A new comprehensive study in the Journal of Simulation and Gaming has revealed a range of fascinating trends across the space, including the surprising prevalence of solo play titles alongside a rise in co-op formats. The report is called Monopoly to Ark Nova: An Empirical and Cultural History of Modern Board Game Design (1930-2025), and it’s well worth a read.
The research, which came to our attention via BoardGameWire, covers over 104,000 titles, looking at board games published between 1930 and 2025. In their work, authors Azael J Herrero, Nicolás Rodríguez-Álvarez, Raquel Martínez-Sinovas, Cristina Aldavero and Fernando Rodríguez-Merino found that solo play ranked as the third most common component in games published between 2020 and 2025. Only dice-rolling and hand-management mechanics were more prevalent during this period, indicating a powerful trend towards board games with single-player modes in recent years.
Many of the best board games of our era boast impressive solo modes, including naturalistic engine builder Wingspan and the fantasy geopolitical arena that is The Old King’s Crown. As much as board games can act as delightful opportunities for community building, solo play offers a unique benefit: you can enjoy it at any time.
That said, collaborative experiences are also on the rise across the board game world. During the 2010s, co-op games accounted for 2.9% of all game listings, according to Herrero et al. However, between 2020 and 2025, the share of co-op games reached 3.7%. This is particularly notable, since co-op mechanics didn’t rank among the top ten game mechanisms across any of the other decades in the report, indicating a modern turn towards collaboration.
Lastly, as you might have intuited from the sheer number of crowdfunding campaigns out and about on the web, the sheer number of board games published in the 2000s and the 2010s has dwarfed previous decades. In the 2010s, a whopping 38,014 titles were published – an immense figure compared to the 9,458 published in the 1990s.
I recommend reading the article in full if you have the time – it’s fascinating stuff.
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Source: Wargamer
