Ludography 2025
With another year of tabletop gaming behind me, it’s time to look back on my 2025 at the game table. I wrote up a similar post last year, for comparison, which you can find here. And as with last year, I logged my plays in the Board Game Stats app.
Summary Statistics
I squeezed in a lot more gaming this year, totaling 330 plays. I think this is due to two things. First, I was a much more regular attendee at my weekly game group, and second, I played many more games online this year. The latter was driven in part by a dear gaming friend who moved out of the country in January, which led us to keep a pretty continuous stream of asynchronous games going on Board Game Arena. In total, I played exactly half of my logged games online, mostly on BGA or Yucata.
My biggest month for games was March, when I played 37 games, but I also hit 36 plays in August and October. In total, I played 154 different titles this year, exactly 100 of which I played once. I’m very fortunate to be part of a gaming group that likes sharing new games with each other, and this brings a lot of variety to our table.
Fives and Dimes
Of the games that hit the table more than once in 2025, the pattern looks a bit similar to last year’s. I played one quarter (25+ plays), two dimes (10+ plays), and 11 nickels (5+ plays):
| Game | Play Count |
|---|---|
| Mottainai | 42 |
| Cartographers | 10 |
| Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic | 10 |
| Balloon Cup | 8 |
| Rebirth | 8 |
| Splendor | 8 |
| Flip 7 | 7 |
| Heul doch! Mau Mau | 7 |
| The Castles of Burgundy | 6 |
| Las Vegas | 6 |
| The Gang | 5 |
| Innovation (including Innovation Ultimate) | 5 |
| The Oracle of Delphi | 5 |
| Sea Salt & Paper | 5 |
I won’t go through every game at the top of this year’s list, but I do want to comment on some notable appearances:
No surprise, Mottainai again tops my list. It is one of Carl Chudyk’s designs that feature multi-use cards (along with the outstanding Glory to Rome, Innovation, and others), and the one major downside shared by all of these designs is a challenging teach. Using the same cards in multiple ways can be hard to grasp for new players, and it takes quite a while to get into the game. However, once players have the hang of things, games typically breeze by, but it’s hard to get over the hump. Fortunately, the lovely community of players on Yucata make it possible to pick up a quick game anytime.
Also unsurprisingly, Clank Legacy 2 clocked in at 10 plays. Last year my group got two sessions into the twelve session campaign, and although we had a multi-week layoff over the summer, we did reach the end by autumn.
Rebirth is a Reiner Knizia design that arrived in late 2024, but didn’t hit the table until this year. The good doctor has returned to tile-laying mechanics, and I am a huge fan of this one. Rebirth is reminiscent of Knizia tile-layers like Samurai and Babylonia, in terms of both mechanics and quality. Players add tiles to a shared board trying to both create large contiguous areas of identical tiles and surround resources and occupy settlements. This edition contains two similar, but intriguingly distinct variants, one for Ireland and the other for Scotland, which suggests expansions may someday follow. Of the games I played for the first time this year, it’s far and away my favorite.
Flip 7 is a quick and easy push-your-luck card game that looks a bit similar to the casino game Blackjack. Players receive cards one at a time into a face-up tableau, most of which are number cards that are worth points equal to their value, but getting a pair causes you to bust, losing all of your cards and scoring 0 points for the round. Added to this basic framework are just a handful of additional cards that offer insurance against busting, or force players to stop or take cards, creating a very swingy but accessible family game. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seemed to gain some purchase even outside the hobby, reaching the shelves of just about every big box store I’ve been in lately. The production quality feels a bit flimsy, but the publisher has clearly prioritized wide distribution at an affordable (~$8 USD) price point. I could see this game joining Uno, Flip-Bo, and Phase 10 in the pantheon of family card game classics.
Heul doch! Mau Mau (or, as my game group calls it, “Onions”) is a card game I had never heard of before a frequent tablemate picked it up at a game convention flea market. Like a lot of the games that hit our table frequently, it’s a quick filler that we play while we’re waiting for players to arrive or as an end-of-night palate cleanser. Each player is dealt a hand of cards that they try to use to build a scoring pile in front of them, adding cards that match the top card in either number or suit, with a couple of important hitches. First, if a card is playable on a neighbor’s score pile, it must go there instead of one’s own. Second, if a player has no legal play (or if they choose to voluntarily), they may play a card face down on their score pile, which may be topped in the next round with any card. In final scoring, face up score cards are worth their face values, but the number of face down cards in the pile removes all the cards of that rank. (That is, if you wind up with five face down cards in your pile, you don’t score any of your fives.) With a couple of action cards to add variety, there’s enough strategy to be interesting but enough chaos to keep things light. It doesn’t appear to be widely available, but if you happen across a cheap copy, its unique design and simple gameplay make it well worth it.
I saw The Gang on a few year-end recommendation lists, and I understand why. It’s a cooperative card game based on the Texas Hold ‘Em variant of poker. It helps to be familiar with the ranking of poker hands, but I think the game is pretty accessible to novices as well. At its heart, the game consists of guessing the relative ranks of all players’ hands solely through a bidding mechanic. After each set of community cards are revealed, players rebid, just as in a normal game of hold ‘em. There are some additional mechanics that advanced players can add on, but its core alone is a clever twist on a classic table game that plays quite well.
Finally, Oracle of Delphi is an older (2016) Stefan Feld game that I encountered for the first time this year and loved. Players take on the role of classical Greek heroes racing to complete 12 trials and be the first to return home, but the clever card-based action selection and the various “divine favors” players can earn create interesting choices and strategic depth. Sadly, it’s out of print and used copies are somewhat rare, but thanks to Yucata, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on this list again next year.
Arcs
One notable game that didn’t make it to the top of my play list was the much hyped and much debated Arcs. I played a couple of standalone games in 2024, but not the Blighted Reach campaign, which I really hoped to try in 2025. Unfortunately, after one more standalone game and one campaign session, I don’t think Arcs will make it to my game group’s table again. I would absolutely love to give it another go, but I’ll need to find tablemates who aren’t on the “hate it” side of the “love it or hate it” divide.
I understand at least some reasons for Arcs’ divisiveness. It looks like a space-themed 4X game, but it doesn’t play out as a satisfying power fantasy like most games in that genre. The play experience of Arcs does not promise you a sense of continuous growth—you can’t guarantee that your little planetary empire will get bigger, stronger, or more powerful. Indeed, because of its unusual card driven action selection mechanic (which, as an aside, is only obliquely related to trick taking), you can’t even be sure you can take strategically optimal actions on any given turn, and that clearly frustrates some players.
I don’t think I’ve played Arcs enough to explain how to play it best, but I have played it enough to say with confidence that no matter what its detractors say, it’s not a broken design. Rather, it seems to be trying to force players to attend carefully to their opponents’ strengths and strategies and move boldly and opportunistically when they can. I believe the design is an attempt to capture the dramatic sweep of a classic space opera, but you can’t deliver the feeling of a miraculous victory against impossible odds if players always feel strong, powerful, and capable. Steadily climbing a power curve doesn’t encourage dramatic, hopeful gambits. Quite the opposite: it’s much smarter under those conditions to bide your time until success is assured.
Cole Wehrle, Arcs’ designer, has once again taken an ambitious risk and created a design that runs counter to commercial trends in the hobby. It’s heartening that he is able to enjoy success and acclaim while doing this. Arcs is not a “feel bad” game, but the market is so overcrowded with hyper-palatable games determined to avoid any experience players won’t enjoy that I understand why some react negatively to it. Still, I sense something powerful and rewarding at the heart of Arcs’ design, and I still hope to get the full experience sometime in the future.
Other Games
I also had thoughts on a few games that didn’t make it to the table as much in 2025.
Fishing: Of the new trick taking games I played in 2025, this is the one that sticks out the most to me for its creativity and strategic potential. Fishing is played over the course of several hands, with stronger and stronger cards being introduced after each one. The clever hook here is that each player’s hand is dealt first from a private deck formed by the cards they won in prior hands, so winning tricks scores points but guarantees weaker hands in later rounds. I only encountered this one near the end of the year, but I’m hoping to get deeper into it in the year to come.
Molly House: This is another innovative design that came out in 2025 with Cole Wehrle’s name on it (co-designed by him and Jo Kelly). At a high level, players are Mollies, members of a community of gender-defying libertines in 18th century London who must work together to create joy or be destroyed by the Society of the Reformation of Manners. At this level, there is a loyalty/betrayal mechanic, where players who cannot win through joy creation can risk turning in the other Mollies as an alternative path to victory. At a more granular level, the gameplay is built around Festivities where joy is created through cardplay. Each player contributes cards in turn, and if the right combination of cards are present, those who contributed them score joy. The catch is that some cards put participants at risk of exposure, and failing to build a scoring combo results in a boring party, which is a thief of joy. The game’s semi-competitive feel is very evocative of a clandestine social scene full of risky relationships that may suddenly transform from supportive to spiteful. It’s not a game we’ll play every night, but I definitely intend to play more.
I enjoy games that try to model politics, and Votes for Women was one I played for the first time this year that immediately calls to mind its inspiration, 1960: The Making of the President, While the latter models a presidential campaign and the electoral college, the former models the campaign to pass a constitutional amendment, specifically the Nineteenth. In many ways, it’s a simpler, streamlined design that incorporates the specific history of the fight for women’s suffrage with fairly clean mechanics. It’s also possible to play solo or competitively with up to 4 players, and the 3 player configuration takes advantage of one of the game’s more interesting design choices, which is to model the challenges in coordinating the Suffragist side of the conflict using two distinct sets of player resources that are aligned but not interchangeable. This is Tory Brown’s debut design, and a promising one at that.
A licensed title based on the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Rear Window is a mystery/deduction game whose core mechanic of a silent “Director” laying out cards to help detectives solve a murder is reminiscent of Mysterium. And while the core gameplay is good, I was even more impressed by the art direction, which did a fantastic job of capturing the aesthetic of both the film and the era from which it originated. All of the components have a midcentury illustrated style that would feel perfectly at home on Jimmy Stewart’s coffee table. With so many licensed titles being cheap cash grabs, Rear Window was a truly impressive effort from the sadly now-defunct Funko Games.
Looking Ahead to 2026
It’s going to be a lot harder to predict the coming year at my game table. I think it quite unlikely that I will log anywhere near as many games as I did last year. I expect to be traveling for work a bit more than I have of late, so that will reduce the number of game nights I can attend. But, if my recent trend of playing more games online continues, that might somewhat make up for it.
This is also the first year in a long time that I don’t have any new games I’m keen to get playing. My longstanding goal, going back well over a year, is to get a proper in-person session of Dune going. Maybe this will be the year for that. Perhaps there will be another campaign game as well, but at this point, nothing is scheduled. Truthfully, I’ll be very happy if I play enough Fishing to get a real feel for it.
In any case, I go into 2026 with an open mind and an open dance card. If you’re in the hobby (or want to be), I wish you a great year of gaming, and if you’re interested, get in touch and we can meet up sometime around the virtual table.