2025 was a big year for “new to me” games on BoardGameGeek, and the data tells a fun story about what people were actually adding to their shelves. Instead of pure sales charts, or arbitrarily locking down the conversation to games released in the last calendar year, today I’m going to take a look at games had the most number of BGG users logging as owned, which I think says a lot about long-term buzz and staying power.

This top 5 is ordered by how many BGG users marked each game as “owned” during 2025, not how many copies sold in stores. Think of it as “the games most adopted by hobbyists who log their collections” rather than a definitive “best-selling at retail” list.

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5 – Ark Nova – 13,091 new owners

Ark Nova continues to climb as the heavyweight darling of modern strategy games, with its interesting action selection river, resource management, and multi-use cards, it’s a big, beloved game whose intricate web of tags, prerequisites, and long-term planning absolutely sings for some players…and completely falls flat for others. Others like me. I’m the wet blanket who doesn’t like Ark Nova, okay!?

Ark Nova lands in the same bucket as Terraforming Mars. The sheer number of card restrictions creates too many feel-bad moments when a cool card shows up that just doesn’t work with my current position. That mismatch between “what the deck is dealing” and “what the map and tableau actually support” can feel like hitting red lights three turns in a row. Experts will happily tell me that is part of the challenge, but I can’t help but feel bad regardless. And with my limited hobby time, I’d rather play games that make me feel happy. Still, I respect Ark Nova for it’s success

4 – 7 Wonders Duel – 13,519 new owners

7 Wonders has long been an entry point into the hobby, famous for handling up to seven players in half an hour. Unfortunately, its built-in two-player mode leans on a dummy city that turns every turn into a juggling act of managing a ghost hand, explicitly hate-drafting your opponent, and really wishing you had just played a proper 2 player game. ​

7 Wonders Duel fixes that by being unapologetically, perfectly two-player. The pyramid-style card display creates constant tension between taking what you need but revealing something juicy for your opponent. The dual threat of sudden military or science victories keeps every decision sharp. Drafting wonders at the start gives each game a different rhythm, especially because extra-turn wonders let you “break” the normal flow in very satisfying ways.

It’s quite impressive that over a decade later, and 7 Wonders Duel is still topping the sales charts. With 2 expansions, and a Lord of the Rings reimplementation, 7 Wonders Duel has proved it has the staying power and longevity to earn a permanent spot on my Top 10 Games of All Time.

3 – Heat: Pedal to the Metal – 14,210 new owners

Heat: Pedal to the Metal takes classic car racing and fuses it with fast, accessible deck-building, letting players manage gears, speed cards, and “heat” as the currency of risk. Each round, your gear dictates how many cards you can play, letting you go faster and faster, but the corners demand careful speed checks, lest you go careening off the rails. The slipstreaming mechanic does a good job of keeping the pack bunched together, so races feel tense right up to the last turn. The way heat cards clog your hand when you push too far, yet are also the resource that lets you take those big swings, is a brilliant bit of hand management that explains why board game fans have latched onto it so fiercely.

Having only played Heat once so far, I still prefer the earlier cycling game Flamme Rouge, from the same design duo, where the positional puzzle feels a bit cleaner and the deck is less cluttered. That said, Heat absolutely nails the fantasy of dropping a gear and perfectly executing a controlled drift around a tight bend. We’ve all had that experience at the grocery store, right?

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2 – Wingspan – 17,874 new owners

Years after its 2019 release, Wingspan is still adding more new BGG owners per year than almost every other modern hobby game, and I suspect more than any other game on this list, for this new owners number to be dramatically lower than reality. I’m constantly meeting new people who have picked up a copy of Wingspan because they played it and loved it, only for them to ask “what’s a Board Game Geek” when I ask for their profile name.

It’s not hard to see why ​Wingspan is so popular. Its production is undeniably stunning, especially if you’re used to the super cheap family games that we used to shove into cupboards. The linen-finished cards feel great to hold, the pastel eggs are an immediate talking point, the beautiful bird illustrations and the welcoming gameplay, with its simple core actions slowly blossoming into a satisfying combo by game end, it’s no wonder why Wingspan continues to win over new players.

1 – Sky Team – 25,002 new owners

Sky Team soared to the top of the new-owners chart with a massive lead, driven by a wave of acclaim, including major awards like the Spiel des Jahres and Golden Geek honours for cooperative and two-player play. It is a strictly two-player co-op where two pilots work together via silent dice placement to land a commercial airliner safely.

​Each round represents 1,000 feet of descent as you and your partner roll dice, then, without talking about numbers, slot them into your shared cockpit to balance the plane, manage speed, deploy flaps and landing gear, and avoid traffic. That combination of tight communication limits, escalating tension, and scenario variety has turned Sky Team into a go-to two-player game for a lot of people. Ironically, despite its popularity, I have yet to sit down and play it. The person I’m most likely to play it with owns it, and has already played it 30 times with his partner, so his craving for it has been satisfied. One day I’m sure I’ll get a chance to play it, but even without my input, Sky Team sits at the top of this list as the game the most BGG users were excited to bring into their home in 2025.