Weekly Hotness: Week of June 01, 2026

The designer of Dominion just put a moon colony through a blender - and the hobby is watching. Moon Colony Bloodbath by Donald X. Vaccarino storms to #1 this week, while Terraria: The Board Game, which owned that throne just three weeks ago, has already vanished from the list entirely. That’s the Hotness in a nutshell: brutal, fast, and completely unsentimentalabout last week’s darlings. Thirteen of the twenty spots are brand-new entries - one of the biggest shakeups in recent memory - and the stories buried in this week’s data are genuinely worth digging into.

This Week’s Top 20

Dropped off: Terraria: The Board Game (#1), Rolling Deep (#2), Feya’s Swamp (#4), Compania (#5), Magical Athlete (#10), Spooky Tower (#11), Terraforming Mars (#17), Arcs (#19), Dark Pact (#20)

Moon Colony Bloodbath - Vaccarino destroys the engine he built

Moon Colony Bloodbath has been lurking on BGG’s radar since its 2025 release from Rio Grande Games, quietly accumulating over 5,000 ratings. This week, something - probably a wave of fresh video coverage - pushed it to the top of the pile, and the concept deserves every bit of the attention.

This is Donald X. Vaccarino, the designer who invented the deck-building genre with Dominion, doing something genuinely perverse with his own legacy. Where Dominion is about constructing an ever-more-efficient machine, Moon Colony Bloodbath hands you that machine pre-built and then systematically dismantles it. You start with thirty colonists, a shared deck of work cards, trouble cards, and twists, and spend the game watching the deck fill up with events - hunger, power failures, accidents, leaks - that methodically kill your people. The game ends when someone’s colony runs out of colonists entirely; everyone else counts survivors. Most alive wins.

The phrase “reverse engine builder” is getting thrown around a lot, and it’s accurate. There’s something darkly funny about a genre-defining designer spending a career teaching players to optimise, and then producing a game about optimising your survival against entropy you cannot ultimately stop. The 1950s Americana-in-space aesthetic, with art by Franz Vohwinkel, gives the whole thing a pleasingly pulpy flavour. Early coverage from outlets like Dice Tower has been enthusiastic - “huge winner” is the quote making the rounds - and at 1-5 players with a 45-90 minute runtime, it fits tables that couldn’t commit to a three-hour dungeon crawler.

War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time - Dire Wolf goes where no one has gone before

It says something about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time that it’s taken this long to get a proper board game adaptation. Fourteen books, thirty years of the fandom waiting. War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time is that game, and the team behind it - Dire Wolf, the studio responsible for Dune: Imperium and Clank! - is exactly who you’d want handling it.

The design is a two-player asymmetric conflict: one player controls the Dragon Reborn and the forces of Light, the other steers the Dark One. Two modes are baked in - Hero Mode for newer players, Epic Mode for the full experience with armies sweeping across the world map from the Battle of the Two Rivers through to the Last Battle. Tableau building, set collection, and area control all feature. The Kickstarter launched this spring and given the IP and the pedigree, it’s tracking to be one of the bigger crowdfunding stories of the year.

The BGG banner ad for this game is literally running on the Moon Colony Bloodbath page right now. Even the algorithm is aware this is a moment.

Eternal Sevens - Hiroken follows up last year’s breakout

Eternal Decks was one of the quiet breakout stories of 2025 - a Japanese cooperative trick-taking game by a designer named Hiroken that landed on the Hotness early in the year and stuck around. Now Hiroken is back with Eternal Sevens, and the approach is characteristically smart: take a classic public-domain card game (Sevens, also known as Fan-Tan), strip out its frustrations, and rebuild it with modern design sensibilities.

The core is familiar - players lay cards in four shared sequences from 1-10, opening new sequences by playing the four through seven, trying to empty their hand. The frustration in traditional Sevens is that a single card stuck in someone’s hand can lockdown an entire suit for everyone. Hiroken addresses this by introducing Eternal cards with unique powers, making passing an active choice that triggers effects, and adding a second win condition: earn two stars by completing horizontal sequences. Two modes (Casual and Gamer, the latter adding character selection with unique passive abilities) mean you can scale depth to the table.

The English/Japanese edition is targeting Amazon Japan in Q3 2026. Hiroken is quietly building a catalogue worth paying attention to.

Earthborne Trailblazer - a beloved studio heads into the unknown

Earthborne Rangers built one of the more devoted fanbases in recent memory. The co-operative card game set in a post-collapse future where humanity lives in harmony with nature accumulated passionate players who spent years in its valley. Earthborne Trailblazer is the board game expansion of that world - literally. The rangers are heading east of the valley for the first time, blazing new trails to the Mississipian Sea, and the game is an open-world cooperative adventure for 1-5 players.

The Kickstarter is live now. What’s drawing attention beyond the IP loyalty is the production ambition: the entire board is a single piece of art depicting the exploration region, drawn by artist Evan, with a branching narrative that’s only about 20% finished even in the current campaign prototype. You earn Ranger Badges as you accomplish feats in the field. Given how much care Earthborne Games puts into their work, this is one to watch through the campaign.

The bigger picture - a Hotness reset

Nine games off the list in a single week is significant. Terraria’s fall - from #1 to not even ranking - is the statistical equivalent of being crowned and immediately deposed, though that’s not unusual for a game whose buzz was review-driven rather than crowdfunding-sustained. Rolling Deep, Feya’s Swamp, and Compania all evaporated from the top 5.

What replaced them tells you where the hobby’s attention is right now: designer pedigree (Moon Colony Bloodbath, Rebirth from Reiner Knizia), IP with mass appeal (War of the Dragon), live crowdfunding (Earthborne Trailblazer), and the slow build of games finding their audience after retail release (Stonesaga, designed by Max Brooke and Luke Eddy of Star Wars: X-Wing and Legion fame, finally getting the attention its 30-hour generational campaign deserves). World Order continues its quiet climb - up seven places to #7 - a geopolitical strategy game that keeps finding new converts week on week.

The evergreens are getting squeezed but holding on. Ark Nova, Heat, Brass: Birmingham, and Harmonies are all slightly lower but still present. They don’t leave - they just get shoved around by whatever is catching fire this week.

Next week’s wildcard: can War of the Dragon’s Kickstarter momentum push it higher, or does the top spot belong to the moon colony a little longer?

Data sourced from BoardGameGeek. Cover images via BGG, used with attribution. The Weekly Hotness tracks BGG’s trending games list, which reflects search activity, page views, and community engagement.