#3
Age of Empires 2 is our usual RTS pick at LAN nights, but StarCraft: Brood War scratches a different itch. The pacing is harder, the skill gap between players is brutal if you have someone who knows what they are doing, and the custom maps give groups a way to sidestep pure competitive matches when they want something looser. Hardware is genuinely a non-issue here. If you can run Windows, you can run Brood War. The main honest caveat is that the learning curve makes it a tougher sell for groups where half the room has never touched an RTS. It rewards commitment in a way not every LAN crowd will have.