Did I play a good number of games that were released in 2025, yes I did. In fact there are 29 different games on the list. And that might be missing some from the list. I went based off of Board Game Geeks years and sometimes publishers will put in their intended crowdfunding release year, and as we know, a lot of those are missed. So let’s see what games made the list this time. I’m going to mainly talk about the Top 10 games in detail, but you’ll get the whole list.

Top Games of 2025

29. Digit Code

This game wanted to be like Turing Machine where it was a puzzle and race to figure out a code. And it works on a digital clock style face. But it’s just kind of a dud for me, the game doesn’t feel that clever in what it does.

28. Gatsby

Gatsby I think is a game that more people are going to like. But for me, Gatsby is very much a miss. It was meant to be a tense two player experience and often times felt like that control in what you did was lacking.

27. Paper World

Paper World is a game that has some stuff going for it, it maybe should be higher. But it’s very simple, and not that unique of either collect all of a color or number and then creating piles and patterns. Again, felt like it was lacking.

26. TacTile

A very abstract game where you move pieces to try and get to your opponents side of things. The game just didn’t do anything for me in terms of interesting decisions.

25. Sir Ocelot’s Cave

This is one I was hoping I’d like. These animals who are delving into a cave to get treasures. And you play out different tokens to create overlapping spots to gain those treasures. But after two plays the game really felt the same, and the core loop of the game is not interesting.

24. Garden Rush

Garden Rush is another game that I gave a good shake to and realized there is one thing I don’t like about the game. The game is just too long. It is fun drafting tiles and putting them in rows and columns to make patterns and get points. But the game just goes on and on and does the same thing every time.

23. INK

INK is another one that does some interesting things. You create connections of colors and when you complete a large enough area to score, you get some bonuses. But in this game you can move as far around a loop as you want to pick a card, but the game then penalizes you for doing that too quickly. So it’s just a miss for me.

22. Verso

Verso is a set collection game, but one that doesn’t do that much in it’s set collection. It tries to be clever, but most of the time the move is obvious. It’s not a bad game as the push your luck aspect to it isn’t too bad, but overall it just didn’t keep my attention.

21. The Hanging Gardens

The Hanging Gardens is a fun little drafting game. You are creating the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and to do that you draft cards from columns and try and get scoring combinations in how you place the cards. The game is pretty simple, which isn’t bad, but led to me not playing it often.

20 Viva Catrina

Viva Catrina is another drafting game where you are trying to complete areas to score points. As well as then get symbols that are going to score you points as well. The drafting mechanism is interesting as you have a two tall by ten or twelve wide grid. You draft from anything that has been revealed as you work your way in from either side. Cool idea, just not that exciting in execution to play.

19. Super

Super is a superhero grid and engine building game where you place your heroes to power them up in a grid. Then if you have enough you can go after missions and complete them for points, but it uses up the hero. I like it in concept, but a game where it’s about that grid building and you destroy the grid really fast.

18. Crafting the Cosmos

Now we are into games that I really enjoyed. Crafting the Cosmos is a game about gaining planets and getting resources to then score those planets. But it uses a really cool marble movement mechanism where the dice end up determines the action that you do. Each player has a marble of their color and shared use of the neutral colored marbles. So you move the neutral marbles and is going to change up what options your opponent has for moving the marbles around.

There are also special powers that you can get in the game which is going to drive the replayability of the game. Overall, I like this one a lot, but it’s down here at 18 because it’s one that I don’t feel the need to get.

17. Moonshine

Moonshine is another one of those games that I don’t feel the need to get, but I’ll keep playing it on Board Game Arena. It’s a simple engine building game where you get symbols on dice that are rolled to then get patrons into your speakeasy. They are going to give you symbols that might mean you can have more at the door, or you can see more when you pick them, or you can roll more dice on your turn. It’s simple, but it’s a lot of fun.

16. Pergola

Pergola is the first one that I’ve picked up for my collection. This is a fun action selection game where you are building up a garden. I like it in person and digitally, and I like how it’s a very free form game. By that I mean that you generally have areas to place the plants and bugs in your garden, but you can adjust as you go so you create your own tableau at the end.

But the game is really about the action selection system. You use these little trowels that have two actions you take. Generally gain a plant or gain a bug. But they are slotted over another action that you gain. As you remove a trowel, the rest shift down and you are creating new combos of actions. So there is a little bit of planning that you can in the game.

15. Toy Battle

Toy Battle is one of many two player games that I played this year. And it’s lower on the list, but it’s one that I want to buy. Toy Battle is kind of League of Legends style battler where you fight over lanes by playing out monsters. You can always defeat an opponents monster with something higher number wise. A lot of the monsters have powers as well, and that creates strategy in how can you push for a win in the game. Because you either want to make it to your opponents base, or secure enough victory points.

14. Pyramido: Forgotten Treasures

Another one that I own on the list, Pyramido is a great drafting game where you build up a pyramid and you gain treasures. One of the coolest parts of the game is that you score each time you finish a layer. So you draft a layer, score the gems in the groups that you can activate. Then you build up the next layer, but the games on the edges that you don’t cover up, those can be scored again. So you are trying to create this scoring chain that works the whole way up your pyramid.

13. Forest Shuffle Dartmoor

I think that Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor would be higher on the list if it wasn’t so similar to Forest Shuffle. It is just a different setting now with moor cards and things that make your caves unique in the game. So it’s a step up, probably, from regular Forest Shuffle, but it’s so similar.

I really enjoy the game though, the playing out of cards and having to spend cards from your hand to do that is a lot of fun. And by playing Dartmoor, I get to try new strategies versus the more common strategies that you get in Forest Shuffle after you’ve played it a number of times.

12. Scratch & Catch

Scratch & Catch is a simple game, but a fun game. You are trying to get rid of your fleas and gain points as a cat. And you are just doing that by playing out two cards. If your second card stacks on another one, you gain the cards adjacent to it which give you points. If you create a run with that card, you are getting rid of fleas which are negative points. Simple, but fun. It reminds me of Parade where it gives you really thinky moments but it is easy to play.

11. Duel for Cardia

Another one of the two player only games on the list. In this one you are trying to outsmart your opponent as you have a wizard battle. Each wizard is going to have a power. But, here’s the twist. If you play the higher numbered wizard, you gain the point. If you play the lower numbered one, you get the power, and that power can manipulate your opponents hand, cards already played, or if you can pull it off, just win you the game.

That little twist of who gets the power makes this an intense back and forth game of keeping track of what your opponent has played and trying to figure out what they have in their hand and are going to play next. It’s fun that sometimes losing a final match-up can give you the power to win the round.

10. One-Hit Heroes

This one dropped a little bit from my Top 100 Games list. But it’s still a great game. I love trying to figure out how to play your heroes so that you don’t take any damage. You know what the enemy is going to do, so how can you stop it with the cards you have to play. And each enemy is going to play a little bit different, so that’s fun. Plus, each hero is going to play a bit different, which I love because that makes it an asymmetric game. The game even lets you level up characters by giving them new cards for the decks between each boss you fight against.

9. First-Class Letters

First-Class Letters is the only 2025 roll and write game that I played this year. And it’s one that doesn’t feel like it should work. It’s a word game, you are rolling the dice to determine what letters you can, and can’t use in your word. The ones that you can are going to be the ones that give you points. But if you use the one you can’t, you get no points for that word.

There are two more twists in the game. The first is that as you fill in your words, they need to end the game in alphabetical order. Any that aren’t, no points. And before you start the game, you roll three of the letter dice and that determines what letters some of the words must start with. So that puts added stress on for getting words right.

8. Arigato

Arigato is one of the games that just surprised me this year. It’s a game of artisans and using them to create their masterwork and retiring them. What is so fun about this game is chaining together powers of the cards in play, you have a two by two grid, managing that, completing objectives, gaining resources and getting all of that work together.

Those objectives can give you a ton of points. Or you can get a ton of points from getting as many artisans as possible retired. Or you can gain points by how you use cards in your grid. And then, each hand, each round, you play a card to your grid, use two for resources and pass two. But even those two you pass can trigger things.

7. Otter

Otter is a small little game that is a ton of fun where Otters want to give all of these tasty sea creatures loving hugs. And as a player, you want to empty your hand of cards. But to do that you need to play them out to the various otters. And each otter is going to have a way to do that. It might be clams and ascending number order. Or it might be fish with a gap between numbers of greater than three. If you meet both criteria you can keep playing. Only one, you have to stop.

Now that might seem like you could get locked out of being able to play. And that is true, but in that case, you can flip a card, or whenever you want, you can flip a card, so that now it might be lower numbers on clams, or the clams for ascending order might be fish now. So you can manipulate how that scoring works. Of course there is a cost of drawing cards back into your hand to do so. Which makes for this great back and forth decision making process.

6. Trinket Trove

Trinket Trove is a set collection game, it’s that simple. But it’s really not that simple. Why, because the hand of cards you have, those which are your sets, are also the cards you use to bid to get more cards. The more cards you bid, and higher value of cards you bid, the earlier you draft. And you don’t just draft the cards that have been flipped out, you draft the ones that your opponents are bidding with as well.

Just that simple twist with the hand management makes this a great game. It is also still easy to teach, but not a simple game to do really well in. And there is an element of luck, what cards come out to set collect, who knows, but that makes you need to be adaptable.

5. Ace of Spades

This one was lower on my Top 100 List. I did have a chance to play Ace of Spades as a two player game as well as a solo game, and I really enjoy it at two as well as solo. This is kind of a Balatro like game in that you are playing out poker hands, but instead of defeating a blind, it’s a bad guy. And as you do that, they give you permanent powers, sometimes, or one time use powers to make hands stronger as the bad guys get harder.

The downside to this game is that poor decisions were made on the artwork. Because of that Devir has wisely pulled the game off the shelf and is going to be redoing it with reworked art, potentially, and changing out some of the insensitive characters. Once it is back out, it’s 100% worth playing.

4. Symbiose

Symbiose is a sleeper hit for me this year. It’s another really simple game but it works so well. In this game you have a two by four grid of cards. They are all face down, and there is a pool of four cards in the middle. On your turn you take a card from the middle and add it to your grid. You then take that card from the spot you added it and place that card in the pool. Each card is going to give you some scoring based off of the other cards you have.

But let’s talk about the scoring because that is where the twist comes in. When you place on either the left edge or right edge, you score those cards based off of your opponents grid on the left and right side. If it’s in the middle four, that scores your own grid. Just figuring out when to grab scoring for your opponents and trying to optimize the scoring in a fast game is a ton of fun.

3. Zenith

Zenith is another two player game and made my Top 10 Games in my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2025 Edition. I love Zenith which technically is a two or four player game. But in this game you are trying to gain favor from planets. You do this by playing out cards, which cost, to bring the favor to your side. Or you play cards for technologies, and that can help you gain influence, gain credits or other manipulation of cards.

There are two things I want to highlight still. The first is how tight the resources are in the game, and that means you need to be strategic about how you use the cards. The other is that the game has three ways to win, and all of them are fun to try and pull off. Win favor from a single planet three times, or four different planets, or five total favor. And the back and forth of trying to block those strategies is so much fun.

2. Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men

It’s Dice Throne, and I love Dice Throne. I almost forgot that X-Men came out this year. But I really enjoy it, especially because it has characters I love in it with Gambit and Rogue. And Gambit is fun to play with aces that you power up to add to the damage that you are doing or to heal. It’s always fun to have more Dice Throne. But I’m not going to go more into the game because I’ve talked about it a lot.

1. Tag Team

Final game is another two player game. And this one is going to be high in my Top 100 Games next year. I played it two late for this year. But Tag Team is a two player battler game where you take a team of two unique characters up against your opponents. The first player to get a knockout wins the game.

But the twist. Of course there is a twist and that is that this game is an auto-battler game. What do I mean by that, I mean that it’s a game where combat is just flipping cards from your deck and seeing what happens. That might sound boring, but the twist does more than just mean that the game plays itself. You start with two cards, one for each character, and after you flip both of those out, you draw three and you add one of them to your deck. When you add it, you can’t adjust the order of any cards in your deck.

So now the game is trying to out think your opponent. I have a big attack, they have a block lined up with that attack. If I play a card below, it means that my attack is one earlier, kind of. But if they add theirs in below, they’ll keep it blocked. So where do I want to add it, and it’s a chance to out think your opponent, if you can.

Final Thoughts

2025 was a great year for gaming for me. I played a ton of new games, probably more so than a lot of years. And I own even more with the 2025 release date that I need to play. BGA also really helped get those numbers up and introduce me to games that I might not have played otherwise.

The additions of Tag Team and Zenith to my collection really give me a lot of fun two player games to play. And there are 14 more games that I own from 2025 that I need to get played. Of course some of them are big campaign games. Let’s just quickly list them out.

• Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread
• Vantage
• The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the SEcond Era
• Deep Regrets
• Dragon Eclipse
• Critter Kitchen
• The Dark Quarter
• Tend,
• Rove
• Origin Story
• Wandering Galaxy: A Crossroads Game
• Onoda
• Super Squad High
• Tricky Kids

Which game is the next I should try. Tricky Kids, Onoda, Super Squad High and Origin Story are all ones that sound like a ton of fun to play. They also aren’t campaign games so it is going to be easier to get them to the table. Especially for Onoda which is a solo only game.

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