A little bit of depth and strategising but nothing too mad is probably best - over the past year we've been playing a lot of collaborative games (like Horrified, Forbidden Desert, Pandemic) that encourage planning and chatting about what we're both doing, or things you can go 1v1 in like Villainous (I know some people hate it but we've been kind of enjoying the asymmetrical gameplay objectives). Ideal player count is probably 2 and upwards, stuff we can play while stuck inside during the pandemic but later on use at gatherings.
He's pretty open-minded though and enjoys novel concepts - we've also played a good few rounds of Fog of Love and found it really funny.
I'm considering Forbidden Sky or Ticket to Ride (we've never played it!), or something by Ravensburger based on an existing property like The Princess Bride.
We actually don't have a copy of Scrabble at home so I might pick this up anyway, lol. We've been playing Bananagrams for our word game fix.