Every December, I scroll through everyone else’s “Best Games of the Year” lists and feel the familiar pang of jealousy. By the time those posts go up, I’ve generally only played about five titles from the current year. Hardly enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone publishing a “Best of 2025” list.

But that’s okay. Being a little behind the curve has its perks. At the time of writing this post, I’ve played 110 games that were published in 2024, giving me some insight of which games actually endured the hype cycle. So instead of churning through hot takes, these are the five 2024 releases that climbed the BGG ranks this year, and what I think about them.

5 – Arcs

Arcs is one of those games where the praise and the frustration can live side by side. Designed by Cole Wehrle and published by Leder Games, it’s a tactical, trick-taking-adjacent space opera where everything, from its world-building to its action economy, feels flawlessly engineered.

As I wrote back in my review, “Arcs is a masterpiece. It’s a game bursting with so much variety, discovery, and depth, all crafted meticulously by designer Cole Wehrle. Every mechanic feels intentional… There isn’t an ounce of unnecessary bloat.”

And yet, “It’s just a shame that I don’t like playing it.”

For players who love being on their toes, Arcs is exhilarating. It’s a game about seizing fleeting opportunities, pulling the exact right lever at the exact right time, and surviving long enough to pivot when the galaxy turns against you. The Blighted Reach campaign expands the base game into a three-act space saga that rewards mastery and table commitment in equal measure.

But for players like me, who crave structure and control, Arcs can feel like being handcuffed to the whims of the deck. I don’t like being cut off from core actions entirely, just because I was dealt a hand of manoeuvre cards. And yes, I know there are ways to subvert a bad hand, it still feels more frustrating than anything else to me. But even I can’t deny how deftly it integrates narrative, tactics, and high-stakes decisions. Arcs might not be the game for me, but it’s unquestionably one of 2024’s best and boldest designs.

4 – Harmonies

Harmonies deserves all the praise it’s gotten so far. It’s a gorgeous spatial puzzle that’s both soothing and surprisingly demanding.

Designed by Johan Benvenuto and published by Libellud, Harmonies quickly became a darling of the 2024 awards circuit, earning a Spiel des Jahres recommendation and winning the Golden Geek Medium Game of the Year. It’s easy to see why.

To oversimplify it, imagine Azul crossed with Cascadia. In Harmonies, you’re building a landscape on your personal player board, creating harmonious habitats for the various animals that could call your board home. Each turn, you draft and place terrain discs, plan for animal patterns, and try to make everything fit together in a natural rhythm.

The cadence of Harmonies is calm, and the puzzle is satisfying. It’s a short, beautiful game that rewards smart drafting and spatial planning without really punishing you for mistakes, aside from lost opportunities. And while there’s precious little player interaction, that calm independence is part of its charm. Harmonies is a game for quiet concentration and tactile joy, not cutthroat competition.

3 – The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth

I love 7 Wonders Duel, much more than the full 7-player game from which it spun off from. And that’s the bias I held which I approached The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth, the streamlined reimagining from Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala.

Like 7 Wonders Duel, it’s a two-player card drafting duel, but this time, one player controls the Free Peoples of Middle Earth while the other commands Sauron’s forces. Victory can come from destroying or capturing the ring, conquering every region, or earning the allegiance of all six races.

Comparing it to 7 Wonders Duel, Duel for Middle-earth has been smoothed to a polished stone. All the wonky rules have been shaved off, everything is easier, and you’re able to calculate the cose for everything with a glance. The result is an elegant, fast-playing experience that evokes the tension of the original while being even more accessible.

That polish, however, comes at a cost. Because the game is smoother, it feels flatter. There’s less texture and depth to grab onto. You lose some of the crunchy engine-building and wild swings in resource costs that make 7 Wonders Duel so replayable. And yet, when my partner and I played Duel for Middle-earth for the first time, we learned it and knocked out two games within an hour and immediately wanted a third. It doesn’t replace 7 Wonders Duel for me, but it does make for an attractive 2 player game that I’d be happy to introduce to almost anyone.

2 – Slay the Spire: The Board Game

Slay the Spire needs no introduction to digital-deckbuilding fans, but the tabletop adaptation from Contention Games was one of the year’s most quietly ambitious triumphs. It managed to translate the tension, rhythm, and roguelike loop of the video game without feeling like a diluted knock off.

Each player pilots a unique character through a branching path of combats, upgrades, and relics, all while managing card efficiency and risk. What impressed me most isn’t that it’s accurate, but that designers Gary Dworetsky, Anthony Giovannetti, and Casey Yano understood the core of the game and didn’t just copy the digital game one for one. They took it as inspiration and created something that works amazingly well on the table without a computer managing the math in the background.

I convinced a friend to buy this for her husband, and while she was initially hesitant because she wasn’t a fan of coop games, they told me they played it almost a dozen times in the weeks that followed. And now both of them have been playing the app too, which inspired me to continue my ascension challenge as well.

1 – SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

There’s something poetic about a game that looks to the cosmos for answers, topping this list. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, designed by Tomáš Holek and published by Czech Games Edition, became one of the most celebrated euros of 2024.

Given scant resources in this tight economy, you’re asked to stretch your actions as far as possible to build an engine to propel yourself to victory. There’s a lot going on in SETI, but the best thing I can say is that we finished our first play at a local café, and one of our players immediately bought a copy on the spot.

Any euro that inspires instant ownership speaks volumes. SETI strikes a rare balance of brain-burning complexity and cool, thematic immersion. You’re not just moving cubes to score points; you’re sending probes out to the far reaches of our solar system, chasing the thrill of discovery itself. And that spark, the sense of optimism and wonder that pushes people to explore the limits of space, well, I think we all need a bit more of that in our lives.

2024 was a great year for games, and these 5 games really showcase the strength of the board game hobby. Now that 2026 is here, I can’t wait to get started on all the great games that came out in 2025!