Which new board games should you consider adding to your collection in 2025? With so many shiny new tabletop games hitting the scene each week, it can be tough to tell at a glance which are worth your time. That’s where we come in. We’ve created an up-to-date shortlist of our favorite new titles, as well as the upcoming board games that should be firmly on your radar.
Board games often release at odd times, with retailers, convention goers, and crowdfunding backers all receiving copies at different times. Because of this, we’ve covered our personal favorites from 2024 and 2025. If you’re looking for the best board games of all time, we have an evergreen list that you can check out instead.
New board games guide:
2024’s new board games
In 2025, many players are still discovering 2024’s new board games for the first time. That might be because these titles turned up in retail stores a little late. Or, perhaps these players waited for awards season to wrap before trying something new.
We’ve tested plenty of recent games from 2024, but here are a few honorable mentions that we still need to get to the table. According to other respected gamers, they’re pretty great:
- SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
- Castle Combo
- Courtisans
- Rebirth
Now onto our favorites from last year that got a thorough testing:
Flip 7
Possibly our new favorite party game ever, Flip 7 can be taught in just a few minutes. It takes your basic ‘stick or twist’ rules from Blackjack, but it stacks the decks with odd probabilities and special abilities.
Everyone is racing to 200 points, but you better be careful when deciding to draw a new card from the deck. Draw two of the same number (which is more likely for more valuable cards), and you’ll go bust for that round.
Flip 7 is fast-paced and surprisingly moreish for its simple rules. It’s an excellent icebreaker before a heaver game, and it’s perfect for nights when you want something more chilled. Well, we say chilled – card-flipping can get pretty frantic, and the yo-yo of who takes first place from round to round is delightfully chaotic.
Harmonies
Harmonies is an elegant tile-drafting game that’s as strategic as it is soothing. It lacks the aggression of other big-hitters in the genre, but it makes up for this with a slight step up in complexity. This is a mid-weight game that’s relaxing enough for casual gaming sessions and puzzle-like enough to keep fans of heavier games engaged.
Each turn, you’ll draft a small pool of tiles and, if you like, an animal card. The cards show patterns that will attract points-scoring animals to your player board. However, each piece of the landscape (mountains, fields, rivers, trees, and buildings) has its own unique way to score. You’ll juggle these two priorities as you expand, aiming to create the most luscious slice of nature possible.
Fromage
Another satisfying mind-weight game, Fromage is a worker placement game where everyone competes to make France’s finest cheeses. You’ll use chunks of dairy to choose actions at the same time as your fellow foodies, worker placement style.
The catch is that you can only choose options from the segment of the board in front of you. Once everyone has placed a cheese wedge, the entire board spins like a Lazy Susan, revealing your next set of actions. The power of the action you chose decides how long it takes for your cheese wedge to return to your pool – after all, you have to let the best cheeses age.
There’s a buttery-smooth strategy to this game that’s a delight to uncover, whether you’re playing solo or with others. We’ve played many worker placement games in our time, but none have felt quite like Fromage.
Arcs
Arcs is the space emperor of recent strategy games. Its combination of trick-taking card game and careful wargame is unexpected, but the combo feels excellent in play. Every turn can completely upend the power struggle you take part in. Should you seize control of the current trick or follow the suit of another player to optimize your fleet, position, or resources?
The luck-based elements of the game (such as combat dice rolls or the cards you draw) can occasionally frustrate the best-laid plans. Thematically, though, these mechanics nail that scrappy space opera theme. Arcs’ highs and lows are deliberate, and they never tell the same story twice. Between the campaign mode and regular play, this is a game you can return to again and again.
You can learn more in our full Arcs board game review.
2025’s new board games
These are, in our view, the most impressive new board games releases of the year (so far). Each has been tested at least once by a Wargamer, and if we’ve shared a more full impression of how it plays, we’ll drop a link to our dedicated review.
As for games we’re yet to try, here’s a list of honorable mentions that, while we can’t guarantee their quality ourselves, we’ve heard are pretty gosh-darned good:
- The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era
- Azul Duel
- Galactic Cruise
With that out of the way, let’s talk about 2025’s new board games:
Star Wars: Battle of Hoth
We feel almost like cheating putting Star Wars: Battle of Hoth on this list. It is, after all, a reimplementation of Memoir ’44, one of the best (and definitely the most accessible) WW2 board game on the tabletop. Take that, dress it up in some ice camouflage, and you’ve got a winning combination.
Our editor Alex tested it at the UK Games Expo earlier in 2025 and, yep, it’s exactly what we expected – a cracking strategy game with easy to learn mechanics and oodles of Star Wars theme. A bit like the Millennium Falcon, this might look like a rust bucket of a design, but it’s got it where it counts.
Molly House
A Molly House was a meeting house and safe-haven for queer men in the 18th and 19th centuries, and this board game is a thematic recreation of that period in history. Mechanics-wise, this is a complex card-drafting game where you aim to create as much joy for your community as possible – without getting caught by constables or hidden informers among your peers.
Molly House is the co-designed by Cole Wehrle, creator of beloved crunchy games like Root and 2024’s Arcs. With such an esteemed reputation, our expectations for Molly House were so high that we grabbed a copy at this year’s UK Games Expo.
Our first impressions of the game are one that can be a little fiddly at first, but its strategy soon unfolds like the plot of a dramatic novel. Molly House tells a fascinating story of marginalized community, hidden desire, and the tension between protecting yourself of the only people that understand you.
Codenames
Technically Codenames isn’t a new board game, but it did receive an updated edition in 2025. This version comes with swanky new art, plus a revised set of 400 code words to guess from. The insert inside the box has improved storage, and we’ve got an improved rulebook that makes it easier to onboard new lovers of word games.
Other than that, not much else has changed. You’re still split into teams, with a spy master for each who drops single-word clues to help you select your team’s code words. Seeing as the gameplay has remained the same, we’ll show you our original Codenames review rather than whipping up a fresh one for the new edition.
The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
Released at the start of August, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship is the latest creation of Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. In fact, this is something of a Pandemic spin-off, sharing plenty of mechanical DNA, if not a remotely similar theme.
You and up to four additional players act as the titular Fellowship. Everyone has control of two characters, and you’ll use them and their unique powers to fend off enemy forces at key locations. All the while, you must conceal Frodo from the watchful Eye of Sauron and his Nazgûl buddies.
We haven’t shared our full review for this game yet, but you can check out the early playthrough we had with designer Matt Leacock.
Upcoming board games
Here are a few of the upcoming board games slated for release in 2025 which you should absolutely keep an eye on – we’ll certainly be looking to get our sweaty reviewing hands on them ASAP!
Lost Lumina
Estimated release: September 2025
Wargamer Tim had a quick demo of Lost Lumina at UK Games Expo and came away slightly rabid about playing more. The premise is simple: two players draft a force of charismatic animal hero cards, who will then lead their forces over a compact area control game.
The combat system involves second guessing which hero card your opponent might play while making your own selection, trying to eke the maximum advantage out of your hand. So it’s the combat system from strategy epic Game of Thrones, condensed into ten to twenty minute games.
Technically Lost Lumina is a re-release of a game published in 2024, ‘Lost Lights’, but as that was only published in German, we’re counting this as a new game.
Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock
Available at Essen Spiel, October 23 – 26, 2025
Already available in Spanish, Orloj is a preposterously beautiful worker placement game that’s been all of a buzz in board gaming circles for months, and we now know the new English language version will be available at Essen Spiel in late October, with a full release in Q1 2026.
One of the prettiest looking eurogames we’ve seen in a hot minute, Orloj has you competing to design bits of the titular historic timepiece (which you can visit in real life at the old town hall in Prague, Czechia). You’ll place workers to build new clock face dials, recruit new specialists to your team, and (in true euro style) have to balance that against gathering key resources and buying upgrades to set up combo plays for big points.
Echoes of Time
Estimated release: October 2025
Popular designer Simone Luciani (Barrage, Darwin’s Journey, Grand Austria Hotel) is back with another strategy game. Designed for two to four players, Echoes of Time is a card game for adults where you recruit a fellowship from various factions who help you to gather a precious resource known as ‘power’. With this, you can control time itself, and the world as you know it.
It’s a high-fantasy concept, but the initial pictures imply that things might not be as complex as they seem. However, the publisher does promise that you’ll be able to build an entirely new deck of cards each time you play – so variety is a top priority.
In a BoardGameGeek forum, publisher Cranio Creations promises that this title will be available at Essen 2025 in October.
Cyberpunk 2077: The Board Game
Estimated release: December 2025
It’s fair to say there’s been some fan controversy surrounding this second high profile board game adaptation of CD Projekt Red’s troubled sci-fi RPG. Billed as a “story driven tactical action game” for 1-4 players, Cyberpunk 2077: The Board Game offers “42+ hours of gameplay” in its campaign, plus an “endless Afterlife mode”.
Most of the stink is probably simply because it’s one of a now famous breed of big, licensed IP board game adaptations, loaded up with millions of crowdfunding dollars, that puts beautiful miniatures front and center. Having been burnt by similar-looking games in the past whose design or gameplay disappointed, some folks are poorly disposed towards anything that fits that profile.
As journalists, we’re both skeptical and open minded, however – and as nerdy gamers with a liking for neon signs, techwear, and weird future slang, we’re very excited to try out a fully loaded, tabletop tactical RPG adventure in Night City. We’ll see, choom. We’ll see.
Sanctuary
Estimated release: TBC 2025
Though it doesn’t currently have a place in this list, Ark Nova remains one of our favorite strategy board games. Sanctuary is, in all ways, the younger sibling of that ultra-crunchy title. It comes from the same designer, and it’s still about managing a zoo, but it comes with streamlined and simplified versions of the original game’s mechanics.
As we mentioned when Sanctuary was announced, it can be tough to get Ark Nova to the table – particularly if your pals aren’t as keen on six-hour gaming sessions as you are. This could be a great middle ground. If only we knew when it was coming – BoardGameGeek promises a 2025 release date, but details beyond that are far and few between.
For more tabletop recommendations, here are the best card games around right now. We can also point you to the greatest tabletop RPGs of all time.
Source: Wargamer
