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.
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 Duelfixes 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?
2 – Wingspan – 17,874 new owners
Years after its 2019 release,Wingspanis 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.
Zenith makes a strong first impression before you even touch a card. It’s bright and cheerful in a way sci-fi games rarely are, usually they’re leaning into the darkness of space to inform their aesthetic, see Beyond the Sun or Race for the Galaxy for examples. Zenith though, reminds me of Lilo and Stitch. Colourful planets, charming little alien creatures, and white clinical backgrounds give this sci-fi affair a more optimistic feel.
A Tug-of-war game for 2 or 4 players, Zenith by designers Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel has players vying for control over 5 planets. On your turn you’ll play a card to do one of 3 things. Either discard it to move up a tech track matching the suit of the card you discarded, discard it to take a diplomacy action, giving you the leadership seal, which increases your hand limit and provides you with a small amount of resources, or play the card to the tracks, which will always move a disc toward you, and then often will have a secondary effect to resolve. The game ends when someone gets 5 planet discs to their side of the board, or 4 differently coloured discs, or 3 discs of the same colour.
The first thing I noticed about Zenith was the abundance of iconography. There are a lot of symbols, and while the reference card covers the basics, it doesn’t quite prepare you for every possible combination the cards throw at you. It’s never impossible to decipher, but I did have to use the hover-over text on Board Game Arena more often than not to be sure of what a card would exactly do before playing it. I would have really appreciated it if the rulebook had a glossary of cards with the plain language rules. That would have gone a long way in helping me through my first few turns.
While the box says 2 or 4 players, Zenith is clearly a two-player game at heart. Yes, it technically supports four, but the four-player mode feels like the designers stretching the system past where it wants to go. The box advertises a “tug-of-war strategy game,” and that’s exactly what it delivers. You and your opponent will trade off sliding discs back and forth, getting certain discs closer and closer to your zone until someone plays an unexpected card and manages to push the disc off the ledge.
The tug-of-war works here because turns are so clean and quick. You’re usually doing one of three things: play a card and pay for it to move some discs, discard a card to get some resources, or move up a track paying a different currency to gain bonuses. It’s a simple turn structure that manages to generate some interesting decisions. There’s a wonderful push-and-pull between choosing to expanding your hand size (huge in this game), building discount engines, and progressing the discs you actually want to claim for yourself, or preventing your opponent from claiming a disc too easily.
And because it’s a two-player duel, the meanness feels just right. You can steal cards which give discounts to cards of the same colour, exile your own tableau to reposition, and even yank planets away at the last second. This is where tug-of-war games usually lose me. Hurting your opponent always directly advances your own cause, and nothing ever feels unrecoverable. It feels more like a war of attrition and undoing what your opponent did on their turn instead of both players working towards an end game condition.
There is some significant luck in the card draw, and it really does matter. Sometimes you really need one specific type of card, an animal to finish off that tech track, or any blue card to just get that disc over the final line, and the deck just says “nope.” When your hand size is only four or five, that can sting. But managing your hand is a big part of the game. Especially when your opponent steals the leadership emblem, and you don’t get to draw new cards until you play some that were sitting in your hand. Taking that leadership token back will expand your hand size again, and you’ll get to draw two cards, but if you don’t have a card ability that gives you the leadership emblem, spending a whole turn to take it back really feels suboptimal.
The tech track can offer some useful abilities, and when you move up a tech track, you get the benefits of everything below it again, but there’s no persistent benefit for moving up the tracks. It’s the kind of thing where you need to be in the right position, then utilize the tech track for a big move that pushes one of the discs over the threshold. It’s fine, but I wish it did reward players in a more persistent fashion. Like if you hit the top of the robots track, now all robots cost 2 resources less to play.
For all its colour, charm, and clever little systems, Zenith ultimately sits outside the kind of experience I’m looking for. It has more going on than a Lost Cities-weight game, yet somehow feels less like it’s building toward anything. Where games like Lost Cities or Air, Land & Sea create this wonderful sense of escalation, slowly tightening the screws as each card nudges the tension higher, Zenith often feels like a stalemate of small reversals, waiting for the right tool to finally appear in your hand.
And that’s really the heart of it for me: tug-of-war games just don’t give me the payoff I want. Trading blows back and forth, undoing each other’s progress, watching discs shuffle the same few spaces back and forth, it’s not the kind of gameplay arc that excites me. I can admire the production, the vibrant personality in the art, and even the flashes of tactical cleverness, but I never quite feel that satisfying crescendo I get from the two-player games I love. That said, if tug-of-war tension is your favourite flavour, if you enjoy tight, interactive duels where every push has an immediate pull, Zenith might land far better for you. It’s well-designed, aesthetically delightful, and offers plenty of room for smart plays.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion in the “cozy” genre in all forms of media. Books, shows, video games, and yes, board games. But it always makes me wonder what exactly makes a board game cozy? It’s obviously not just about ease of play, but I think it’s more about the feeling the game evokes. Cozy games are gentle on competition and rich in atmosphere. They tell you to slow down, do something perhaps inane, but satisfying, and soak in the pleasure in small decisions. You’re not fighting to survive or building a bustling metropolis; you’re farming, sorting, and enjoying the process of play itself.
A cozy board game often pairs calm themes, such as gardens, quilts, villages, and lantern festivals, with accessible mechanics that let conversation flow as easily as the gameplay. I also think they remove some of the consequences, so you can revel in your own creation, instead of worrying about trying to come out ahead.
With that established, here are five board games that capture that warm, comforting spirit. These are games perfect for rainy days, quiet evenings, or when you simply want to have a moment of peace at the game table.
1. A Gentle Rain
By Kevin Wilson, published by Mondo Games | Full Review
If meditation could take cardboard form, it might look like A Gentle Rain. In this solo or cooperative tile-laying game, you’re creating a tranquil pond surrounded by blooming flowers. There’s no score to chase or opponent to outsmart—just the soft rhythm of placing tiles and watching the scene unfold. Each tile shows a mix of flowers and water patterns, and your task is simply to align them in harmony.
The beauty of The Gentle Rain lies in its simplicity. The game is as much about the act of playing as it is about the result. The sound of tiles clicking together feels almost therapeutic, and completing the circle of blooms brings a quiet satisfaction. It’s a rare game that can calm your mind while still offering a gentle puzzle to engage it.
2. Dorfromantik: The Board Game
By Michael Palm and Lukas Zach, published by Pegasus Spiele
Despite my gripes with Dorfromantik: The Duel, Dorfromantik does manage to capture the charm of building a pastoral landscape one tile at a time. You and your friends collaborate to construct a patchwork of rivers, forests, and villages, trying to fulfill small goals without breaking the natural flow of the map. The art is charming, the turns are breezy, and there’s never a sense of pressure. You won’t agonize over a tile placement, and for some players, that’s exactly the appeal. It’s a game that asks very little of you, other than to sit back, relax, and build a countryside for half an hour.
There’s a touch of comfort in Dorfromantik’s balance between order and chance. It rewards planning, but a bad tile draw doesn’t feel like a punishment. You can just toss it onto the other end of your landscape and hope it’ll come into play later. And as an added bonus, by the end you’ve created a serene countryside. It’s the perfect companion for tea, soft music, and unhurried conversation.
3. Patchwork
By Uwe Rosenberg, published by Lookout Games
Few games embody “cozy competition” like Patchwork. While the theme is about trying to create a patchwork quilt, the economy, the theme is mearly window dressing. Mechanically, you’re managing two resources, buttons and time, to acquire eclectic polyomino tiles, and setting them onto your board until you’ve patchworked your way to the end of the game.
Despite its puzzly nature, Patchwork feels homely. The theme of quilting, paired with the subtle satisfaction of fitting the perfect pieces into its place, makes every session feel like you’re curled up on the couch crafting. The game is simple enough for newcomers but deep enough to keep seasoned players engaged. It’s one I use to introduce the board game hobby to anyone who enjoys crafting, quilting, or knitting.
4. Lanterns: The Harvest Festival
By Christopher Chung, published by Renegade Game Studios
Lanterns: The Harvest Festival turns tile-laying into a celebration of light and beauty. Players take turns placing lake tiles adorned with floating lanterns into a shared tableau, and everyone at the table receives coloured lantern cards based on how the tile is oriented. This shared reward system keeps the tone friendly, even as you subtly compete for the best colour combinations to craft sets and score points.
What makes Lanterns cozy is its elegance and positive player interaction. It’s a communal experience where your opponents’ moves bring you gifts. If you’re looking for a game that radiates charm and encourages quiet appreciation, Lanterns is a perfect fit.
5. Flamecraft
By Manny Vega, published by Cardboard Alchemy | Full Review
At first glance, Flamecraft dazzles with its whimsy: dragons in aprons brewing coffee, baking bread, and enchanting local shops. But beneath its adorable art lies a smooth as silk worker-placement game where players act as “Flamekeepers,” guiding artisan dragons to bolster the town’s businesses.
Flamecraft is cozy in every sense. Its theme and artwork radiates warmth and imagination, while the gameplay rewards kindness and collaboration as much as competition, as you’ll all be unlocking stronger action placements for each other. It’s a feast for the eyes as those adorable little dragons, each with their own unique name dot the board, and the vignettes on the shop cards are full of whimsy and charm.
Final Thoughts
Cozy games remind us that play doesn’t always need tension to be fulfilling. Whether you’re placing tiles in a pond, building a countryside, or helping dragons bake pastries, these experiences invite calm, connection, and creativity. In a world that moves too fast, it’s nice to have games that encourage you to slow down and simply enjoy being at the table.
Remember Minesweeper? Ever since I was a little kid, I was the type of person to press every button, look in every file, check every setting. When our school go it’s first Windows 95 computer, my inquisitive nature was rewarded with finding Minesweeper. Now, I’m curious, but dumb, so I just clicked around a bunch and eventually, always, blew up. It wasn’t until I was an early teenager when someone explained to me how the game worked. It wasn’t just a random grid of mines and numbers, it was a puzzle to be solved. Today’s game, Bomb Busters, designed by Hisashi Hayashi and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2024 evokes a lot of the same feelings as classic Minesweeper.
In Bomb Busters, players are a team of bomb disposal experts, trying to collaboratively cut all the wires to disarm the bomb, while avoiding the trigger wire that will spell disaster for everyone around the table should it be cut. At the start of every game, 48 tiles, 4 each of numbers 1 – 12 are face down and shuffled up. Then, a few yellow and red tiles are added to the mix, and the tiles are distributed as evenly as possible amongst all the players and set in ascending order in each player’s tile tray.
On your turn, you choose a tile of your own, then point to a single tile in someone else’s tile try, and declare what number that tile is, matching the tile of your own that you chose. If correct, you both lay the tile down in front of your trays. If wrong, the other player takes an information token and places it in front of the tile you chose, revealing it’s number for someone else to cut on a later turn, and reducing the game timer. If the game timer runs out, or if anyone ever happens to point to the red wire, boom. The game is lost. To win the game, all players need to fully empty their tile trays.
To assist you in your bomb diffusing efforts, each player has a power, and as you cut certain numbers, you unlock tools that you can use to tilt the odds of the game into your favour. These tools can let you swap a tile with someone else, or label two tiles in your tray as “matching” or “not matching”. Choosing who and when to use these tools can be the difference between victory and defeat, or at the very least, if someone is in a situation where they have a 50% chance to cut the red wire, then they can really save the crew from disaster.
Bomb Busters starts with an 8 game introduction. Very slowly introducing mechanics and concepts to players, and then making those concepts a touch harder over the course of several plays. Our group, skipped to the 3rd mission, then the 6th, then the final mission. I’m generally a fan of the learning games, but in the case of Bomb Busters, I think the first few missions were entirely too easy. But if you have players in your group that struggle to learn rules by someone talking at them, it’s a useful way to scaffold their learning. The last training mission is the full game experience, so if you’re the kind of person who does very well with reading a rulebook and understanding from that, you may want to consider skipping right up to that point.
When you first start playing Bomb Busters, each player will have a single information token in front of them. You’ll scratch your head, trying to figure out what your comrades are trying to tell you, and more than likely, you’ll make a blind guess or two, potentially ending the game early (hence the Minesweeper reference in the first paragraph). But after a few plays, things start to click. You start inferring more information from a single guess. Why someone might choose a specific number, figuring out what solutions they’re leading you to, it’s kind of magical in that way.
To assist those of us with stunted memories, there’s a handy board that tracks the numbers in play, and where the yellow and red numbers MIGHT be. As you progress in missions, during the set-up you’ll pull several potential yellow and red tiles, mark them on the board, but only actually put a few of them into the mix, setting the others aside, unseen. The bit of uncertainty when picking wires to cut is delicious, and when you successfully deduce your way around them, the whole table feels like they can read each other’s mind.
Bomb Busters is a friendly family deduction game, one that has you delighting in your shared victories. And the box packs in a ton of content. Beyond the 8 training missions, there are a further 66 missions to flex the system and bend your brain. The first mission after basic training includes a small deck of cards, indicating there is now a series of numbers that must be cut in a specific order.
The presence of all the extra missions reminds me of The Crew, where when you play with the same group of players week after week, the missions give a nice variety to the experience. New challenges to overcome, new twists to disrupt the groove you’ve all figured out for yourselves. I haven’t delved further into the missions yet, but I’m excited to see what tricks they’ve cooked up for those seeking bomb disposal mastery.
The base game, that is to say, the game you play at the end of the last training mission, feels full and complete on its own. A deduction game where you feel accomplished following the trail of crumbs your friends leave for you, instead of taking wild guesses in the dark. The setup is mildly tedious, needing to shuffle and distribute 70 little tiles amongst everyone, but that’s a mild criticism.
Minor setup fuss aside, Bomb Busters delivers a tight, engaging cooperative deduction experience that feels fresh. It’s the kind of game where your group slowly levels up together, learning how to read each other’s choices until the table clicks into a shared wavelength. With dozens of missions and clever twists waiting past the tutorial, there’s far more depth here than the cutesy presentation may suggests. For fans of logical puzzles and tense, thinky co-op moments, this one’s a blast. Hopefully not literally.
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!
