2025 Games

Seven great games from 2025

We're 75 percent through 2025. Some great games have emerged.

Matt Montgomery

October 1, 2025 — 8 min read

It's been a really lovely year for board games. I think that's been the case for a long time, that each year has been great. I wouldn't pretend to rank the year against its peers, but I do think it's in the top 10 for gaming in the last decade.

Let's not waste too much time getting to the list. These seven games are exciting, interesting and engaging. Some are deeply strategic, others are light and playful. There's a lot to love here.

Quattro Tricks, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, No Loose Ends, Alibis, Crisps | Photos by Matt Montgomery

Alibis (Sato, 2025) is a word party game that’s going to draw inevitable comparisons to Codenames (Chvatil, 2015), and I do think it’s a useful way to pitch the game, especially given the crossover success of Codenames. But Alibis is cooperative, and it feels the entire time like it’s meant to be cooperative. Each player is basically communicating an alibi for two suspects in a lineup, with players working together to find the guilty party — the suspect without an alibi. The suspects all have a word attached, and players will communicate their two suspects with a single word. This is a fun concept that’s executed really well. Designed by Yusuke Sato, illustrated by Albert Monteys, and published by Allplay.

Crisps (Bhat, 2025) is a climbing-shedding game with a simple premise: After every trick, each player will be drawing a card, with the winner choosing between a face-up card and a face-down card, and the loser getting the other. The combinations are simple, the cards have no suits, and the bombs are triples and quadruples, and they can only be played after a Crisp card is played. There aren’t many games about potato chips, but this is easily my favorite. Designed by Shreesh Bhat, illustrated by Sai Beppu, and published by Little Dog Games.

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship (Leacock, 2025) is certainly in the running for my favorite game of 2025, owing only in part to its Pandemic (Leacock, 2008) roots. With a huge cast of characters, I find myself excited at the start of each game to figure out who exactly I’ll be playing with, and how my teammates’ characters can interact with mine. Unlike Pandemic, where each player has one unique ability to influence the game, each player has two unique characters, and you’ll have to figure out how those characters will interact to bring peace to Middle Earth. Designed by Matt Leacock, illustrated by Jared Blando and Cory Godbey, and published by Z-Man Games.

No Loose Ends (Shinzawa, 2025) is a trick-taking game by the legendary Taiki Shinzawa, which might be enough to sell many trick-taking fans on the game, but it does stand up really well on its own without the name attached. This is a must-follow trick-taking game, and you’ll be making bids from your hand at the beginning of the round. As you do, you might end up with more or fewer cards in your hand than other players, and that can present some unique challenges. Win bids by winning with cards that match the suit or rank of the winning card, and you’ll have a successful bid. This is a bit unusual and a lot of fun. Designed by Taiki Shinzawa, illustrated by Sai Beppu, and published by GameHead.

Quattro Trick-Taking (Shinzawa, 2025) is another trick-taking game by Taiki Shinzawa, and it executes one of the more interesting premises among his extensive catalog: Each player is playing with a different set of bidding conditions. It’s not fully asymmetric like, say, Root (Wehrle, 2018) or Spirit Island (Reuss, 2017), but you’re constantly having to balance your scoring conditions with every other players. Like most Taiki Shinzawa designs, Quattro Trick-Taking is clever. You can actually order it from New Mill Industries right now, and it’s pretty unusual for Shinzawa games to be available in the U.S. — not sponsored, they’re just a small publisher I really enjoy. Designed by Taiki Shinzawa, illustrated by Keisuke Nakamura, and published by AMATSUBU GAMES.

Ruins (Clair, 2025) is a climbing-shedding game with card crafting, which largely plays out as you starting with some ‘fine’ cards and ends with you playing some wildly overpowered cards. At the start of the game, you might only be able to make a pair of cards or to play a reasonably high single, but by the end? You’re looking at being able to play six or seven cards of a kind — considerably more than was in the deck when you started. Designed by John D. Clair, illustrated by Jake Morrison, and published by Allplay.

Tip of the Diceberg (Barron, 2025) rounds out the trick-taking and climbing games in the list (you’ll see a few more in the to-play section), and it’s got a premise that sounds simple on paper: It’s basically a climbing-shedding game with must-not-follow trick rules. There’s more, though. There are polyhedral dice, each suit corresponds to one of the seven polyhedral dice (well, six, with just one D10), and you’ll be dealing out the melds that can be played each game randomly. Surprisingly, the game combines well into something easy to teach, and while repeat plays will help improve your play, it’s intuitive enough to pick up from the start, too. Designed by Jon Barron, illustrated by Racknar Teyssier, and published by Baron Jon Games. Yes, with a different spelling of Baron/Barron.

Seven games I’m looking forward to playing

As with every year I’ve been playing games, there are more games I’d like to play than I’ve had the opportunity to play. This is a somewhat natural thing, I think, given how many games are released in a year. I’d like to highlight seven of those here, simply because I’ve talked about seven games above. We’ll do this one with a list, though — and I’ll write a bit shorter for each.

Eternal Decks (Hiroken, 2025) is a cooperative game with deck-building elements and a really interesting battle system. I’ve played it a couple times solo, but I’d like to get it to the table.
Flash Point: Legacy of Flame (Franklin, Lanzing, Leder and Rogers, 2025) is a legacy take on one of the first cooperative games I played, Flash Point: Fire Rescue (Lanzing, 2011), and that’s about enough to sell me on it. I hope it’s great. Reviews do seem good.
I Made you a Mixtape (DiLisio and Hughes, 2025) is a card game about making mixtapes — the theme just speaks to me, and I do enjoy a good I-split-you-choose game.
Knitting Circle (Vincent, 2025) is a follow-up to the great puzzle game Calico (Russ, 2020). Also, the cats are adorable.
Propolis (Johnson, Melvin and Stankewich, 2025) is a game described on BGG as a “worker-placement, engine-building, area-control, and tableau-building game.” I have no idea what that really means about how it plays. I’m mostly curious about how they’re able to get those descriptors in place with a reasonably light game — but I trust these designers, who make up a good chunk of Flatout Games.
Quashars (Shinzawa, 2025) is another Taiki Shinzawa trick-taking game. I haven’t played it. I’d love to.
Vantage (Stegmaier, 2025) is a cooperative adventure game that doesn’t need a campaign to work, and that’s enough to have piqued my curiosity. The glowingly positive reviews don’t hurt.

Thanks, as always, for reading Don't Eat the Meeples! It's hard to believe we're so close to being through 2025. What a year it's been. I went from having a one-year-old baby to a two-year-old toddler who constantly wants to play games with me. (Rules are not his strong suit, but he's sure having fun.) I hope it's been a personally good year, despite any external chaos, for you, too.