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First Impressions: Trials of Maya (2026)

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When this monster-sized box showed up at my house, I was already pretty amped up by the sales pitch. An expandable, card-driven, MOBA-style game? Hello yes! I love MOBA games; god only knows how many hours I burned playing League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, and DOTA.

Suffice it to say, this was a concept that spoke to me directly. In fact, it’s the sort of game I have been looking for so desperately that, in the absence of its existence, I tried to create one myself. I’m about as close to a target audience for Trials of Maya as you’re ever going to get.

What is a MOB? It stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, a genre of gaming that involves players (typically 5 vs 5) running unique characters from a large roster all with special and unique abilities fighting on a map over a serious of towers and the ulimtate price, the opponents base camp. First team to blow up their oppossitions base camp wins.

League of Legends in particular for me was THE MOBA to play. Like most MOBA’s, it’s about the Champions first and foremost and all the crazy interaction between all their various powers. This is really what I’m hoping Trials of Maya gets close to as a game.

I should fully disclose before we get going here that this First Impression article is based on a single two-player siege mode game. This is not the review; That we will do later, but I felt, given that the crowdfunding for this one is going live next month, there are probably plenty of people out there looking it up.

Trials of Maya is here… I played it, and it’s time to talk about it.

Opening The Box

This box, and everything in it, feels like more than just a game. It’s a work of art, crafted with a clear focus on turning the simple act of discovering a new board game into a unique visual experience. I knew from the outset this wasn’t going to be just a box opening, and Trials of Maya did not disappoint.

Just the art in this game speaks volumes to the design team’s dedication, though I think this is not only expected, but demanded by MOBA fans. Art in MOBA games is part of the allure, so a board game trying to represent this genre would need to do the legwork. Fortunately, Trials of Maya does indeed pass this trial with flying colors.

Everything here feels as though it was created through the lens of an artist. Personal… designed from the heart. The illustrations, graphic design, components, books, colors, and physical presentation have all been tied together into a single piece of work with a singular vision. Combined, they create the sort of presentation most games don’t even strive for, let alone achieve.

There is an included novel that tells a story from the universe in which the game is set (Just getting into that), offering an inside perspective on the setting and theme. There is striking artwork, and a genuine effort to entice through elaborate, if not sometimes overproduced components. Mind you, I’m working with a prototype here. Even the smallest details seem carefully matched to everything around them, creating a unified whole that comes together almost like a painting.

Every detail in Trials of Maya feels like the result of countless hours of contemplation and creativity. It’s not always successful, but you can’t discount the effort here; this game is someone’s baby boy born from blood, sweat, and tears, that much is clear

To give you one particularly strange and wonderful example, the included novel has a cover that is itself a 3D art piece. The game actually comes with a pair of 3D glasses that reveal the full effect of the cover art.

Why? Why would anyone go through the trouble of doing something like that in a board game?

Supporting a board game with a novel is not unprecedented; in fact, we saw exactly this in Syncanite Foundation I reviewed earlier this year, but I find things like this make me giddy, especially if I’m really into a board game. I love exploring a cool new settings.

I think the answer can be found in the particular sort of nostalgia Trials of Maya is trying to evoke. The rise of MOBAs belongs to a generation of gaming that grew up surrounded by loud colors, experimental visual design, and a fascination with 3D entertainment. Movies, games, and advertising were constantly trying to leap out of the screen at us. Even the bright red glasses themselves fit perfectly into the color palette and visual identity of Trials of Maya.

It is nostalgia expressed through art, a kind of unnecessary cherry on top, but it speaks volumes to the love affair the designer/producers of this game have with it.

3d Movies were a bit of a gimmick, and I’m not sure it panned out quite how Hollywood hoped it would, but I remember it like it was yesterday, and it was pretty awesome!

I don’t think everyone will have the same reaction, but if you grew up during the rise of MOBAs and were deeply immersed in gaming culture at the time, there is something about Trials of Maya that may feel oddly familiar.

Yet for all that familiarity, this is certainly not another game drawing exclusively from the familiar well of Western fantasy. The Tolkien-inspired traditions and Appendix N influences that dominate so much of fantasy gaming are largely absent here.

Instead, Trials of Maya has a striking Indo Asian aesthetic, with characters, clothing, architecture, symbolism, and mythology that appear influenced by Indic and broader Asian artistic and cultural traditions. Combined with its science fantasy elements, it gives the world an identity that feels immediately distinct from anything else you will see out there.

I spend a great deal of time reviewing games, reading about games, and as a side effect reviewing artwork. We get all kinds, but for me personally, I love it when art is both really unique and exceptional, while still comfortable and familiar in a way. This definitely has a League of Legends Wukong feel to it and I love that.

I am going on and on here, but I think that is justified. So much effort has gone into the presentation of Trials of Maya that it deserves to be lingered over.

In a word, Trials of Maya is absolutely gorgeous. We are off to a really great start!

Setup and Components

While Trials of Maya is artistically impressive, we have to put the artistry aside for a moment because even in a First Impressions article, my job is to offer the reader a dose of reality. I don’t want to be all hype and no substance. Anyone interested in this game is going to want a breakdown of the game itself.

Eye candy is eye candy. The game is the game.

There is no question in my mind that in order for a modern, crowdfunded board game to do well, it must indeed be eye-candy. That is the visual advertisement, but in the end, once you get a game to the table, the game lives and dies by its gameplay.

My friend and I set aside half a day to sit down with Trials of Maya and play a one-on-one siege game, one of several game modes the system offers. The Siege Mode is, in effect, the base mode of what we think of as a MOBA game. Towers, minions, lanes of sorts, and the push.

Ahead of his arrival, I read through the rulebook and reference material, trying to get a handle on the game, and got everything set up so that we could dive straight in.

The Rulebook is laid out beautifully with very focused areas and clear language. I have read a lot of rulebooks in my day from independent publishers and crowdfunded games, and universally they are usually so bad they are barely usable; I was very pleasantly surprised that the Trials of Maya dev team did some quality, professional work here. It made a huge difference for our experience with the game.

Now, it’s important to mention for a second time that I’m working with a prototype of Trials of Maya. Keep that firmly in mind as a lens through which to view the following comments.

While the components look fantastic laid out on the table, and much of the physical design is exceptionally well conceived, even during setup I could see that Trials of Maya was going to be a fairly fiddly game.

The hexagonal battlefield is very tight, and there is a lot of stuff that goes onto it, leaving surprisingly little room for fat fingers to maneuver. Setup itself was not particularly complicated, albeit it took about 20 minutes. The physical components, while gorgeous through and through, were something of a mixed bag in the usability department, ranging from fantastic to …meh.

The player boards, for example, are really well thought out. Components fit snugly into designated spaces, and everything is organized in a visually accessible way. It was particularly convenient to be able to look across the table and, with a quick glance, understand the board state of my opponent. Critical to executing the game successfully and being fully informed.

I really loved the character cards; everything is well organized, has a clear purpose… every aspect of the tactile design aces the test, and it looks gorgeous to boot!

The cards were similarly successful. The iconography is relatively simple, and we adjusted to it quickly. Most of the cards we encountered during our game were clear, and whenever something was not immediately obvious, there was handy reference material included with the game that made answers easy to find.

My friends and I have all designed a lot of cards for our games over the years, and this is exactly what you want. Nice looking, clear text, clear iconography, and consistency. This is how you make cards for a card game. Well done!

Some of the physical components in this prototype, however, were clumsy.

Several pieces were easy to knock over and awkward to grab, resulting in quite a few frustrating fumbles during play. The stackable chips in particular, used to track the health of minions, while a good idea conceptually, had a tendency to topple over. The various spawn and upgrade markers had similar problems because they stood upright and were rather top-heavy.

You get a better sense of the board from the side here, but there is a lot of three-dimensional stacking here; those plastic chips are feather light, and even a tiny bump can knock a stack over. Don’t get me wrong, I think using chips to track health of units is clever and looks great, but if you’re going to use chips in a game like this where they get handled a lot, they need to have some weight to them like poker chips.

There was also a more practical issue with the battlefield itself. Many components completely covered the hex they occupied, making it difficult to see symbols or terrain features underneath them. Walls and other important battlefield information could effectively disappear once the board became populated. The board really could have been 20% bigger.

None of this is catastrophic, but in a game built around positioning and tactical information, where you’re constantly moving pieces around, physical usability matters.

There is still time before release to tighten some of these components up and, in fact, the designer has expressed a commitment to doing exactly that. Trials of Maya is clearly in the final stages of production preparation, and I would expect that a number of these details will change before the finished game reaches players.

For that reason, I would not personally count these issues against the game at this stage. This is precisely what prototypes are for.

Still, it’s worth mentioning because there is an important distinction here. A game needs to be both beautiful and easy to use. Trials of Maya has unquestionably nailed the first half of that equation. The prototype suggests there is still some work to be done on the second.

With everything finally set up, however, it was time to dive in.

Both my gaming partner and I were excited; I in particular was holding my breath because I desperately want this game to be good.

Gods! I need a good MOBA tabletop game, let this be the one!

Rules, Mechanics and Gameplay

As one might expect, right out of the gate we fumbled around with the rules and got a few things wrong. This is not particularly unusual with a brand new game, especially one that is a bit more complex and comes from an independent publisher clearly willing to experiment with new mechanics and ideas. I only mention it because the game came with a strong solution.

The rulebook was very well written. Whenever we discovered that we had misunderstood something, we were quickly able to find the answer, correct ourselves, and keep going. The reference booklet and reference cards reinforced this, and before long we were playing without needing to constantly stop and consult the rules.

This is big for me because I find universally that most independent crowdfunders have terrible rulebooks; Trials of Maya succeeded where most people fail, and this is such a critical element of getting off on the right foot with a new game. Big kudos to the design team!

After a couple of rounds, Trials of Maya started to come into focus.

We began to see the strategy, understand the rhythm of the game, and recognize how all of its interconnected systems were supposed to work.

The aha moment had arrived. It was time to get down to the business of crushing each other’s souls! We were itching for the action.

My gaming partner and I were pretty focused during the game, so we did not spend much time discussing our opinions while we played. We were too busy trying to successfully navigate our characters around the battlefield, uncover combinations between cards and abilities, manipulate minions, and control important areas of the board as we fought our way toward each other’s towers.

Because that is essentially the game.

Each round you gain energy from cards that slide off your tableau as well as play new cards. You then spend that energy executing actions from the cards in play in your tableau, moving your character, attacking enemies, and triggering various special abilities. Meanwhile, your character develops and becomes increasingly powerful as you complete objectives and gain XP.

In other words, pretty much exactly what you would expect and I hoped from a MOBA board game.

Very much like actual MOBA’s, pushing forward and controlling the forward position is key to the game. You want to be fighting closer to your opponent’s tower so that when an opportunity opens up you’re within striking distance. As such, controlling neutral spawn points is a major point of contention in the game.

This is a card-driven tactical game about fighting with your character and controlled minions, pushing toward the enemy tower and trying to pull off various gambits and shenanigans as you outmaneuver your opponent.

Each character felt genuinely unique, with clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. Some were fast, some excelled at range, and others were built to stand their ground and absorb punishment. There were only four characters available in this prototype, but it was not difficult to imagine another thirty.

There is no question that Trials of Maya feels infinitely expandable in this area, and I suspect that discovering new characters and learning how to exploit their unique abilities is going to be a big part of the long-term appeal of the game. In fact, like a MOBA, I would expect in groups where the game is played often, META’s will form as they would in League of Legends or DOTA, with homebrew tournament rules undoubtedly forming.

The Trials of Maya prototype came with four characters, each with their own deck of cards, abilities, skills, and stats. Even with just four characters, there is plenty to explore mechanically, but you can see how very obviously, more is better! I haven’t mentioned the quality of the sculpts here, mainly because I find pictures tell the story for the most part. I can say that the miniatures in my box were actually a lot nicer and more detailed than the ones depicted in the marketing material. These are very paint-worthy minis

The customizable card decks add another layer to that potential.

You can essentially create your own version of each character by modifying their deck. We did not experiment with deck construction during our first game, choosing instead to use the recommended starting decks, but halfway through the game I already had strong opinions about which cards I wanted to remove and what sorts of cards I would want to replace them with.

That’s a very good sign.

The potential here is exceptional and, more importantly, I would argue the game is already very fun in its current form. There are several other game modes still to explore, and I strongly suspect that a four-player siege game is going to be considerably more chaotic and exciting than our one-on-one match. Though I am deeply concerned about the game’s length. Our two-player game stretched well into the 3rd hour, and while we were new and a slow first game is understandable, I worry that a 4-player game is going to be a pretty extended affair.

I personally thought Trials of Maya succeeded in bringing the MOBA genre to life on the tabletop, though I would argue it felt a bit slow. Perhaps the most accurate description of the experience came from my gaming partner. At the end of the match, he looked up from the board and uttered a sentence that perfectly encapsulated what both of us were thinking.

“This was a really fun game, but it had some jank.”

I completely agree. That statement, however, requires some explanation.

First, I will remind you once again that this is a First Impressions article about a prototype game. After a single play, I would not feel comfortable being held to account for any definitive conclusions about its finer mechanical details; these are gut instincts firing here. We are going to tackle the depth of this game in the review later after having a few more plays under our belts.

Think of what follows less as criticism and more as an advisory observation from two people who have spent an ungodly amount of time designing and playing prototype games ourselves, desperately trying to get the jank out of our own designs.

It’s experience shining through and, perhaps more importantly, an acknowledgement of just how difficult it is to truly streamline a game.

Jank, for lack of a better term, is what happens when a game is clearly on the right track and has a fundamentally good design, but still has mechanics or physical elements that need refinement. It’s a kind of threshold for a game. It’s when a game is so close to its final version that you can taste it, but there are still little pieces of friction getting between the players and the experience, which can turn a fun game into a frustrating one. Typically and perhaps most commonly, Jank causes games to be longer than they should be.

Jank is the demon every game designer eventually has to tango with, but perhaps more problematically, crowdfunded games are famous for leaving the Jank in on release. Something I’m always weary of.

I think that is exactly where Trials of Maya is in this prototype, and I really hope it’s not too late for the designers to address and fine-tune this game further.

Some of the jank comes from the components themselves, as I have already described. The game is simply a bit too fiddly right now, slowing it down and making it feel a bit clumsy.

These strike me as very solvable problems.

In fact, the next time I play Trials of Maya I will probably just use my clay poker chips for tracking minion health, for example, as a solution to chips toppling over all the time. Clay poker chips are designed to stack, they stay put, they are easy to grab, and they are smaller in diameter. In a game where moving stacks of chips around the battlefield is a constant activity, you want this part to be smooth as silk.

Anyone who has ever played poker with plastic, rather than clay poker chips, will instantly know what I’m talking about when I say light plastic chips do not stack and fall over all the time. It’s why in poker you use heavier, clay chips. I can’t even describe how huge of a difference this would make for Trials of Maya.

There was some mechanical jank as well, though this is where I become much more cautious about drawing conclusions after a single game.

Both my partner and I felt that something about the handling of allied minions was still a little off.

During the game, the neutral minions that begin on the battlefield are quickly converted into allied minions controlled by the players. This part we liked, but we soon discovered that stacks of allied minions die quite quickly and, almost immediately, those same minions begin spawning back onto the battlefield.

The result was a revolving game of attrition where minion deaths primary impact on the game was slowing it to a crawl.

Minions were returning as quickly as we could kill them, you really couldn’t “clear the lane” for those familiar with MOBA terminology. Movement is fairly limited for all but the most mobile characters as it is; the battlefield is extremely tight, and the sequence of play allows minions to spawn at the beginning of a player’s turn and then act during that same turn, often in the same turn they died.

As a result, the board state could collapse and rebuild itself in one swift sequence of actions during the same turn. There is little breathing room, in one turn you achieve success, in the very next it’s all undone, and there is not much you could do about it.

This attrition results in the game being a lot less decisive with really heavy attrition and, as a consequence, a lot longer than I think it needs to be.

Something about that rhythm felt off to both of us.

I definitely want to play Trials of Maya a couple more times before making any stronger judgment about it. There may be, in fact, likely are aspects of the minion system that we simply failed to appreciate during our first game, and I suspect a four-player game could reveal considerably more nuance. Not to mention that the custom deck building I think is going to become a key feature of the game on repeated plays. Even after a single game, I felt quite ready to build my own deck.

We were slicing and dicing minions by the handfuls; they were leaving play and returning at breakneck speeds. It was fun at first, but this attrition really slowed the game down to a crawl and extended its overall playtime quite dramatically.

What I had considerably less trouble forming an opinion about was the card play.

I loved the card powers and the mechanic of sliding cards off your tableau to generate energy. There was a clear strategy and rhythm to it. It quickly became clear that every card had subtle benefits and drawbacks. There were cards I desperately wanted to get into play, while others seemed less useful until some unexpected situation or coordinated combos suddenly transformed them into the most important card in my hand.

That was really fun.

Even better was discovering some of the funky shenanigans possible when certain cards and abilities started interacting.

At one point I suddenly realized that a particular combination of cards in play would allow my character to essentially shoot across the entire battlefield, bypass the enemy forces and make a direct assault on my opponent’s tower.

I caused devastating damage in short order and nearly pulled off a win right then and there. That was the first time the game felt responsive, less about attrition and more about action. And in that moment, Trials of Maya did exactly what I wanted it to do; it felt like I had hoped it would.

I think in a way, the overarching jank in Trials of Maya is that it’s too slow most of the time; when the action exploded like that, it was the first time the game felt really good, and I think that is what this game should be. A quick 30-45 knife fight in a phone booth of moves and counter moves, not a slow strategic game of attrition.

For a moment, it felt like a classic League of Legends tower rush. Like a proper MOBA game, and I think that is precisely what this game should be striving for. MOBA’s are not thinking, strategic games, they are action games that require quick thinking and quick decisions.

First Impression Conclusion

I don’t particularly like writing first impression conclusions.

There is a sort of finality implied by the word conclusion when the reality is that I’m only just beginning to explore Trials of Maya. If there is one thing I have learned from reviewing games over the years, it’s that my opinions can change wildly during that process.

I remember playing Lord of the Rings The Card Game for the first time and absolutely hating it. A year later, it held the number one spot on my Top 10 Best Games of All Time list, a position it would hold for nearly a decade.

Never judge a game by the first time you play it, over the years, I have learned this lesson many times over. From Lord of the Rings, the card game that I hated the first time I played and became one of my all time favorite games, to Eclipse that I hailed as the next coming and now I can’t even stand to look at. All games deserve at least 2-3 plays before you judge (says the game doing a First Impressions article after one play!)

I have seen games go the other way too.

The point is that first impressions can be wrong. Sometimes spectacularly so.

After my first game of Trials of Maya, however, there are three things I feel reasonably confident saying.

First, it was fun.

That sounds like an almost insultingly simple observation, but ultimately it is the most important one, and I think the designer would agree; those are magical confidence-building words to the ears of a person who spent half a decade working on a passion project. Trials of Maya is a game I genuinely cannot wait to get back to the table. It’s beautiful, strategic, highly customizable, and filled with possibilities that I have barely begun to explore.

Even with some prototype jank and a few mechanical questions lingering in my mind, when we packed the game away I was already thinking about the next match.

That matters.

Second, I suspect Trials of Maya may be at its best with four players.

Our two-player Siege game occasionally felt a little isolated. With only two heroes running around the much smaller battlefield, it seemed like there was space in the design waiting to be filled. It kind of felt like an introductory game, with depth that simply wasn’t there for us to explore to keep things simple. I’m very curious to see what happens when four heroes are unleashed on the battlefield with custom decks, creating more combinations, more threats, and presumably considerably more chaos.

In fact, before even getting four people together, I’m tempted to try a two-player game in which we each control two heroes just to see how dramatically that changes the experience. I just wonder about the playtime: how long is a 4-player game going to take?

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I think Trials of Maya has layers that we barely touched.

Toward the end of our game, I started catching glimpses of tactical possibilities that simply had not occurred to us during the opening rounds. Movement, positioning, pushing and pulling characters around the battlefield all seemed considerably more important than we initially understood. The relationships between cards, heroes and minions began revealing opportunities for combinations and clever plays that our basic starting decks only hinted at.

Strategy games, especially customizable card games ones usually have a lot of subtle nuance that may not be evident in a first playthrough. I suspect Trials of Maya definitely falls into that category. It definitely requires more exploration.

That is ultimately what excites me most and may also quell my criticisms. Trials of Maya did not leave me feeling like I had figured it out.

It left me feeling like I wanted to figure it out.

Maybe the game is, in fact, much faster once you know what you’re doing. Maybe that feeling of slow-paced attrition was just the impression of a newbie still trying to come to grips with the game’s strategies.

When that enormous box first arrived at my house, Trials of Maya sounded like the sort of game I had been waiting for. An expandable, customizable, card-driven tactical game that attempts to capture the characters, combinations, battlefield positioning, and tower assaults of a MOBA on the tabletop.

After one game, I am not prepared to tell you that Trials of Maya has completely fulfilled that promise.

I am prepared to tell you that I desperately want to play it again.

For a First Impression, I cannot think of a better conclusion than that.

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Top 10 Announcements From GenCon 2026

There is no question that, when it comes to tabletop gaming announcements, Gen Con is probably the single most important event of the year. This is where the industry’s biggest publishers pull back the curtain on what they have planned for the coming year and where many of the games we will all be talking about over the next twelve months are revealed for the very first time.

It has been a dream of mine for many years to monetize Gamers Dungeon enough that I could actually justify making the trip to Gen Con myself. So far, I would say the project has been a tremendous success spiritually, just not financially. The site continues to grow, the readership is fantastic, and more people are discovering it every month. I just have not quite figured out how to turn that momentum into a meaningful source of income without compromising what I think makes the site special.

I have always been a bit stubborn about maintaining the hobby feel of Gamers Dungeon. I never wanted it to become a wall of sponsored content or lose the authenticity that comes from simply writing about games because I genuinely enjoy them. Maybe one day I will figure out that balance.

Until then, I will just keep writing.

Thankfully, Gen Con has given us plenty to write about. There were a surprising number of exciting announcements this year, even so far as Gen Con goes, from long-awaited sequels and expansions to entirely new games from some of the biggest names in the hobby.

So, let’s dive into the ten announcements that caught my attention the most.

By the way, if you want to know about what went on at GenCon you can check out the official Lookbook and Program Book here. They went all out again this year, including some really great cover artwork, very much loved it!

10. Wizards of the Coast & Dungeons and Dragons

One of the most important RPG publishers in the hobby is Wizards of the Coast, and the most influential role-playing game on the market is Dungeons & Dragons. Whenever the company takes the stage at Gen Con or anywhere for that matter, people pay attention, and almost every announcement has the potential to shape the direction of the hobby for years to come.

That said, I found myself a little underwhelmed by this year’s presentation, which is why it lands in the number ten spot on my list.

The headline announcement was a collaboration between Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. The upcoming Azeroth campaign setting will allow players to adventure across Blizzard’s iconic world while introducing familiar races, classes, and locations. It is the beginning of what will almost certainly become a long line of crossover settings for the Dungeons & Dragons brand in the years to come.

Personally, it did very little for me. I play Dungeons & Dragons because I want to experience classic fantasy through the lens of Dungeons & Dragons. If I want to play in Azeroth, I would rather just play World of Warcraft. I understand why Wizards of the Coast is pursuing these collaborations, but this one simply was not aimed at me, and I doubt any of the other crossovers will do much for me either.

The announcements became much more interesting once the focus shifted back toward the game’s own history.

Joe Manganiello, one of Hollywood’s most passionate advocates for D&D, appears set to continue championing the return of Dragonlance. A new Dragonlance book was announced alongside additional sourcebooks and novels, suggesting that Wizards of the Coast is continuing to invest in one of the game’s most beloved settings.

Even more intriguing was the announcement of a Greyhawk project inspired by previously unpublished notes from Gary Gygax himself. If handled with care, this could become something genuinely special for long-time fans of the game.

To round things out, Wizards also hinted that other classic campaign settings could be making a return, with Dark Sun being one of the names mentioned. That is much more my speed. Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and Dark Sun represent some of the greatest settings ever created for the game, and I would happily spend more time in any of them.

Dark Sun was without question one of the more controversial settings from D&D’s past and certainly problematic in terms of replicating content for a modern audience. I do love their decision to lean into adult content and to just throw a mature audience label on it.

Finally, Wizards teased what appears to be a Star Wars crossover arriving in 2027.

Again, I recognize that this is major news, but it did very little to excite me. If I want to play a Star Wars role-playing game, Edge of the Empire remains one of the finest modern systems available, while the classic West End Games Star Wars RPG is still, in my opinion, the definitive tabletop adaptation of the universe.

Interesting? Absolutely.

Important? Without question.

Exciting? Not really.

For me, the real story here was not the crossovers. It was the renewed interest in the classic worlds that helped make D&D the legendary game it is today. If Wizards of the Coast can recapture some of that old magic, these announcements could end up being far more significant than they first appear.

9. Railway Boom

I missed this release from Japan, which is not all that surprising, I suppose, but I do keep a close eye out for any train games; I love them and own quite a few already.

I have always had a soft spot for train games. While I love sprawling economic titles like the 18XX series and Railways of the World, those games demand a serious investment of both time and mental energy. On the opposite end of the spectrum, many lighter train games have left me feeling that they abstract away so much of the experience that they lose what makes the genre appealing in the first place.

Railway Boom, designed by Hisashi Hayashi, looks like it might strike a very interesting balance.

Originally released in Japan during 2025 with extremely limited distribution, this year’s international edition gives the rest of the world a chance to experience it. So if the name has never crossed your radar before, don’t worry. It is new to most of us.

The game revolves around building and managing a railway company through an economic system centered around auctions and investment decisions. What immediately caught my attention is the relationship between auctions and turn order. Strong economic decisions earn you advantages, but turn order determines which opportunities are available, creating an interesting tension where money alone is not always enough.

I have always enjoyed games that ask players to balance those competing priorities. It actually reminds me a little of Smartphone Inc., where timing can be every bit as important as raw efficiency.

From everything shown so far, Railway Boom appears to have the feel of a heavier Eurogame without crossing into the kind of exhausting experience that some economic games can become. It looks substantial enough to reward careful planning while still being approachable enough that I could see it reaching the table on a regular basis.

Another feature that immediately won me over is the inclusion of actual route building. For me, this is one of those essential ingredients of a great train game. Laying track and expanding a rail network creates a direct connection between the mechanics and the theme. It makes me feel like I am actually running a railway company rather than simply manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet.

That is one of the reasons I never fully connected with games like Russian Railroads. As brilliant as the mechanics are, they become so abstract that the train theme starts to feel interchangeable. If you are going to make a train game, I want to see trains, tracks, and networks spreading across the map.

Railway Boom appears to embrace exactly that philosophy.

It is still a bit of an unknown, but from everything I have seen so far, this is one of the Gen Con announcements that has me genuinely intrigued. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one

8. Final Titan

Final Titan, I think, falls into a similar genre as King of Tokyo: fun, fast, and lots of cool powers. The artwork for this one is outstanding!

As much as I like to think of myself as someone who enjoys dissecting deep strategic games, it would be complete fiction to suggest that those are the only games I play or enjoy. Some of my favorite gaming memories have come from loud, chaotic, completely unbalanced games where the only objective is to laugh until your sides hurt.

Games like Galaxy Trucker and King of Tokyo have earned permanent places in my collection because they understand that sometimes fun is more important than perfect balance or some sort of deep strategy. There is room in this hobby for careful strategic planning, and there is room for absolute nonsense.

Final Titan looks like it falls squarely into the second category.

Designed by Richard Garfield, who has never been afraid to embrace big swings, crazy interactions, and spectacularly overpowered abilities, Final Titan is all about larger than life characters battling it out in a frantic king of the hill style arena until only one Titan remains standing.

From everything shown so far, the game combines drafting, timing, and wildly overpowered combat abilities into what looks like a fast-paced spectacle where the best stories will probably come from the ridiculous things that happen rather than who actually wins.

That is exactly the sort of design Garfield excels at. His games often prioritize memorable moments over mathematical perfection, and I think there is a lot of value in that philosophy. Not every game needs to be a carefully balanced competitive masterpiece. Sometimes the best games are the ones where everyone around the table erupts into laughter because something completely absurd just happened.

Final Titan looks like it understands exactly what it wants to be.

It appears to be the perfect nerd culture filler, packed with outrageous powers, dramatic reversals, and enough chaos to keep everyone invested right until the final turn.

This is one I fully expect to see hitting my table as soon as I can get my hands on a copy. It simply looks like too much fun to pass up.

7. Excalibur

Cool theme, cool genre, but the hidden role and identity games are very hit-and-miss. There are at least as many good ones as terrible ones.

Hidden role games have become something of a family tradition in our house. Whenever we head off on vacation, there are almost always a couple packed into the luggage. Games like Coup, The Resistance, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and occasionally Bang! The Dice Game have provided countless evenings of laughter, accusations, and just the right amount of friendly betrayal.

The problem is that, after enough plays, even the best hidden role games begin to lose some of their magic. Once everyone knows the strategies and the personalities around the table, it becomes increasingly difficult to surprise one another. That is why I am always keeping an eye out for something new in the genre.

Excalibur immediately caught my attention.

One of the things that often frustrates me about hidden role games is how easily they can be unintentionally spoiled. A player misunderstands their role, accidentally reveals too much information, or makes an obvious mistake during setup, and suddenly half the mystery disappears before the game has really begun.

Excalibur appears to avoid much of that.

Rather than relying on players memorizing a collection of unique roles, much of the gameplay revolves around moving tokens and resolving the abilities printed directly on them. That gives the game a much more natural flow. Once everyone understands the basic rules, the components themselves seem to guide the experience, making it easier for newer players to participate without accidentally giving the game away.

I also like the variety of powers that have been shown so far. My family always enjoys games where everyone gets to do something unique, and Excalibur appears to have plenty of interesting abilities without becoming overly complicated.

The play time is another major plus. Hidden role games tend to work best when they stay short and energetic, and for me anything much beyond twenty minutes starts to lose some of its momentum. Excalibur seems to understand exactly where that sweet spot is.

It also takes a slightly different approach to player interaction. Unlike games such as The Resistance or One Night Ultimate Werewolf, where direct accusations drive much of the experience, Excalibur appears to focus more on deduction through gameplay. Players are trying to determine who controls one of two legendary swords. Holding Excalibur at the end of the game earns you victory, while being left with the cursed sword means defeat.

It is a wonderfully simple concept, but one that seems capable of creating plenty of memorable moments and tense decisions.

This is exactly the kind of game that thrives around my family’s table, and I have a feeling it will be finding its way into our vacation bag before long.

6. Dungeon Crawler Carl

I have never read the books or know much about this universe, but I think games setup for a good one-shot are few and far between. Alien RPG was probably the last one I thought did a good job of it. I’m hopeful.

I have to admit that I have never been a huge fan of role-playing games built around comedy. Games designed primarily as jokes have always struggled to hold my attention. I never really connected with Paranoia, and while I certainly appreciated the wonderfully bizarre nature of Dungeon Crawl Classics, it was never something that stayed on my table for very long.

Dungeon Crawler Carl fully embraces the outrageous tone of the bestselling novels on which it is based. From everything shown so far, this is an RPG that is unapologetically designed to be funny.

Normally, that would be enough for me to lose interest.

But there is a catch.

For quite some time now, I have been looking for an RPG that fills a very particular niche. I want something that works brilliantly as a one-shot, requires very little preparation, and can be pulled off the shelf on a random evening when a few of my nerdy friends happen to stop by. Sometimes you do not want an epic campaign. Sometimes you just want to roll some dice, tell a ridiculous story, and have a good laugh for a few hours.

Surprisingly, that niche is not very well served.

Most modern role-playing games take themselves fairly seriously. Even systems with lighter rules often expect players to invest in an ongoing campaign, and they rarely feel suited to the kind of spontaneous pick-up and play experience I am looking for.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, however, feels like it was almost designed for exactly that purpose.

The premise alone is wonderfully ridiculous. Aliens invade Earth and force humanity into an intergalactic reality television show where contestants must battle their way through an ever-changing dungeon packed with monsters, traps, absurd challenges, and increasingly bizarre situations, all for the entertainment of a galactic audience.

That sounds like the perfect foundation for a memorable one-shot adventure, even if as a campaign, it’s not something I would have any interest in at all.

I also have another weakness that probably works against my wallet. Whenever something becomes inexplicably popular, I simply have to know why. I have to read it, play it, or watch it just to understand what everyone is talking about.

Dungeon Crawler Carl has become one of those phenomena.

So while it sits well outside my usual tastes, I can absolutely see a place for it in my collection. It may never replace my favorite fantasy RPGs, but I have a feeling it could become my go-to choice for those evenings when the goal is not to build an epic campaign, but simply to gather some friends around the table and have a ridiculously good time.

5. Satisfactory: The Board Game

I’m a huge fan of the PC game, and while my faith in crossovers has its limits, I’m really hoping for the best here. I do think the concept is very well suited for the table top.

I should probably begin with a disclaimer. At the time of writing, we know very little about Satisfactory: The Board Game. In fact, there is barely enough information available to form an opinion about what the finished product will actually look like.

That said, I simply could not leave it off this list.

Satisfactory, the PC game, is quite possibly the best video game I have played in the last five years. It completely consumed me for weeks. There is something incredibly satisfying about gradually building these sprawling, beautifully efficient production lines, watching resources flow through increasingly elaborate factories, and constantly finding new ways to optimize everything.

It is an absolutely brilliant game.

Naturally, the announcement that it is coming to the tabletop immediately caught my attention.

The current Gamefound page offers little more than a brief overview of the concept and promises to recreate the experience of building an automated industrial empire around the table. Technically, that qualifies as information, but in reality it tells us almost nothing about how the game will actually play.

Will it focus on engine building? Resource management? Spatial puzzles?

At this point, your guess is probably as good as mine. Despite that, I cannot help being excited.

Every time I see the title, I immediately start imagining all the clever ways its mechanics could translate into a board game. There is enormous potential here. The constant optimization, expanding production chains, balancing inputs and outputs, and solving increasingly complex logistical puzzles already feel like they belong in a Eurogame.

Of course, I am also trying to keep my expectations under control.

Video game adaptations have a very mixed track record. Some manage to capture what made the original special, while others end up feeling like they borrowed the artwork and little else. Translating an experience that unfolds over dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours into a board game is no easy task.

Still, I am choosing to be optimistic.

Satisfactory is one of my favorite PC games of all time, and I would love nothing more than to see it become an equally compelling tabletop experience. Right now there are far more questions than answers, but this is one announcement I will be following very closely over the coming months.

Here’s hoping Coffee Stain’s masterpiece can beat the odds and become one of those rare digital adaptations that truly earns its place on the tabletop.

4. Drillers

The production on this game is pretty over the top, but mostly this pick is based on the publisher’s reputation. I love every single CGE game I have ever bought.

Whenever Czech Games Edition announces a new game, I pay attention.

Few publishers have earned my trust quite like CGE. Time and time again they have produced games that not only impressed me on first play but continued to earn their place on my shelf years later. In fact, if I looked back over all of my various Top 10 lists, I suspect Czech Games Edition would have more appearances than any other publisher.

That kind of track record buys a lot of goodwill.

Drillers is still something of an unknown quantity, so my excitement is tempered with a healthy dose of caution. There simply is not enough information available yet to know whether this will become another CGE classic or just an interesting experiment.

What I can say is that everything shown so far looks incredibly promising.

The artwork immediately grabbed my attention with a unique, colorful art style that has that come-together look, and the production already has that polished look that I have come to expect from the publisher. More importantly, I really like the core concept. I love a cool mech game, and this being about mining, I don’t know why how, perhaps years of Minecraft exposure, but it just appeals to me. It appears to sit comfortably in that middle-weight space, offering meaningful decisions without becoming overwhelmingly complex. That is a sweet spot that Czech Games Edition has consistently excelled at over the years.

If I am being completely honest, though, this entry is as much about confidence in the publisher as it is about the game itself.

Right now, Drillers has not earned this spot through detailed gameplay reveals or glowing previews. It has earned it because Czech Games Edition has built up years of trust with me, and because the game simply looks fantastic. Sometimes that first impression is enough to get a game onto your watch list.

Now it is up to designers Roman Bednář and Adam Španěl, two relative newcomers, to deliver on that promise.

I certainly hope they do.

3. Trials Of Maya

I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to review this one; it’s very much in my wheelhouse!

Even if you attended Gen Con this year, there is a good chance you completely missed Trials Of Maya. It was not one of the convention’s headline announcements, nor was it surrounded by the same level of hype as many of the bigger releases.

For me, though, this is a bit of an indulgent pick.

Everything I have seen and read about Trials Of Maya suggests that it was designed specifically for someone with my rather unusual tastes. I have always had a soft spot for games that do something a little different, especially when they combine strong and unique gameplay with deep world-building and a compelling narrative.

It reminds me a little of Syndicate Foundation in that regard. Rather than simply presenting a game with an interesting setting, Trials Of Maya appears to build an entire universe around its mechanics through a novel and expanded lore. I love that approach. It transforms the board game into something larger with presence, giving players an opportunity to continue exploring the world long after the game has been packed away.

That sort of commitment to storytelling is right up my alley.

To make things even more exciting, the publisher recently reached out and asked if I would be interested in reviewing the game. Needless to say, I accepted, so you can expect a full review here on Gamers Dungeon once I have had a chance to dive into it properly.

Just a few weeks ago I had never even heard of Trials Of Maya.

Now it is one of the games I am most looking forward to playing.

The gameplay itself also looks incredibly promising. The “How to Play” videos already available showcase what appears to be a MOBA-inspired design, with heroes battling over objectives and making tactical decisions that feel heavily influenced by the digital genre.

If there is one thing guaranteed to get my attention, it is a game that blends strategic combat with immersive world-building and a strong narrative foundation.

Trials Of Maya seems to be doing exactly that.

I have very high hopes for this one. Hopefully the finished game lives up to the excitement, because if it does, I think it could become one of the biggest surprises of the year.

2. Star Wars Unlimited

I’m just about ready to call Star Wars Unlimited a modern-day classic; it’s soooooo good.

I have to admit that I have not played as much Star Wars Unlimited over the past few months as I would have liked. Earlier this year it was on my table almost constantly, but lately it has settled into that comfortable place where it comes out every now and then for a few casual games.

That has not stopped me from collecting it.

Fantasy Flight Games used Gen Con to reinforce what was already becoming increasingly clear. Star Wars Unlimited is here to stay.

The coming release schedule is incredibly ambitious. Homeworld arrives this October, followed by the new introductory mini set, Icons, in November. Beyond that, Legacy of Skywalker, System Overload, and Galaxy At War are all planned throughout 2027, giving players a clear roadmap for the game’s future.

Admittedly, much of this information had already been announced before Gen Con, but there is something reassuring about seeing Fantasy Flight Games double down on its commitment. Collectible card games live and die by publisher support, and knowing there is a healthy pipeline of new content makes investing in the game feel much easier.

That is really what excited me most.

It is also worth saying that, even if the game somehow disappeared tomorrow, I honestly think Star Wars Unlimited has already earned its place among the great collectible card games. The foundation is remarkably strong, and the expansions have only reinforced that opinion. Sets like A Lawless Time and Ashes of the Empire have been outstanding, adding interesting mechanics while continuing to capture everything that makes Star Wars such a compelling universe.

Hopefully I am not tempting fate by saying this, but I genuinely believe Star Wars Unlimited has already secured its legacy.

Now it just has the opportunity to become even better.

With another full year of expansions already planned, I cannot wait to see where Fantasy Flight Games takes it next. For me, Star Wars Unlimited remains one of the most exciting games in the hobby today, and it is still right at the top of my must-play list.

1. Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit

Excited doesn’t even begin to describe what I’m feeling right now about this game.

I don’t know much about Restoration Games, but with Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit, they have definitely got my attention now!

The game is a reimagining of the legendary Star Wars: Queen’s Gambit, one of those wonderful hidden gems that quietly disappeared into tabletop history despite being far better than most people ever realized. The fact that it is returning at all is exciting enough. Rebuilding it around what I consider to be one of the greatest fantasy worlds ever created simply pushes it over the top.

Over the past several months, Restoration Games has steadily released previews, designer diaries, and behind-the-scenes looks at the project. Gen Con felt like the moment where everything finally came together. With a planned release in September 2026, the finish line is clearly in sight.

Queen’s Gambit is, without question, a classic. Sadly, I don’t own this one, I, like so many, missed my chance, and these days trying to get a copy is expensive and difficult.

What impressed me most was finally seeing the game in action.

The spectacular multi-battle structure that made Queen’s Gambit so memorable appears to have survived the transition beautifully. Watching several interconnected battles unfold simultaneously across the table captures the scale of The Lord of the Rings in a way that very few board games have managed. It is ambitious, visually stunning, and from everything shown so far, remarkably faithful to both the original design and Tolkien’s world.

Simply put, it looks incredible.

Of course, I am trying to keep my expectations under control. We have all been excited about games before, only to discover that they never quite lived up to the promise. Until I actually get this one to the table, there will always be that small voice reminding me not to get carried away.

That said…

This is the announcement that excited me more than any other at Gen Con 2026.

If Restoration Games manages to capture even half of what made Queen’s Gambit so special while wrapping it in one of the greatest fantasy settings ever created, they could have something truly remarkable on their hands.

And if they somehow pull it off completely, there is a very good chance this will become one of my favorite board games of the decade.

No pressure, but the hype is real, people!

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Hidden Gems, On The Table

Review: Hitster – Battle Of The Generations

Party games are always fun to review because ultimately there is only one standard by which they should be judged. They either generate laughter, friendly arguments, and memorable moments around the table or they don’t.

I don’t have to get all academic about clever mechanics or spend three paragraphs dissecting optimal strategy. The only real question is whether people are having enough fun to accidentally spray their drink across the table while laughing.

The original Hitster landed back in 2022 like a bombshell, at least in my house. It immediately became the centerpiece of every family gathering and has remained there ever since.

We eat. We drink. We play Hitster. Somebody confidently insists that ABBA released a song in 1997. Somebody else gets irrationally competitive. Everyone has a great evening.

Hitster Battle of the Generations is far from the first variation on the formula. In fact, Jumbo has been releasing new editions at a pace that makes it feel like there is probably a Hitster edition dedicated exclusively to songs about tractors somewhere in development.

There are versions centered around Movies and TV Soundtracks, genre collections like Rock and Christmas, and regional editions such as Radio Italia or the German Schlager Party. There really is something for just about everyone.

At its core, though, every version follows exactly the same recipe. Pick the music that best suits your family and friends, scan the cards, and let nostalgia do the heavy lifting.

Original Hister, so far as I could tell, blew up as a party game, but I’m not so sure it really attracted the board gaming hobby community. Its ranking on BBG is impressive, sitting at 480 today, but I honestly expected to see a lot more ratings and fans of the game than that.

That makes this review refreshingly straightforward because I already love the original Hitster. Battle of the Generations immediately struck me as one of the more interesting ideas. Dividing songs into different eras so that grandparents, parents and teenagers all have a fighting chance sounds like an obvious improvement on paper.

The only question is whether that idea actually works in practice.

That is exactly what this review is all about.

Overview

Final Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star(4.65) Fantastic Party Game

Hitster could hardly be simpler as a game. Each player begins with a single song drawn from the generation they have chosen for the game. Every card has one important piece of information printed on it, the song’s release year.

On your turn you draw the next card from your generation deck, scan the QR code, listen to the song and then attempt to place it in the correct position on your growing timeline.

Naturally, the more songs you have in front of you, the more difficult this becomes.

Players can also earn Hitster tokens by correctly naming both the song and the artist.

If you place a song incorrectly, your opponents get the opportunity to steal it by placing it correctly on their own timeline and spending a Hitster token.

And that is pretty much the entire game. So where does the fun come from?

Well, Hitster is really an excuse to sit around listening to great music, reminiscing about old memories, and confidently demonstrating just how much useless musical knowledge you have been carrying around for the last thirty years.

Music is already a natural part of most gatherings with family and friends, so turning it into a game feels effortless.

At its heart, Hitster is a trivia game, but unlike most trivia games, it does not punish you for lacking specialist knowledge. You do not have to know the exact release date of a song. You simply have to make a reasonable guess about where it belongs in history.

I don’t want to cast shade on Trivia Pursuit; it’s a great, classic game, but it does make you feel quite stupid, quite often. The blend of Trivia game and party game is a tricky business; make it too hard, and it can really let all the steam out of the room. Hitster finds that fine line between too hard and too easy, while maintaining the fun.

Even if you have never heard a particular song before, you can often estimate its age from the production style, the instruments or simply the general feel of the recording. The game constantly rewards educated guesses rather than perfect knowledge.

As a result, Hitster rarely makes anyone feel left out or embarrassed. Most players will score reasonably well, while people with exceptional memories, musicians, and dedicated music fans naturally have an edge.

In a party game though, who wins is almost beside the point. What matters is whether everyone is smiling, singing along and arguing over whether a song is “definitely from the eighties.” Hitster delivers all of that in abundance.

The Battle of the Generations twist actually makes the game both easier and harder at the same time.

Restricting the playlist to your own generation greatly increases the chance that you will recognize the songs, giving everyone a better opportunity to participate regardless of age. At the same time, because every song now comes from a much narrower window of time, the release dates end up clustered much closer together.

Guessing whether a song came out in 1987 or 1989 is considerably more difficult than deciding whether it belongs before or after Bohemian Rhapsody.

It is a surprisingly elegant trade-off that keeps the game feeling fresh without changing the core formula.

I suspect we will see JUMBO pump out versions of Hitster for many years to come with unique themes and gimmicks that cater to different kinds of music lovers.

In the end, Battle of the Generations is every bit as entertaining as the original Hitster, which comfortably sits in my “always happy to play” category.

It’s a fun trivia game about music; I’m not sure what else you could ask for out of a party game.

Components

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_star

Pros: Great quality components, fantastic, easy-to-use app; everything is in order here.

Cons: With a phone on the table, some might end up fiddling when it’s not their turn.

Everything included in the box, which essentially amounts to a large stack of cards and a handful of tokens, is well produced with excellent print quality and easy-to-read text.

The game also requires you to download the free Hitster app, which is used to scan the QR codes on the cards and play the music. We experienced no issues whatsoever during our time with it. The app downloads quickly, is intuitive to navigate, and simply does exactly what it needs to do without getting in the way.

Hitster maintains consistently strong component quality throughout the entire spectrum of releases; it doesn’t really matter which one you get, it has been standardized.

Rather than including a printed rulebook, the game provides a QR code that links to the rules online. Given how remarkably simple Hitster is, I actually prefer this approach. The rules take only a couple of minutes to read and, unlike a traditional booklet, they cannot mysteriously disappear into the same dimension as missing socks and television remotes.

There is nothing in the box that feels particularly luxurious or flashy, but there really does not need to be. The cards are durable, the app works exactly as intended, and the production quality is consistently high throughout.

Considering the relatively modest price, Hitster Battle of the Generations delivers excellent value for money.

Theme

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: The era of music concept does a lot to set this version of the game apart from others, and it’s a fun gimmick.

Cons: Not everyone is going to fit neatly into one of the three era’s of the game.

Like every Hitster release, Battle of the Generations takes the same core concept and adds its own twist.

This time the music is divided into three distinct eras, with each player selecting the generation they want to play before the game begins. Every era has its own deck of cards, allowing everyone at the table to tailor the experience to the music they know best.

The three generations are the LP Era, covering music up to 1984, the Cassette Era spanning 1985 to 2004, and the Streaming Era covering 2005 to 2025.

It is a sensible split and, for most players, it is easy to identify the era that best represents their musical upbringing.

That said, not everyone fits neatly into a single category. I was born in 1975, which technically places much of my childhood in the Cassette Era, yet I have always gravitated more toward the music of the LP Era. I could happily play either deck, and I suspect many players will feel the same way.

There is one unique type of Hitster, called Hitster: Bingo, I haven’t tried yet that combines the classic game of bingo with Hitster’s unique brand of music trivia. It looks cool, and I suspect we will see more unique themes like this as JUMBO milks this cash cow. Not that I blame them in the slightest, they have a real winner on their hands!

Fortunately, this is hardly a problem. If anything, it simply reflects how personal musical taste is. Generations may be convenient labels, but very few people actually listen to music according to a calendar.

Whether the song selection is unique compared to the original Hitster is difficult to say. There are so many cards across both games that you are unlikely to encounter the same song very often, and even if you do, enough time usually passes between plays that it never becomes an issue.

As for whether I prefer this version over the original, I honestly cannot pick a clear winner.

After playing both versions with a wide variety of groups over the past month, a few people commented that they preferred the unpredictability of the original, where absolutely anything could appear next. There is a certain excitement in wondering whether your next card will be Elvis Presley or Ed Sheeran.

That is not really a criticism of Battle of the Generations, though. If anything, it comes down to personal preference. This version offers a more focused experience, while the original feels a little more chaotic and surprising. Both approaches work, and both are a lot of fun.

Gameplay

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: Gameplay is simple and to the point; Hitster is about music, plain and simple.  It’s less a game and more of a party activity.

Cons: Making a comeback is very difficult; once you fall behind, your probobly not going to catch up.  Competitive players might find that to be a problem.

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the mechanics of Hitster Battle of the Generations because, at the end of the day, this is a party game. Strategy plays only a minor role, but the experience is much closer to a social activity than a deeply tactical game.

There is still a winner, of course. The first player to collect ten songs wins, and some of the most exciting moments come when a player spends a precious Hitster token to steal a song that someone else failed to place correctly.

Each player begins with three Hitster tokens. While you can earn additional tokens by correctly naming both the song and the artist, they remain a limited resource throughout the game. By the halfway point, many players have already spent most of theirs.

That means every decision to spend a token actually matters. You cannot afford to gamble on every opportunity and, more often than not, the player who chooses the right moments to steal a couple of key songs ends up winning the game.

Hitster tokens are kind of the key to the game. As you progress through the game, stealing another players/teams Hitster card is how you are going to get ahead and win the game.

Beyond that, Hitster is essentially a race. Placing a song incorrectly is a meaningful setback because someone else may immediately benefit from your mistake. At the same time, it is surprisingly common for at least one player to build a flawless timeline, meaning games rarely drag on.

Even if a game lasts ten rounds or more, turns move so quickly that the pacing never becomes an issue. In fact, one of Hitster’s greatest strengths is knowing exactly when to stop. It finishes before anyone starts checking their phone, wandering into the kitchen, or announcing that they are “just going to stretch their legs” for twenty minutes.

Most games also produce remarkably close finishes. It is not unusual to see several players sitting on eight or nine songs, all desperately hoping someone else slips up so they can steal the winning card. Those final few rounds generate exactly the kind of excitement you want from a party game and exactly at that right, end-game moment.

I loved the original Hitster when it was released, and Battle of the Generations has done nothing to change that opinion. If anything, it reinforces just how brilliantly simple the formula is.

It is difficult to imagine a better party game.

Replayability and Longevity

Score: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star
Tilt: christmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_starchristmas_star

Pros: For music lovers in particular, this game is infinitely replayable, but music is such a universal language; I find this to be true about everyone who plays the game.

Cons: Choosing the right version of Hitster for your particular mix of players is important.

I will keep this one short and sweet.

Hitster is about as replayable as a party game can be.

It has appeared at almost every family gathering and dinner party at my house over the past year and, somehow, it still manages to be the game people ask to play before the evening is over.

That is not unusual for a great party game, but it is surprisingly rare for a trivia game. Most trivia games tend to be a bit too long in my opinion when it comes to entertaining guests as the evening dessert comes out.

Hitster largely avoids that pitfall mainly because it’s about listening to music, an activity already associated with a good party.

The sheer number of songs means you are unlikely to encounter the same cards very often, and even when you do, enough time has usually passed that nobody remembers exactly where they belong. More importantly, the experience is driven as much by the conversations, singing and shared nostalgia as it is by the gameplay itself.

That gives the game an unusually long lifespan.

If you do eventually want something different, there is no shortage of expansions and themed editions to explore. Whether your group prefers rock music, movie soundtracks, Christmas songs or something more region-specific, there is probably a version that fits your tastes.

Good party games earn a permanent place on the shelf in every household, and so far as party games go, I think Hitster has nailed a great formula.

Conclusion

I don’t think there is much doubt that Hitster is here to stay as one of the defining party games of this generation. I can easily imagine it becoming one of those games you find tucked away in a basket at every holiday cabin, bed and breakfast or Airbnb, sitting comfortably beside Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit in a few years.

Hitster has managed to do something surprisingly difficult. It has created a party game that appeals just as much to people who never play board games as it does to dedicated hobby gamers.

Battle of the Generations leans even further into that universal appeal. The idea of dividing players by musical generation is immediately attractive and, before we even played our first game, everyone in my family was excited by the concept.

The twist works well, although I am not entirely convinced it replaces the original. If anything, it complements it. Some groups will enjoy the focused playlists and the chance to revisit the soundtrack of their own youth, while others may prefer the wonderfully unpredictable mix of the original game. Neither approach is better. They simply create slightly different experiences.

What remains unchanged is everything that made Hitster such a success in the first place. It is approachable, endlessly entertaining and capable of bringing together people with wildly different gaming backgrounds around a single table.

That is exactly what a great party game should do.

As far as recommendations go, Hitster Battle of the Generations is an easy one. It has earned a permanent place in my collection, and I expect it will continue making appearances at family gatherings for years to come.

If you are hosting a party and wondering what game to bring to the table, there are a lot of fantastic options; in fact, I feel like I should do a list here at some point.

Or you could just put on some music and pull out Hitster. It always works.

Board Game Reviews, Boardgame Review, Hidden Gems, On The Table

On The Table: White Castle

White Castle showed up on my Top 10 Favorite Games to Play on BGA list last week, and this little worker placement game has become something of an obsession lately. Today, I want to dig a bit deeper into what makes it such a special and truly unique worker placement game.

At its core, White Castle is a dice-driven worker placement game with a heavy focus on tight resource management and a healthy dose of engine building. In other words, it’s a pretty standard Euro game on paper. Nothing about that description should have veteran board gamers falling out of their chairs.

What’s interesting is that White Castle isn’t really the sort of game that normally lands in my wheelhouse. In fact, if you’ve spent any time reading this blog, or glanced at my Top 20 Games of All Time list, you’ll know that Euro games rarely make the cut. When one does, like Dune Imperium or Terraforming Mars, it’s usually because it has earned its keep at my table as one of the very best in the genre.

Terraforming Mars remains a gold standard for Euro games in my book. Through and through, it’s outstanding in every measurable way, the only complaint I have is I don’t play it as often as I would like to. Rich, deep, meaningful gameplay, it’s a masterpiece.

I realize that makes me sound like a bit of a board gaming snob. I promise that’s not the case. I’m perfectly capable of recognizing and appreciating a great game, Euro or otherwise, regardless of genre. It’s just that Euro games often leave me feeling a little cold. They’re usually clever, well-designed, and about as exciting as a tax spreadsheet.

When a Euro game grabs my attention, that says something. When it completely takes over my BGA play history, that says even more. White Castle has done exactly that. I genuinely believe it’s operating in the same league as the genre’s heavy hitters and deserves to be mentioned alongside some of the greats.

I’m still anxiously awaiting my physical copy, but it’s clear as day that this is a very pretty game, albeit a very busy game. I would definitely put it in the “gamers” game category.

There are two things in particular that stand out.

The first is its brilliant use of dice as communal workers that every player draws from. The second is the game’s razor-sharp efficiency. White Castle wastes absolutely nothing. Every action matters, every resource feels precious, and every turn leaves you wishing you had just one more action to pull off your master plan.

It’s a master class in game design.

The Dice Workers

Most worker placement games follow a pretty familiar formula. You have your own pool of workers, your opponents have theirs, and everyone competes for action spaces on the board. That’s the core of the mechanic and, in many games, that’s about where the story ends.

The more interesting examples tend to add something extra. Age of Empires gives players different worker types that create unique opportunities and decisions. Dune Imperium layers deck building and combat on top of its worker placement system, giving players multiple ways to approach the game and interact with one another.

That’s generally where I land on worker placement games. When the mechanic exists in isolation, I often find it a little dry. It’s not that games like Russian Railroads are bad. Far from it. They’re well-designed games with plenty of strategic depth. The problem, at least for me, is that the interaction between players often begins and ends with, “Well, you took the spot I wanted.”

I know that this is a worker placement fan favorite, but it did not fare well for me. It’s a game about railroads, yet they are barely featured in the game, and it’s just a plain, run-of-the-mill worker placement game with absolutetly nothing particularly interesting happening beyond that. It was, in a word, kind of boring.

As a result, many worker placement games start to feel a little one-dimensional over time. The better ones usually find a way to add some extra flavor, some additional layer that transforms the mechanic into something more engaging.

That’s where White Castle surprised me.

At its heart, it’s still a worker placement game. It hasn’t abandoned the formula. Instead, it takes the worker placement mechanic itself and twists it into something far more interesting through its use of communal dice.

The first thing that stands out is that the dice are shared by everyone. Just like the action spaces, the workers themselves are a limited resource. Suddenly, you’re not only competing for the spaces you want to use, but you’re also competing for the workers you want to use on them.

There are a lot of dynamics in White Castle, from the cards that make up the worker placement spots to the value of the dice, no two games are going to be the same, and there is no “base strategy” that is going to work. You really have to assess what is feasible and work with what’s on the table. It’s a new puzzle every time you play.

That alone would be clever, but White Castle goes several steps further.

Each die has three different characteristics that matter.

The first is its value. Depending on where you’re placing it, a high-value die might earn you resources (coins) while a low-value die could cost you precious coins. Sometimes the die you desperately want is also the die you can least afford.

The second is its color. Different locations on the board require different colored dice to activate, which means you’re not simply evaluating numbers. You’re evaluating colors, values, timing, resources, combos, and opportunity all at once.

Then there’s the position of the die on the bridge.

Dice on the right side generally have higher values, making them immediately attractive. Dice on the left, however, grant a secondary action that becomes increasingly valuable as the game progresses. The catch is that taking a die shifts the remaining dice along the bridge. Grab the wrong die, and you might accidentally serve up an incredible opportunity to the next player.

And that’s where White Castle starts to become fascinating.

Every decision feels loaded with consequences, for a worker placement, the interaction goes far beyond “you took my spot”.

Most mechanics are communal in White Castle, but each player does have their own player board where some of your engine-building elements are managed, including some elite spot you might, on occasion, be able to leverage.

Do you take the lower value die on the left to gain the bonus action? Can you afford the resource cost? Are you opening the door for another player to grab exactly what they need? Is there a chain of actions on the board that turns an average move into a great one?

These aren’t decisions you make once or twice during a game. They’re decisions you make every single turn.

What’s remarkable is how much depth emerges from such a simple idea. On paper, you’re just selecting a die and placing it on the board. In practice, every choice feels like a small puzzle packed with tradeoffs, risks, and opportunities.

It’s one of the most elegant worker placement systems I’ve seen in years.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this approach ends up influencing future designs. The idea of communal workers with multiple competing characteristics feels like a genuine step forward for the genre. White Castle takes one of board gaming’s oldest and most familiar mechanisms and somehow makes it feel fresh again.

I was trying to think of a game that White Castle might be compared to, and while it’s a bit of a stretch, it does remind me a little bit of The Red Cathedral.

It’s simply one of the most elegant and exciting worker placement mechanics I have seen come along in a board game in a long time, and I definitely think it’s going to become a thing. You are going to see this in a lot of worker placement games in the future. This is the next evolution of worker placement games.

Now, I should say that I don’t know that this mechanic originated in White Castle; there are tens of thousands of board games out there, so I don’t want to accidentally steal credit from someone by suggesting this is the first invention of its kind, odds are it probably isn’t. Suffice it to say, it’s the first time I have seen it in a game, and I think it’s fantastic.

The Efficiency

The other thing that makes White Castle stand out is just how unbelievably efficient the design is.

This game is tight. Not “Euro game tight.” Not “carefully balanced tight.” I’m talking about the kind of tight where every game feels like you’re attempting a speed run and constantly realizing you’re three moves away from greatness.

Most of the time, you’ll come up short somewhere. You’ll miss a resource, mistime an action, or discover that one seemingly harmless decision three turns ago has come back to haunt you. Then every once in a while, it all clicks together, and the result feels magical.

Without the expansion, you’ll take just nine actions during the entire game. Nine. That’s your whole game.

Nine opportunities to create the most efficient sequence of actions possible and somehow turn a handful of resources, workers, and bonuses into a winning score.

Despite having only 9 actions in a game, your first few play-throughs are going to feel very slow. There are a lot of interactive decisions; the depth here is pretty heavy. Once you get accustomed to the rhythm, though, this game can actually be quite fast. Analysis Paralysis however, is real in this game; people are going to get stuck.

At first, that sounds restrictive. In fact, during your first few games, it feels almost cruel. Some might bounce off the game for that reason, but stick with it because this game is so much more than what you discover on the surface. Surely nine actions can’t possibly be enough. And somehow they are.

What makes White Castle special is how many possibilities exist inside those nine actions. Every move has the potential to trigger another action, generate resources, set up future turns, or create scoring opportunities. The game constantly asks you to squeeze one more drop of value out of every decision.

It’s difficult to fully explain until you’ve experienced it yourself. White Castle is one of those rare games where you finish a session and immediately start replaying your turns in your head. Not because the game was frustrating, but because you can see the path so clearly in the aftermath. You can see where two or three tiny improvements would have transformed a good score into a great one.

That’s the mark of exceptional design.

Great game design isn’t just about knowing what to include. It’s also about knowing what to leave out. White Castle feels like a game that has been refined over and over again until every unnecessary piece was stripped away.

What’s left is a remarkably focused experience where every mechanism serves a purpose and every action matters.

It’s a design that’s elegant, balanced, and incredibly satisfying to explore.

Quite frankly, it’s a chef’s kiss.

Conclusion

I’ll be reviewing White Castle in the near future, but even before putting together a full review, I can already say this much with confidence.

This game is special.

In nearly twelve years of writing for Gamers Dungeon, very few games have seriously threatened a perfect 5 out of 5 score. In fact, only one game has ever achieved it: Blood Rage.

White Castle might just be the second. That’s not a statement I make lightly.

White Castle offers an expansion that is available on BGA called White Castle Matcha, and honestly, once you know the game and try this expansion, it will be hard to imagine playing without it. It’s one of those rare cases where it feels like this expansion probably should have been included in the base game. I didn’t think so at first, probably because I tried it too early, but it’s made me a believer!

If you’re a fan of Euro games, this should already be on your radar. If you’re a fan of worker placement games, it absolutely needs to be. White Castle takes a familiar genre and manages to make it feel fresh, challenging, and exciting again.

That’s a rare achievement.

This is one of the best worker placement games I’ve played in years.

And that’s not praise I hand out very often.

Best of List, On The Table

Top 10 Favorite Games To Play On BoardGameArena.com

People are always telling me that I should do more Top 10 lists. They’re a staple of the hobby, and to be fair, I used to write a lot more of them in the past. I get it, I like them too. The problem is that whenever I sit down to make one, I inevitably end up recreating some version of my annual Top 20 Games of all time list. After a while, it starts to feel less like a new article and more like I’m just changing the title and hoping nobody notices.

This year, however, I’ve spent a lot more time playing games on Board Game Arena, the digital board gaming site. If you’ve never used it and are a board game fan, you definitely should give it a go. It’s probably one of the best resources available for trying games before deciding whether they’re worth buying. The library is enormous, especially if you’re a fan of Eurogames, and there’s always something new to discover as games are added all the time.

One of the unexpected benefits of BGA is that it exposes me to games I would not ordinarily pick up and probably not otherwise ever try. Some of those games have turned out to be absolute gems. Even more interesting, certain games actually play better online than they do on the table. Some games are fiddly with endless bookkeeping, complicated scoring, or enough upkeep to qualify as a part-time job. When all of that is automated, a game can suddenly become a much smoother and more enjoyable experience online than it ever could offline.

In fact, I’ve caught myself saying, “I don’t really like that game… but I love playing it online.” Which, as strange as it sounds, I actually find to be true quite often.

So that’s exactly what this list is. These are my current 10 favorite games to play on BGA. Some of them are games I already loved, some of them surprised me, and a few are games that I enjoy far more online than I ever would around a physical table.

1. Great Western Trail

This is one of my favorite games of all time. It has appeared on my annual Best Of lists for years, and I do not expect it to disappear anytime soon. What’s interesting, however, is that unlike many of the other games on this list, this is one I actually play very often online but rarely offline. A big part of that is thanks to the excellent Board Game Arena implementation. This is a case of the game being a bit of a pain to teach, and it’s quite fiddly on the table and can be quite long. BBG kind of fixes all that for you.

It’s difficult to point to any specific mechanic in Great Western Trail that keeps pulling me back; There is a hand management element, resource management, and traditional victory point salad. Other than the way you move being a bit unique in the game, there is nothing particularly standout about the mechanics. I think it’s more of a general strategic options thing, everything put together at once. The sheer volume of strategic possibilities GW offers demands a lot of exploration; it goes quite deep. Even after 118 plays, I’m still discovering new ways to win and combo, but more often than I would like, new ways to lose.

A big part of your success in Great Western Trail is timing, landing on the right building at the right time, and doing that consistently is the puzzle and it’s not easy to unravel.

My history with the game is a little unusual. My original review was far from glowing. It took several more plays after this review before I really understood what the game was trying to do, and even longer before I truly appreciated just how brilliant it is. It is part of a very small number of games on this site that I have ever gone back on and re-reviewed.

At its core, this is a tight resource management game that rewards careful planning, efficient turns, and long-term strategic thinking. Success often comes from anticipating your opponents’ plans and finding ways to exploit the opportunities they create, an aspect of the game I adore.

My endorsement here is of the highest order!

2. White Castle

This was a relatively recent discovery for me, but wow, does this game deliver.

At its heart, White Castle is a tight worker-placement and resource-management victory-point salad game, a classic Euro formula. What makes it stand out is its shared dice pool. Players aren’t just competing for action spaces; they’re competing for the dice that power those actions as well, creating a sort of duality to the worker placement formula.

The result is a surprisingly interactive experience. Every turn feels like you’re making a multifaceted decision with significant impact both on your own position and denying opportunities to your opponents but on multiple fronts. It’s one of the more confrontational worker placement games I’ve played that doesn’t rely on cheap direct attacks or “take that” mechanics, like, for example, Lords of Waterdeep.

I love Lords of Waterdeep, but it can be a pretty mean-spirited game; getting slapped with a mandatory quest has a way of unraveling what is otherwise a pretty cordial and competitive worker placement game. I just don’t think it needed this mechanic.

What really sold me, though, is just how tight the design is. Every resource, every action, every position is part of a grand strategic design, and there is absolutetly no room for error. You literally will take 9 actions in the entire game. The game rewards careful planning, clever sequencing, and the ability to squeeze every last drop of value out of your turn. It’s the kind of game where you finish a session and immediately start thinking about what you should have done differently.

This game is challenging on several levels. The learning curve, getting your head around the strategy, unlearning all the stuff you thought was true, and then re-learning the game for real. It’s a brain buster, but absolutetly worth the effort.

In fact, this was one of the very few games I discovered on Board Game Arena that led directly to me buying a physical copy. That’s about as strong an endorsement as I can give.

If you enjoy deep, challenging worker placement games that reward smart play and punish sloppy decisions, White Castle is an absolute winner.

I should talk a bit about the expansion because this is also available on BGA. White Castle: Matcha introduces a 4th dice type and some new actions and cards that take this already pretty deep game and tight game and open it up a bit. It definitely complicates, and while I like I would not recommend it unless you’re playing this game on repeat and need something fresh. In that way, it’s a perfect expansion, as it does exactly what expansions should do: refresh a game you already like.

I’m generally very wary of expansions to games I already think are quite perfect, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. In this case, however, as this game can feel pretty short with only 9 actions per player, it pushes that a bit as players get 4 actions instead of 3 per round. It remains a tight game with 12 actions in the game, but if you want more White Castle, this is the way to do. It does what it should as an expansion.

3. Shogun

Let me start with a confession.

I think Shogun is better in person, making this an exception to the general rule of this list.

In fact, if given the choice, I would almost always rather play it at a real table. The reason is simple: the dice tower.

That ridiculous contraption is one of the greatest gimmicks ever put into a board game. Every battle becomes an event. Players gather around it, cheer for impossible outcomes, groan at disasters, and generally make far more noise than any sensible adult should. It is glorious.

So yes, something is inevitably lost when you move Shogun online.

And yet, the Board Game Arena implementation is excellent.

The reason it still works so well is that beneath the spectacle, Shogun is also a fantastic strategy game. It remains one of my all-time favorites and one of the oldest titles in my collection.

So far as “Dudes On A Map” games go, this is one of my favorites. With a few exceptions, simply moving armies around and fighting is not enough for me, a war game has to have some strategic juice coming from somewhere else. In Shogun’s case, that is the action planning system, and in my humble opinion, it’s perfect.

At first glance, it looks like a straightforward dudes on a map conflict. Armies move around Japan, provinces are conquered, and players fight for territory. Simple enough, but the game is much more than that.

The twist is that, hidden beneath all that military posturing, is a surprisingly tight victory-point driven game. Scoring opportunities are limited, which means every point matters. Taking territory is important, but taking the right territory at the right moment is what actually wins games because, as the game progresses, players build point-scoring buildings in territories, dramatically increasing their value.

Then there is the action planning system. Every round, players secretly assign a whole series of actions in advance, often with incomplete information and only a rough idea of what everyone else is about to do. It is a brilliant mechanic that turns every turn into a mixture of strategy, prediction, and outright gambling, culminating in beautiful chaos.

You can devise a master plan worthy of a legendary daimyo. Or you can watch that plan collapse spectacularly because your opponent did something unexpected. Or because the dice tower decided it was feeling particularly mischievous that day. Probably both.

The combination of area control, hidden planning, resource management, and unpredictable battles creates a game that is constantly generating memorable stories. It is strategic enough to reward careful planning, chaotic enough to keep players humble, and interactive enough that nobody ever feels like they are playing a multiplayer solitaire game.

Shogun is one of those rare games that has stood the test of time for a reason. If you have never played it, you should. If you enjoy area control games, you should probably own it.

And if your gaming shelf currently contains Risk because you wanted a conquest, dudes on a map game, I would argue that Shogun is superior in every measurable way and solves that need far more elegantly.

4. Knarr

Knarr is one of those games that seemed to slip past a lot of people when it was released, myself included. It’s a shame because it’s a bonefied hidden gem and smash hit as far as I’m concerned.

Mechanically, it’s a straightforward tableau-based, card-driven engine builder wrapped up in a race for victory points. On paper, there isn’t a lot going on here, mechanically it’s simple and streamlined. In practice, however, the game offers far more strategic depth than its light rules would suggest.

One of the things I love most about Knarr is that it’s sort of a risk vs. reward style game when it comes to your strategy. Your options are to go for the slow burn and explosive end, hoping you will get to execute that final big turn for the win, or you race to finish to outpace people building proper engines, creating pressure on everyone. Once you commit to a path, you are largely along for the ride. The game is simply too short to completely change direction halfway through, so success often comes down to reading the table, spotting opportunities, and trusting your instincts in the early game.

Knarr is a fast-moving game, but whatever your strategy is in any given game, one thing that makes or breaks you is getting the right combination of trade routes and being able to execute them regularly. This requires a lot of planning and a bit of luck.

There is certainly a bit of luck involved. You can’t control what cards will appear, and part of the challenge is figuring out how to make the best use of whatever opportunities are currently available. The best players are not necessarily the ones with the perfect plan, but the ones who can adapt when the cards refuse to cooperate. Reading people’s options is also fairly important here.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give Knarr is that one game is rarely enough. Whenever my regular online group plays a round, it’s rare that someone doesn’t immediately demand a rematch. It’s addictive, occasionally frustrating, and consistently entertaining. This is a game that will keep your gaming group up late every time. I’ve had many painful mornings because of this one.

Knarr went straight from Board Game Arena to my shopping cart. It’s easy to learn, easy to teach, accessible enough for newer players, and still offers plenty of depth for experienced gamers. The expansion adds a lot to the game; if you get a chance to grab it, it’s a no-brainer.

An outstanding game and one that deserves far more attention than it’s gotten since its release.

5. Middle Ages

I should probably begin this entry with a disclaimer. I have only played Middle Ages three four times.

As a result, its appearance on this list may be a little premature. There is every possibility that six months from now I will discover some fatal flaw and wonder what I was thinking.

That said, based on what I have seen so far, I really like it.

What immediately stands out is how unique the game feels; it’s not a mechanic I have seen before. There are plenty of games that ask players to plan ahead, but Middle Ages builds its entire identity around that concept.

The core mechanic is a bit odd, but ultimately fairly simple. Each round, you choose the action you will perform next round while simultaneously resolving the action you selected during the previous round. The action you choose next round will determine the turn order and will determine which building you put into play, how you score, and what special action you can take. You can see what buildings will be available 4 rounds in advance. The trick to the entire game is knowing how to navigate a clean path that yields the most victory points through building combinations by predicting what your opponents are going to do and what will be available on your turn. Do that well consistently and you are going to wint his game.

If that explanation sounds confusing, it’s because it is, and this game will seem very complex the first time you play it. It’s really not; that impression fades quickly.

One of the tricky parts about Middle Ages is that it will punish you severely for not having a building of each type (each missing building is -10 points), so whatever your strategy is, it has to include completing your medieval town, else you’re kind of screwed.

In fact, learning and teaching the game is probably harder than actually playing it. I remember being thoroughly confused the first time I sat down with it. Thankfully, once you get over that first game hump, everything clicks surprisingly quickly. Beneath the awkward explanation lies a remarkably straightforward game.

The real magic comes from the timing.

Many of the actions are surprisingly confrontational, creating plenty of opportunities to disrupt plans, steal opportunities, and generally make life difficult for everyone else at the table. It creates a wonderfully dynamic experience where long-term planning is important, but short-term flexibility is equally valuable.

Of course, if everyone else is trying to do the same thing, things can get delightfully messy. Which is where much of the fun comes from.

Four games is hardly enough time to form a definitive opinion, but Middle Ages has already made a strong impression on me. It is clever, interactive, surprisingly tense, and refreshingly different from many of the other games currently making the rounds.

Ask me again after ten more plays…but yeah, for now, I think it’s good.

6. The Castles of Burgundy

This is another game that firmly belongs in my “great on Board Game Arena, probably not for my collection” category.

The Castles of Burgundy hardly needs an introduction. For more than a decade, board gamers have been singing its praises from every rooftop available. It remains one of the hobby’s most celebrated Eurogames and continues to sit comfortably among the highest-ranked games of all time on BoardGameGeek.

To be fair, I completely understand why.

In Castles of Burgundy, it’s not just about building that perfect hex board, but doing it in a timely fashion. When you do stuff often matters a lot more than what you do.

The game is incredibly clever. Every turn presents you with a simple challenge: here are your dice, now figure out something smart to do with them. It sounds straightforward, but the sheer number of options available creates a deeply satisfying puzzle, and a puzzle is exactly what this game is.

Unlike certain other famous dice games (fuck you Catan!) that I could happily launch into the sun, The Castles of Burgundy never feels like it is actively trying to ruin your day. Yes, the dice can be frustrating. They will occasionally betray you. They will occasionally mock you. But the game gives you plenty of tools to manipulate results, mitigate bad luck, and salvage a plan that has gone horribly wrong.

I’m not saying that Catan is a bad game; its popularity is clearly established. I’m just saying, “please trade with me so I can win” is a stupid concept, as is any game where you roll dice to get resources. Combined, I find the game annoying to play.

Success comes from finding opportunities, building combinations, and squeezing as much value as possible from every action. Like any great point salad game, there are dozens of paths to victory and just as many opportunities to accidentally wander off a cliff.

What I find particularly amusing is that, despite genuinely enjoying the game, I have yet to finish anywhere other than last place.

Normally, that would be a warning sign. Instead, I find myself wanting to play more.

Every loss feels less like a defeat and more like a challenge. Somewhere inside this elegant machine is a strategy that works. Other players seem capable of finding it with alarming consistency. One day, I intend to join them.

Until then, while I’m late to the party, The Castles of Burgundy remains a great BGA discovery. I’m not sure I will ever own a copy, but I can fully understand why people love this game.

It vexes me.

And I shall prevail.

7. Beyond The Sun

Beyond The Sun is another game on this list that falls firmly into the “I keep playing it because I find it fascinating” category, but I doubt I would ever buy it.

Whether I actually love it or not remains an open question.

What I can say with confidence is that it is… interesting in an academic, connoisseur of board games kind of way.

The best way I can describe Beyond The Sun is that it feels like two only vaguely related games somehow got stitched together and, against all odds, the result actually works.

On one side of the board, players compete over a sprawling technology tree through a worker placement system. Researching new technologies unlocks powerful abilities, creating entirely new worker placement spaces that only the player who discovered them can use. Much of your overall strategy is shaped by how you navigate this constantly evolving network of technologies.

On the other side of the board, there is a surprisingly aggressive little space conquest game taking place. Fleets move around the galaxy, players compete for influence, and planets are eventually colonized for valuable rewards and endgame objectives.

What makes it all work is that both halves of the game share the same economy. The actions you take on the technology board fuel your expansion efforts in space, while success in space provides resources and opportunities that feed back into your technological development.

This game looks super fiddly to me, I suspect that playing it on BGA is probobly takes considerably less time to play, which is the case with most games, but the fiddlier it is, the more valuable a BGA implementation becomes.

The whole experience feels like an enormous efficiency puzzle.

There is player interaction. In fact, the space board can become downright hostile at times. Yet somehow, despite ships moving around and players competing for territory, most of your attention remains focused on optimizing your own engine and finding the most efficient sequence of actions possible.

That contrast is part of what makes the game so interesting. It feels interactive without being overly confrontational. Competitive without being particularly emotional.

And fascinating throughout.

The funny thing is that I am still not entirely sure whether I would call Beyond The Sun “fun.” I know that sounds absurd, given the amount of time I have spent playing it, but there is a difference between enjoying something and being intellectually captivated by it.

Beyond The Sun falls into that second category for me.

Every game leaves me wanting to explore a different technology path, try a different strategy, or see how another combination of systems might unfold. It is the kind of design that keeps provoking questions long after the game is over.

That curiosity alone has earned it a place on this list. I don’t know if I would recommend it as a purchase, but on BGA you should definitely try it, especially if you have an academic curiosity about board game design.

8. Aquatica

Aquatica occupies a similar space on this list as Beyond The Sun, an academic curiosity more than a fun game.

I am not entirely convinced that I love it. I am not even completely convinced that I would describe it as fun or even a good game.

And yet, I keep playing it.

That probably sounds like a terrible endorsement, but hear me out.

Again, as a self-proclaimed connoisseur of board game design, I find Aquatica fascinating. There is something about its unusual approach to engine building that continues to pull me back in. I have logged over a dozen games so far, and I am still trying to fully wrap my head around what makes it tick.

At its core, Aquatica is a tableau-building card game where players are constantly trying to create temporary engines from whatever cards happen to be available at the time. The experience feels less like constructing a finely tuned machine and more like creating temporary boosts that you hope will have a domino effect.

This is a very pretty game; the artwork is fantastic. It may ultimately become the reason I want a real copy.

I think that is the unique spark here that your tableau, the cards you buy, is a temporary resource in your engine. Unlike many engine builders, where you gradually assemble a powerful machine that produces increasing returns throughout the game, Aquatica lets you use a resource once, and then you kind of have to start over. Your engine is constantly changing shape, firing off effects, collapsing, and being rebuilt into something entirely different.

The result is a game that feels surprisingly dynamic. Every turn becomes a puzzle involving the cards in your hand, the cards available for purchase, and the opportunities hidden within your tableau. Plans rarely survive intact for very long, and adaptation is often more important than execution. Other players can also alter the board state in front of you, which creates another uncontrolled layer to the puzzle.

It is a strange design that sort of skirts expectations.

One thing I have heard repeatedly, although I cannot personally verify it, is that Aquatica can be somewhat fiddly when played physically. If true, it is exactly the sort of game that benefits enormously from Board Game Arena handling all the bookkeeping behind the scenes. Though I have to say this is not the best interface on BGA, it can be a bit fiddly here as well.

Whether Aquatica ultimately becomes a favorite of mine remains to be seen. What I can say is that very few games have managed to keep me this curious after so many plays.

That alone makes it worth trying.

Give it a shot. It might not capture your imagination the way it has captured mine, but if it does, do not be surprised if you find yourself queueing up “just one more game” while trying to figure out what on earth makes it so compelling.

9. Harmonies

Harmonies is a perfect example of a game I would never buy, but am more than happy to play on Board Game Arena.

That is not a criticism of the game. Quite the opposite, actually. Harmonies is an excellent design. The reality is simply that it lives well outside my usual gaming preferences. An abstract puzzle game about building habitats for animals is not exactly the sort of thing that normally finds its way onto my shelf.

More importantly, I know my gaming group.

If I brought Harmonies to game night, everyone would give it a fair shot. We would play a game, nod appreciatively, make a few comments about how clever it is, and then immediately return to conquering empires, managing medieval economies, or fighting over cubes. The game would quietly disappear into the collection and never see daylight again.

Board Game Arena changes that completely.

Online, Harmonies becomes the perfect middle-weight filler game. It is quick, engaging, easy to set up, and delivers just the right amount of brain burn without demanding an entire evening. It is the kind of game I am always happy to squeeze in between heavier titles.

If it looks puzzly, believe it, it is very puzzly; it should come with a warning label, because this game will melt your brain.

The gameplay itself is wonderfully clever. Players build habitats using colorful terrain pieces while drafting animal cards that reward specific patterns and arrangements. Every turn feels like a small puzzle, with multiple competing priorities fighting for space on your board. There are animal objectives to complete, bonus scoring opportunities to chase, and just enough point salad sprinkled throughout to keep you second-guessing every placement.

It is thoughtful, satisfying, occasionally frustrating, and surprisingly addictive. The kind of game that makes your brain hurt just enough to remind you that you are having fun.

I may never own Harmonies, but I am always happy to see it hit the virtual table.

10. Lost Ruins of Arnak

I feel obligated to include Lost Ruins of Arnak on this list. I am doing so under protest.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: it is a good game. In fact, it is probably a very good game. The design is clever, the decisions are meaningful, and there is clearly a tremendous amount of depth hiding beneath its relatively approachable exterior.

The problem is that Lost Ruins of Arnak and I are currently involved in a bitter personal feud. After eighteen plays, I have yet to win a game.

Not only have I failed to win, but I have rarely come close. At this point, I am less an explorer searching for ancient ruins and more an archaeologist excavating the remains of my own shattered confidence.

I’ve heard the claim that this game is like Dune Imperium, and while I can see why people might say that, it’s not nearly as streamlined, and this has a far bigger learning curve.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the game does not appear especially complicated or novel.

Mechanically, Arnak is built from familiar ingredients. There is deck building. There is worker placement. There are tracks to move up. There is resource management. None of these concepts are new, and individually they are all things I understand perfectly well.

Yet somehow, when combined together, they form a mysterious puzzle box that my brain simply refuses to open.

I watch other players effortlessly chain actions together, convert resources into other resources, advance research tracks, discover sites, recruit assistants, and somehow continue taking turns long after I have passed and started questioning my life choices.

Most of the time I don’t even understand how I lost. I simply know that at the end of the game everyone else has more points than I do.

Repeatedly.

To be fair, I completely understand why Arnak has such a devoted following. It is one of the most celebrated games of the last several years, and an incredibly polished design. Every mechanism feels carefully crafted and intentionally connected to the others. It is easy to see why so many people consider it a modern classic.

I just happen to be standing outside the secret clubhouse, pressing my face against the window and wondering what everyone else is so excited about.

Eventually, I will return. I will once again venture into the jungle. I will once again attempt to decipher its mysteries.

And perhaps one day I will finally discover the ancient secret that allows a player to score points.

Until then, Lost Ruins of Arnak sits at the bottom of this list as punishment for being naughty and refusing to let me win.

I am aware that this is not how rankings work.

I stand by my decision.