In previous years, I think I did a list of my Top 5 or Top 10 board games that were new to me that year. Well, this year, with Gen Con and other gaming, I can comfortably put down five board games, really more, that I played in 2023 from 2023. Also this list definitely could be longer. I think I have a pretty easy Top 10, so we might get the next five coming soon, but let’s see my Top 5 board games of 2023.

Top 5 Board Games of 2023

5. Trailblazers

Let’s start out with Trailblazers. This is a fun route building game as you create the pathways for hiking, biking, and kayaking out in the wild. Each of them needs to start and end at the rental or trailhead locations for their respective one. To get a biking trail you need to start and end at the biking trailhead, for example. And the question is how long can you get your various routes, because you can connect up to four trails to each trailhead.

Mechanically this looks like card drafting. You pick out two cards from your hand and then you add them to the trails that you want. Each of them has different overlapping routes so you can connect them in a few different ways. But, of course, these cards don’t only have a single type of trail on them, they can have multiple types. So can you get them laid out right, though, you can overlap nor to trail types need to match. For a full biking trail, though, it needs to only be biking path on that trail.

4. World Wonders

Next up in World Wonders from Arcane Wonders and actually a Brazilian company. World Wonders is a game about building up an ancient society and getting the conditions met to put a wonder on your board. Well, it’s a tile laying game where you need tiles arranged in certain ways to get cool wooden wonders which give you points.

I like this game a lot for it’s action system. In World Wonders you get money each round. And that money goes for buying roads or buying buildings, mainly. But the big thing you can buy with your money are the wonders. The wonders are one of the main ways that you get points. You do for surrounding tiles you’ve played as well, but it is mainly for the wonders. To get a wonder, though, it costs all of your coins. So however many you have left, that is going to be the cost. It’s a great question of when you are going to make the jump.

And I like the tile placement in the game. It’s fairly restrictive in how you can place them. You either need to play it next to a road or another tile. And wonders don’t count as tiles. So you need to think about how you’re placing everything. And how you can reduce gaps in your placements to try and get things surround. And the tiles also offer advancements, going up tracks. As you push up those tracks that can trigger the end of the game. Which is a nice alternate end.

3. Tesseract

Next up we have Tesseract, a game that I had an amazing time with at Gen Con. The group of people I played it with were a ton of fun. And Tesseract is the type of cooperative game that I really enjoy. It’s a cooperative game where each player has special powers. And that is something I very much like in games. But beyond that, it is a game where you can lose in multiple ways, much like Pandemic.

In Tesseract, you play as researchers who are studying a tesseract cube that came to Earth. And you need to solve it’s puzzle before it all disappears and, well, destroys the Earth. It’s a bit absurd and mainly mechanical. But it works on the Pandemic like system of do a number of actions and then bad things happen. How do you beat it? You need to place out one through six of four different colors of dice. To do that, you need to play it from a run or a set. It’s very mechanical that way.

But I still really like how it plays out. There is always pressure. And each player has their own special ability. What I am able to do on my turn is unique from what you can do. So you need to work together to get everything taken care of. And there are elements of the game, like trading dice, that do help with that. And I like that as you get closer to the end game and the game winning, but you complete columns of dice, let place all four fours, you get boosts to help you. It’s a really rewarding system.

2. Forest Shuffle

Next up we have Forest Shuffle another nature themed game. Forest Shuffle is one that I really grew to like at Gen Con and was really happy to get my hands onto it. It’s a tableau building card game of building out a forest. That’s the basics of it, you have a hand of cards that you balancing playing cards from and paying for those cards with cards from your hand, with drawing up more cards. I like that system.

Then the scoring itself is a real mixed back of what you can do for scoring. Almost everything you play down gives you points. You have the most trees in your forest, well, there is a card that scores points off of that. One of the birds scores points for the bugs you have, another for the diversity of birds, or a tree for how many of that tree you have. It’s a ton of points everywhere.

And I think it’s really clever how you get those point cards into your tableau. You play them around the tree cards. The trees each start their own separate little part of the forest and on each side you can play something out. But you are generally limited to one card per side. You are able to play out more, but only if the animal or card says you can. And each card you play next to a tree is split in two. You got a left or right or up or down. So if it’s split vertically it can only go on the top of the tree or bottom. And that covers up half the card which is clever.

1. Marvel Zombies

Finally, this is more the type of game that people think of when they think of the board games that I like. And it makes my #1 for that reasons, Marvel Zombies. Now, I don’t have the giant Galactus, but I wish that I did. It just costs so much money. But Marvel Zombies is a Zombicide game of dice chucking fun. In a normal Zombicide game you play as people fighting zombies. You can do that here, but the main draw and core box has you playing a zombies fighting heroes.

This game is a simple game in a lot of ways. It’s just going out and fighting zombies (or heroes/SHIELD agents) with some objective. And the more you take out, the more objectives that you get, the more everyone levels up. To do that you chuck a handful of dice, if you’re rolling a lot, and see if you hit. Or you move around a board and then, of course, you spawn more zombies.

Marvel Zombies is not a thinky game. There is a little bit of strategy to it, but not too much, it’s more about that fun of running into a room as the Hulk, rolling a bunch of dice, and smashing a lot of good guys. Or when a swarm of SHIELD Agents shows up with Thor either running away to try and complete an objective, or maybe taking in a whole team of zombies, everyone playing, and seeing what happens.

What Was Your Favorite from 2023?

Now, I think I could give a number of honorable mentions. But I am not going to do that because like I said, I plan to do the next five board games for 2023. I will say, I think that my big board games that I played in 2023, like the campaign game ones, all came out earlier. Often times, I find, that a big game comes out in a year, I get it and then it takes me a bit to get to it. But that’s why I do a Top 10 Campaign Game list sometimes as well as my Top 100 Games (of all time) each year.

There are a lot of great board games that came out in 2023. Which is your favorite? Is there one that you think I should try out?

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