I've recently gotten more excited about board games with less waiting. In the typical board game you go around in a circle with each player making a decision and taking a turn. Especially when turns are long, and there's not much for you to think about on someone else's turn, this can get dull. In a "real time" game, by contrast, everyone is playing at once. For example, in Boggle everyone looks together for words and then after a timer completes you see who has words no one else got. Other games like this are Spoons, Ricochet Robots, and my current favorite, Galaxy Trucker. (Another favorite game, Race For The Galaxy, has this feel, even though technically it isn't this mechanic.) While it's not a very common system for board games it's the default in sports and computer games.

(If you like you could compare this to the shift in contra dancing from active/inactive to equal-turn. Except that I think equal-turn dancing was more like an "innovation" that replaced the previous version while with board games I expect both to continue with their various advantages and feels.)