It’s January 3, and I’m finally recording my end-of-year bonus episode. I did this last year and had a blast, so I’m back to share the games that stuck with me the most throughout 2025.
One reason I wait until early January: winter break is the one stretch of the year where I can actually play a bunch of games without interruptions. No clients, no schoolwork, no chaos. Every year, there are a couple of “I need to try this before I finalize my list” titles… and this year, two late plays over the break made the cut.
You can watch a video overview of this list on YouTube here, or you can listen to the audio version (as a $5 Producer Member) on Patreon here.
Honorable Mentions (Good, But Not My Top 10)
A few games I liked a lot but didn’t quite make the final list:
Railroad Tiles
A clever re-implementation of Railroad Ink as a tile-laying, grid-based drafting game. Drafting tiles from a shared tableau reduces luck and makes it a more strategic puzzle. The base set is a bit vanilla, but there’s a lot of extra content from the crowdfunding campaign that improves it.
Toy Battle
A fast, punchy two-player game that looks simple but has surprising depth. It plays like an abstract with area control energy. Something like Small World meets Santorini. Quick, clever, and satisfying.
Roth
A gorgeous Chip Theory production with neon cyberpunk vibes, asymmetric factions, and fun area control. Multiplayer? Great. Solo/co-op? The implementation felt off. It was close to making my list, but I couldn’t justify it when the mode I’d play most didn’t land.
The Top 10 Board Games of 2025
10) Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game
A licensed deckbuilder that actually feels like the source material. The metal-based system is the hook: you manage different metals, “burn” them, and can overuse them for big surges. Multiplayer can get clunky (deckbuilder attacking with 3–4 players often does), but solo/co-op is excellent, and it captured the world so well that it made me want to reread the books.
9) Flamecraft Duel
I picked this up at PAX Unplugged for my daughter, and it’s been a great surprise. Same charming art and dragon vibes as Flamecraft, but completely different gameplay: a two-player tactical puzzle where you build patterns on a hex grid to complete contracts while trying to disrupt your opponent. It’s good in its base form, but it really shines once you add shared goals and the Fancy mode cards.
8) Moon Colony Bloodbath
I avoided this at first because… the art is rough. Not “campy B-movie rough,” just rough. But the gameplay is shockingly clever: a deck-driven engine-builder where your action cards get diluted over time as more bad stuff floods the deck. You’re building systems to survive, but as colonists die off, you literally start tearing your engine apart to keep going. It’s tense, inventive, and I keep coming back to it, even if I still wish it looked better.
7) The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
This is Pandemic in Middle-earth, and it delivers exactly what you’d hope. The twist isn’t that it reinvents the system, but that it boils the Lord of the Rings story into a tight, highly playable co-op that finishes in about an hour. You’re managing multiple threats across the board while racing toward the ring objective. Great production, very approachable, and very satisfying if you like Pandemic-style gameplay.
6) Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon
Capitalism on the moon, but in a good way. The standout design choice is the corporation system: the box includes eight corporations, but you choose three per game, and the board behavior changes based on which three you use. That gives the game a ton of replayability and a great puzzle feel. For me, it’s slightly bland visually, but mechanically it keeps pulling me back.
5) A Place for All My Books
A gorgeous, cozy, spatial puzzle about building a book collection, stacking colored book tiles across rooms, traveling into town to acquire and trade, and completing pattern-based goals. The twist is the social battery mechanic: staying home restores you, leaving the house drains you. It’s funny, thematic, and clever. But the heart of the game is the satisfying contract/pattern collection puzzle, which is a lot of fun.
4) The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era
This one sat on my shelf most of the year because learning it was a project. Once I finally did, it shot straight into my Top 4.
It’s Chip Theory’s evolution of the Too Many Bones system, layered with Elder Scrolls exploration and a deep, deep character-building framework: races, classes, skill lines, dice types, leveling paths. It’s one of the most customizable character experiences I’ve ever seen in a board game.
The biggest caveat: it’s not perfectly balanced for solo one-character play. The game quietly wants you to run two characters, which is doable but slows down the min-max fun I enjoy. Still, it’s a monster of a game (in a good way), and I’m excited to play it multiplayer.
3) The Anarchy
You’re checking boxes across two big sheets while physically building castle walls and responding to threats. The Anarchy isn’t a light roll-and-write; it’s a full-on strategy game with deep chaining, tight planning, and huge decision density. I love seeing how far this genre can be pushed, and this one pushes hard.
2) I, the Children of the Sun
My favorite pure Euro of the year. You get relatively simple actions, but the brilliance is in how they combine and how the game evolves over time. Each round, one action path retires, shrinking the decision space and forcing you to plan for both now and the future. It’s strategic without being crushingly heavy, beautiful on the table, and a great example of a game that rewards smart sequencing and long-term planning.
1) Star Trek: Captain’s Chair
This is the one that hit me hardest.
It’s a two-player (or solo) re-implementation of the Imperium system from Turczi and Buckle, but streamlined and locked into a setting where everything feels cohesive. You play as one of six captains, each with unique strategies and complexity levels, building a crew, exploring, gathering allies, developing your tableau, and creating an engine where every card can do multiple things and many stay in play with ongoing triggers.
Here’s the best part: the rules aren’t that hard to teach. The complexity comes from the interaction of your growing tableau, not from an overloaded rulebook. It’s my most-played game of the year, and a solo session still runs 90 minutes to two hours, so that should tell you how much I enjoyed it.
I’m not even a massive Trekkie (at least not compared to Chris), but the theme clicks because these factions exist in the same universe and feel like they belong together. This one is easily a Top 100 contender for me.
The Full Top 10 List (Quick Reference)
- Star Trek: Captain’s Chair
- Ayar: The Children of the Sun
- The Anarchy
- The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era
- A Place for All My Books
- Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon
- The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
- Moon Colony Bloodbath
- Flamecraft Duel
- Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game
Final Thoughts
This wasn’t a “Voidfall year” for me—nothing lived on my table for a month straight—but it was still a strong year full of memorable experiences. If I had to bet on which games rise in my all-time rankings over time, Star Trek: Captain’s Chair is the surest thing, and Elder Scrolls has enormous potential as I explore more of its content.
