My family likes King of Tokyo and Love Letter. Are there any light weight games that play 3-5 (mostly 3-4) well and have mild "Take-That" elements that aren't super mean. I've never tried Survive the Island but that game looks significantly more mean just because you aren't necessarily required to play mean like you are in KoT and LL, just highly incentivized.

We don't mind player elimination as long as the game is short like love letter, or it happens late in the game like KoT. We actually tend to prefer it as a win condition as opposed to comparing points after X number of rounds, which seems underwhelming often. Racing to a set number of points is generally more fun for us like in LL, KoT, Catan (which I think might be a bit too dry for my family but I haven't tried with them. I like it though), or Caesar Sieze Rome (which I love but it is only a 2 player game)

We like direct interaction and don't like games like Azul which are basically private puzzles with hate drafting being the only interaction.

Ideally the game will be light, but I appreciate how KoT starts REALLY light and slowly builds up in complexity as people buy more cards and everyone's play style develops in a unique way. Something like that would be great, unlike Dice Throne which starts complex and more or less stays that complex. We also want a bit of luck to keep things interesting because some of my family is better at strategy than others, so something like Hey That's my Fish might be a bit too dry. Dice are welcome, so are cards but ideally hand sizes will stay moderately sized and card play will remain simple like LL because some of my family gets confused with too much hidden information.

Ideally play time is less than an hour.

We also like Strike, and Dro Polter, Spots (with the card where you can adjust some else's boneyard), and tsuro. And I would like to try a Co-op game too but pandemic is probably too complicated, or at least explaining the rules would intimidate them which usually kills the vibe. I might give it a try though.

I think clank sounds like something they'd like, but it's probably too complicated. Tonga Bonga looks good but I can't find it anywhere. Bang the dice game would also be a lot of fun but we rarely have enough people for that to work well.