Board Games

Is Concordia Worth Expanding? Salsa, Venus, Solitaria, and the Map Packs Ranked Concordia is one of those games that keeps aging like it has a private cellar in Rome. It sits at 8.08/10 on BGG from 45,172 ratings, carries a 2.99/5 weight, and holds BGG rank #29. Published in 2013, it plays 2-5 players in about 100 minutes. All of that tracks. Sit down with it and you get a razor-clean economic game where every card matters, every colonist movement hurts a little, and the final scoring still makes new players blink twice. ...

The Legend In 2008, Pandemic landed at exactly the right moment for the hobby. Not because the world was ready for disease cubes. Because the hobby was ready for a cooperative game that didn’t need a hidden traitor, a gimmick reveal, or a giant rules lecture to create tension. Matt Leacock’s design changed the conversation. This was the game that showed a lot of players, including plenty of non-hobby folks, that “we all lose together” could be just as dramatic as direct conflict. Maybe more. You had a world map, a handful of specialist roles, four actions, a deck that kept getting nastier, and those awful little outbreaks that could turn a stable board into a full-blown disaster in one bad sequence. Clean design. Immediate stakes. Real panic. ...

Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile Is Still One of the Boldest Games You Can Buy Some games are fun for a night. Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile is fun to remember. This is the rare design where the end of one session actually matters next time, not because you’re trapped in a legacy campaign, but because the world itself keeps the scars. The usurper who stole power. The weird card that warped the economy for three sessions. The moment your friend swore loyalty as a Citizen and then absolutely did not mean it. I love games that create table stories. Oath turns those stories into infrastructure. ...

If you’re searching for the best legacy board games, the short answer is this: Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is still the benchmark, but it’s far from the only great choice in 2026. The best legacy and campaign board games are the ones that make your group care about what happens next, whether that means tearing up cards in panic, naming a favorite character, or staring at the board after a session because the world now looks permanently different. ...

Are the Azul Sequels Better Than the Original? Look, calling these “expansions” is already a little bit of a cheat. Azul, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, Azul: Summer Pavilion, and Azul: Queen’s Garden are standalone sequels, not bolt-on modules. You do not shuffle them together. You do not create some cursed mega-Azul. Each one is its own box, its own ruleset, its own answer to the question: what if Azul, but different? ...

BGG Hotness Review, Week of March 23, 2026 This week’s Hotness is saying something pretty loud. The hobby wants spectacle, yes. But it also wants familiarity. It wants the shiny new sci-fi campaign monster and the comfy old euro in fancy clothes. It wants cyberpunk robots, Roman merchants, cosmic dread, train-era economics, and apparently at least one cozy village-builder trying to elbow its way into the conversation. That mix matters. ...

Theme Park: Nature & Wildlife Board Games The cozy end of board gaming There’s a reason nature games keep blowing up. They look inviting on a shelf, they’re easier to pitch to non-gamers than “industrial-era canal economics,” and the theme actually does work at the table. Animals, plants, habitats, migration, sunlight, ecosystems. These aren’t pasted-on ideas. They naturally become mechanisms. Look, when a game asks you to build a forest, attract birds, or balance a habitat, your brain gets it immediately. You don’t need a 15-minute lore dump. You just start playing. And that matters. ...

The BGG Hotness list is one of the best real-time signals for what the hobby is collectively obsessing over. This week, the signal is loud and clear: interaction is back. The Top 5 #1: Concordia Special Edition is holding firm for a second consecutive week. That’s not a fluke. Concordia has always been the euro that euro-sceptics love, precisely because your card plays directly mess with what’s available to opponents. The Special Edition adds enough production value to justify a re-buy for existing fans, and it’s pulling in new players who skipped the understated original box. A 12-year-old design outperforming everything new on the market. Let that sink in. ...