Board Games

Three players is the awkward middle child of board gaming. It’s the most common household count - two adults plus a friend, or a family where the youngest just aged into real games - but it’s poorly served by a lot of titles that quietly fall apart at three. Two-player games go headless at three. Five-player games become negotiations between strangers at three. And a significant slice of the medium-weight euro catalogue was designed with 4 in mind, plays fine at 3, but nobody told you that your preferred count is actually squeezing the game’s intended balance. ...

Root works because it understood something that most area control games get completely wrong. Every faction at the table is playing a different game. The Marquise de Cat runs an industrial engine, building sawmills and workshops, trying to grind the board into submission through sheer production. The Eyrie Dynasties are locked into a decree that grows increasingly unmanageable, balancing expansion against the constant threat of turmoil. The Woodland Alliance builds sympathy quietly - too quietly - until the forest erupts with unrest and suddenly they’re winning without having fought anyone. The Vagabond drifts through all of it, taking quests, making friends, betraying them. Each faction has a completely separate arc, a separate game feel, a separate path to victory. ...

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. ...

Ark Nova is one of the most remarkable games of the decade. It sits at BGG rank #2, carries a staggering 8.54 rating from over 100,000 voters, and packs a 3.80 weight that rewards players who don’t mind genuinely working for their payoff. You’re running a modern zoological establishment - building enclosures, acquiring animals from across the globe, supporting conservation projects - using a brilliant action card system where each card’s power is determined by its position in a row that shifts with every use. ...

The BGG Hotness this week belongs to a video game franchise. Kingdom Come: Deliverance - The Board Game sits at #1, and a second board game adaptation of the same franchise - set during the Hussite Wars - takes #2. Two tabletop versions of the same video game series debuting on the hotness in the same week is unusual. It hasn’t happened with this kind of franchise crossover before on this list, at least not in recent memory. ...

Two stories dominated this week’s BGG Hotness, and they both involve games doing something unusual. Concordia: Special Edition debuted at #1 while Concordia - the base game from 2013 - climbed fifteen spots to #5. Two versions of the same title occupying the top five simultaneously is the kind of anomaly that stands out even in a high-turnover week. The second story belongs to Harmonies and its expanding universe: three entries from the same franchise appeared on the list at once, with two new expansions - Pulse and Crescendo - both debuting in a single week. Ten new entries arrived. Ten others departed. Last week’s #1, Wondrous Creatures, tumbled thirteen spots. It was a messy, eventful week. ...

Something unusual happened this week. Wondrous Creatures vaulted from #11 to the top of the BGG Hotness - and simultaneously, its brand-new expansion Winterfall debuted at #8. A base game and its expansion occupying the hotness simultaneously is rare enough to be worth noting. Seven new entries replaced seven departures, including Stonesaga, War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time, and Earthborne Trailblazer - all of which had been generating real buzz just a week ago. The turnover is sharp, and the stories buried in the data are worth digging into. ...

Brass: Birmingham is, by every measurable standard, the best board game ever made. It holds BGG Rank #1, carries an 8.56 average rating from nearly 60,000 voters, and packs a 3.86 weight that rewards players who actually want to think hard for two hours. You’re a competing industrialist in 1770-1870 Birmingham, building cotton mills, coal mines, iron works, and canals - then tearing it all up and doing it again in the rail era. The hand management is elegant, the resource chain is punishing in the best way, and every move ripples outward in ways you only fully appreciate after losing to someone who built beer earlier than you. ...