Here is a game that does almost everything right. It has a gorgeous table presence with vibrant Japanese artwork. It has a deeply satisfying central mechanism that is unlike anything else in the hobby. It has tremendous replayability through a modular board. It is designed by one of Japan’s most talented designers. It sits at #156 on BGG, rated 7.79 by nearly 14,000 people, with a strategy game rank of #116. ...
Last week, Lairs was sitting comfortably on the throne at #1. This week? It’s plummeted to #41. That’s not a fall from grace - that’s falling off a cliff, bouncing off several ledges, and landing in a ravine. In its place, Terraria: The Board Game has dug, fought, and crafted its way to the top of the Hotness - fuelled by a wave of fresh reviews including No Pun Included’s delightfully titled “We Could Not Finish Terraria: The Board Game.” ...
Terraforming Mars has been a staple of modern board gaming since 2016, and with good reason - few games nail that slow-build engine satisfaction quite like watching your card combos snowball across generations. But with six expansions now available, the buy-in can feel overwhelming. Which ones transform the experience, and which ones are dead weight? We’ve ranked them all, from essential to skippable. The Base Game at a Glance Before diving into expansions, here’s where Terraforming Mars stands: ...
Trains are the backbone of modern board gaming. The 18xx genre literally predates most of what we’d recognise as “hobby gaming,” and the simple act of connecting two points on a map with a coloured line has launched a thousand designs. There’s something primal about railways - the expansion, the competition for limited routes, the satisfying click of infrastructure falling into place. But “train games” aren’t one thing. They span the entire complexity spectrum, from games you can teach your parents in five minutes to economic simulations that make spreadsheets look casual. The theme bends to fit everything from gentle tourism to robber baron capitalism, from fantasy steam-magic to pure abstract stock manipulation. ...
It’s the most frequently asked question in modern board gaming: “I want a game that combines deck-building with worker placement - should I get Dune: Imperium or Lost Ruins of Arnak?” Both released in 2020. Both shot into BGG’s top 50. Both blend the same two mechanisms. Yet they feel remarkably different at the table. Here’s the deep breakdown. The Elevator Pitch Dune: Imperium is a political knife-fight disguised as a deck-builder. You’re manoeuvring agents across Arrakis, courting factions, and committing troops to conflicts - but the cards in your deck determine where your agents can go, creating a delicious tension between long-term deck strategy and short-term tactical needs. ...
There’s a specific moment in every Vital Lacerda game. You’re twenty minutes into the teach, staring at a board covered in interlocking tracks, influence markets, and action spaces that seem to connect to everything else. Your brain is screaming that this is too much. And then, somewhere around turn three, something clicks. The systems aren’t arbitrary - they’re architectural. Every connection exists because the theme demands it. Every mechanism serves the story the game is telling. ...
You’ve terraformed Mars. Now what? Terraforming Mars earned its place in the 2026 BGG Hall of Fame for a reason. It sits at a 3.24/5 weight on BGG with a rating hovering around 8.4, and it’s held a top-five overall rank for years. It plays 1-5 in roughly 120 minutes, though two experienced players can push through faster and a full table of new players might be there all evening. The appeal is specific and hard to replicate. You start with almost nothing - a corporation, a handful of credits, and a barren planet. Over generations, you play cards that chain into other cards, building an economic engine that starts as a trickle and ends as a flood. The moment when your production income finally eclipses your spending is one of the best feelings in board gaming. And because the card pool is enormous (over 200 unique project cards in the base game), no two games feel the same. ...
You’ve done the restaurant thing. You’ve done the Netflix thing. Now you want something that involves actual eye contact and maybe a little competitive tension. Board games are the answer - but not just any board games. Nobody’s idea of a romantic evening involves reading a 40-page rulebook or staring at a spreadsheet in cardboard form. The perfect date night game needs to be easy to teach, quick to play, and engaging enough that neither of you reaches for your phone. Bonus points if it sparks conversation, creates inside jokes, or ends with someone dramatically flipping the table (in a fun way). ...
There’s a moment in every area control game where you look at the board, count your pieces, count your opponent’s pieces, and realise you’re one move away from either a masterful territorial sweep or a catastrophic overextension. That tension - the knife-edge between dominance and collapse - is why area control has been a cornerstone of board game design for decades. But “area control” is deceptively simple as a label. It covers everything from the elegant medieval politics of El Grande to the asymmetric woodland warfare of Root, from the mythological brawling of Kemet to the Darwinian survival of Dominant Species. What unites them isn’t just “put your stuff on the map” - it’s a deeper design philosophy about shared spaces, visible competition, and the impossibility of defending everything at once. ...
Last week, Dungeon Crawler Carl stormed the Hotness at #1 like a reality TV contestant kicking down a dungeon door. This week? Carl’s been shoved to #12 and the throne belongs to Lairs - the competitive dungeon-builder that’s been quietly climbing for two weeks and has finally claimed the crown. Meanwhile, Eternal Decks has made one of the most dramatic jumps we’ve tracked, rocketing from #14 to #2 in a single week. ...
