BGG Hotness

The Hotness chart got hit by a tidal wave this week. The big story is not one game. It’s three different kinds of attention landing at once: crowdfunding heat for Whisperwood, pure player-to-player momentum for Wildscape, and sequel trust for The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth. Around those headliners, a second tier of lighter and more accessible games is also climbing, which makes this week’s chart feel unusually varied. That mix is really what this article is about: not just who is hot, but why they are hot, and what kind of attention each game is attracting. ...

Last week’s ecological strategy wave just got completely wiped out. Whisperwood, Wildscape, The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth - all gone. The chart swings hard this week, and the new direction is about as far from forest restoration as you can get. Gunsen: The Battle for Toshi Ranbo goes straight in at #1, and it is doing something entirely different from everything else that occupied this space recently. This is a Legend of the Five Rings game - clan warfare in Rokugan, where the Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Phoenix, Scorpion, and Unicorn Great Clans clash for control of the legendary fortress. Matthew O’Malley is the designer, which matters more than it might seem at first: the man behind Welcome To… and Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig knows how to build accessible weight into competitive structures without letting the crunch collapse into a slog. The stats are consistent with early serious-fan enthusiasm: a 7.54 rating from 102 votes, weight of 3.0, 2 to 6 players, 90 minutes. That 2-to-6 range is genuinely useful - it suggests a game that doesn’t demand a specific headcount to function. Hex grid movement, open drafting, dice, and variable clan powers point to a design that wants tactical depth without spiralling into the five-hour range. L5R fans have been hungry for something worthwhile in the Rokugan universe since the card game era wound down. If the early noise is accurate, Gunsen might actually be it. ...

The Hotness this week is not subtle. It has been absolutely carpet-bombed by new entries, and the list is being driven by three very different kinds of attention: Whisperwood and Wildscape landing straight at #1 and #2 tell you the current mood in one glance, while The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth arrives right behind them with the pull of a proven series. Nature-forward strategy games are still catnip for this hobby, especially if they look clever and arrive wrapped in preview buzz, but this week also has room for sequel momentum, a chaotic old favourite, and the usual comparison-driven aftershocks lower down the chart. ...

Seven new entries. Seven departures. Dominant Species loses the top spot it has held since Gen Con. Whisperwood crashes into #1 on the strength of a Kickstarter that launched six days ago and blew past its funding goal within hours. This is the most turbulent list we have seen since the Gen Con spike two weeks ago - except this time the movement is driven by Kickstarter launches and retail arrivals, not a single convention. ...

Last week the hotness list was reshaped overnight by Gen Con. This week it settles. The convention is two weeks in the past and the shorter-lived buzz is burning out: CRAB RAGE!, Timespan, Mobius, and Québec - all genuinely Gen Con-driven entries - have fallen off the top 20 entirely. What remains is either durable (Dominant Species, The Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit, Wingspan Pocket) or newly arriving (Hell of a Deal, Avalon: The Riven Veil). The algorithm, as usual, is unkind to games that live only on floor buzz. ...

Gen Con 2026 ran from July 30 to August 2. The convention closed its doors yesterday, and by this morning the BGG hotness list had already been reshaped by what happened inside it. Ten games in, ten out - as steep a single-week turnover as last week’s pre-con surge. The difference is the direction of the wave: last week brought Essen speculation and Gen Con anticipation; this week brings post-play buzz, floor announcements, and crowdfunding campaigns that launched mid-show. ...

Gen Con opens on July 30th, and the hotness list has registered the impact three days early. Twelve games are new to this week’s top twenty - the largest single-week turnover we have tracked this year. Only eight titles survive from last week. Old Ones Origins, which debuted at #1 last week on the strength of a Gen Con announcement, has already fallen off entirely. The pre-convention wave of news cycles faster than any single announcement can sustain. ...

The headline this week is a double-entry that hasn’t happened on the hotness list before in quite this form: Old Ones Origins debuted at #1 and Forbidden Stars debuted at #2 - simultaneously - because one is a direct reimagining of the other, announced four days ago. Chaosium revealed Call of Cthulhu: Old Ones Origins on July 16th, describing it as a Cthulhu Mythos take on the Forbidden Stars formula, designed by Samuel Bailey, who co-designed the original. The announcement was tied to the Gen Con BGG Preview List and Chaosium’s Gen Con booth. BGG players who saw the announcement searched for the original game in numbers sufficient to push a decade-old out-of-print title to #2. ...

The Spiel des Jahres jury announced their 2026 winners in Berlin on July 12th - yesterday - and the BGG hotness list responded immediately. JinxO, Martin Ang’s word-association party game, won the Spiel des Jahres. Rebirth, Reiner Knizia’s tile-laying euro from Mighty Boards, won the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Both debut inside the top three this week. More unusually, all four nominees for those two awards appear on the list simultaneously: Cozy Stickerville (#16) and Moon Colony Bloodbath (#18) join the winners in what is the most concentrated SdJ presence this list has seen in a single week. ...

The biggest single movement this week belongs to a Kickstarter. Defenders of Hogwarts, the Harry Potter deck-builder designed by MinaLima - the studio behind the original film’s graphic props - jumped from #13 to #3 in one week, a ten-position climb that tracks almost exactly with the campaign going live. Kickstarter launches reliably generate this kind of hotness burst; the question is whether the underlying interest holds into next week once the announcement noise settles. ...