your opponent will do; it's entirely skill-based.
No trading, no auctions, no religion (no IRL religion at least. One character is an angel, but so is Fanatic, and you like Sentinels, right? It's kind of like that. He's like a male Fanatic.)
All movement is limited to what is written on the cards you play. If your card says "Start of Beat: Advance one space." What do you do? Wait until the Start of Beat triggers happen (immediately after determining whose attack goes first by comparing priority), and then move your character forward one space.
Traitor mechanics? PSSH! It's a FIGHTING GAME. You were never on the same side to begin with! There is a TINY bit of bluffing sometimes, when it comes to anteing tokens that grant special abilities, but it's not nearly on the same level as things like Battlestar Galactica or Shadows over Camelot.
What it does have:
There's plenty of screwage. Lots of the character abilities allow you to mess with the opponent in various fun and creative ways, like flipping their movement around, making them discard cards, infecting their attacks with bees, copying their attacks, canceling their effects, etc.
No Meeples, per se, but there are cardboard standups that represent your characters.
The theme is strongly implemented, well-balanced with the gameplay, and pretty immersive. The art is also fantastic.
Other cool stuff:
There is a LOT of gameplay in the box. Speaking specifically of Devastation here, since War is in between reprints and the 1st edition doesn't contain a lot of the extra content that Devastation has.
The cast of characters is immense and fantastic! There are 18 characters in War and 30 in Devastation (not counting promos, one of which is Legacy and the Freedom Five!), each with their own unique special abilities, cards, tokens, strategies, etc. From Cadenza, a mechanical soldier that is extremely slow but can tank every hit you throw at it and hit you back twice as hard, to Rukyuk, a sniper who uses custom ammo to enhance his attacks, leading to even MORE variety; the only problem is, he has to stop and reload every now and then, leaving himself wide open for a counterattack. Aria has mechanical drones she places that give passive negative effects to any enemies foolish enough to stand near them. Oriana has a pool of MP she can use to power her spells, but it can run out, leaving her weak if she can't hit you to get them back. Kallistar turns into a flame elemental, making herself faster and stronger, at the expense of draining her health each turn she keeps it active. King Alexian is so POWERFUL his Unique ability is actually a benefit to his opponents; whenever he hits them, he gives them tokens they can use to make themselves faster and stronger just to keep up. Gaspar makes clones of himself to execute multiple, weaker attacks per turn, which can lead to some wicked combos if planned properly.
Devastation also includes several boss characters that require 3 or more players to team up together to take down, as well as 5 co-op dungeons (think Double Dragon, Turtles in Time, or Battletoads), that you can take on with friends or even solo.
There are also multiple alternate rules and game modes, like 2- or 3- on-1, 2-on-2, tag-team matchups, and arenas that give everyone extra rules and conditions to pay attention to; they flip like Sentinels villains, leading to 2-phase fights.
Also, Tom Vassel from the Dice Tower listed it as #8 on his top 100 games of all time, and went on record saying it was one of the best games he has ever played. Ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NLv2lOdbuE
You can put in a preorder or buy the print-and-play edition off the website, lvl99games.com.
As is the standard for lvl99 games, they also have a FREE PRINT-AND-PLAY DEMO OF THE GAME AVAILABLE ON THE WEBSITE, so please, at LEAST do me a favor and check THAT out. I went to all the trouble of writing this out, you could at least do that for me, couldn't you? Pretty please?
So, I recommend getting Devastation FIRST, then waiting until the reprint of War comes out and getting that. It also takes a little bit of getting used to, but the instructions do a great job of introducing you to how to play.
Also, FOLLOW THE UNBOXING INSTRUCTIONS. There is a lot to unbox, and it is all organized in flights by relative complexity. So open the first flight of 6 characters, play with them, get used to it, and then move on to the next one. Don't just open it all up at once.
Dice don't hate me, but I just don't enjoy that feeling of helplessness that comes with having no real control over whether you win a dice-heavy game or not. Some random is good, just not a lot of it.
I hate it in Settlers because when you hit a streak of bad rolls (which happens to everyone at some point) you literally can't do anything. The dice didn't give you resources so you can't build anything and you don't have anything to trade so you sit there being completely unable to play the game.
I don't mind games with a lot of luck as long as I can still make decisions and in the long run the better player wins more than the worse one.
Never a problem in BattleCon. If you ever can't do something, it's always either your fault for playing poorly or the opponent's fault for out-playing you.
Cool! I'm actually technically a playtester for L99, I just haven't gotten round to actually playtesting anything yet. 
I'll absolutely check out the demo (yay, love PnP) and look into these games a bit more because they do sound fun. Thanks1
I playtested Devastation and the rebalanced War. It's an enjoyable game, but I've found the rulebook to be cumbersome and the forum to be nowhere near as helpful as the Sentinels forum for clarifications. I've been told that the BGG Indines forum is much more helpful, but I find some details in Indines to be a little frustrating.
That being said, I'm quite excited for my games to be sent to me in a few days! On top of that I've not ever been an avid 2D fighter fan (I'm just not very good at them…) and have too much love for Co-Op games. The fact that Sentinels is a Co-Op card game blew my mind, as I'm not a terribly seasoned board gamer, either.
There is one fairly major mark against BattleCON in this particular instance, and that's that it cannot be found on Amazon UK, on which Silverleaf is constructing her wishlist :P
I know this because it looks awesome, and I wanted to see how much a copy was... Maybe it's time to find out exactly where my FLGS is.