2025 in Review -- Games

Time for my annual look at the board games I played in 2025. Unlike 2024, I did not pursue a "10 x 10" (10 games each played 10 times). It's likely unrelated, but I also rose 50 plays to 327 games played in the year. (I'll talk about a bit of an asterisk on that in a bit.) I played 80 different titles (up from 75).

As always, these caveats apply:

• I don't count the games made by my work if I played them for work (in unfinished forms). 

• There are a few games that I count "by the session," like The Crew and the Exit: The Game Advent Calendar. (You might take issue with one game I don't count this way, as I'll discuss in a moment).

Here's my 2025 List:  

82    The Gang
13    Secret Hitler
12    The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game
11    Exit: The Game – Advent Calendar: The Missing Hollywood Star
11    Sky Team
10    Forest Shuffle
9    Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang's Destiny
9    Fromage
8    Alibis
7    Phantom Ink
7    Vivo
6    Bohnanza
6    The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
6    Finspan
6    Kokopelli
5    Cities
5    Clever Cubed
5    Wine Cellar
4    Distilled
4    Grand Central Skyport
4    Invincible: The Hero-Building Game
4    The Quacks of Quedlinburg
4    Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion
3    Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig
3    Concordia Venus
3    Merlin
3    Positano
3    So Clover!
3    The Taverns of Tiefenthal
3    That's Pretty Clever!
3    Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West
3    Windmill Valley
2    Azul: Master Chocolatier
2    Cascadia
2    Cascadia: Rolling Rivers
2    Clank! Catacombs
2    Clever 4Ever
2    Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
2    Just One
2    Kathmandu
2    Luthier
2    Old London Bridge
2    Pirates of Maracaibo
2    Trinket Trove
2    Turing Machine
2    Wingspan
1    Aquatica
1    Celestia
1    Coloma
1    The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
1    Decrypto
1    Dune: Imperium
1    Dying Message
1    Foundations of Metropolis
1    Galileo Galilei
1    The Great Split
1    Kabuki Tricks
1    Link City
1    Majesty: For the Realm
1    Medieval Academy
1    Memoarrr!
1    Mistwind
1    New York Zoo
1    No Loose Ends
1    Obsession
1    Ra
1    Red Outpost
1    Scout
1    SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
1    Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon
1    Skara Brae
1    The Speicherstadt
1    Strasbourg
1    Tabriz
1    Tangram City
1    Time to Panic
1    Tír na nÓg
1    Twice as Clever!
1    Wild Tiled West
1    World Wonders

My miscellaneous observations on these results: 

• 2025 was "The Year of the Co-op Game." The Gang, The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, the Exit Advent Calendar, Sky Team, Avatar, Alibis, and more... at 157 total plays, cooperative games made up nearly half of everything I played in 2025. (And adding team games carries it well over the halfway mark.)

• But most especially, The Gang. The cooperative poker game was by far my most played game -- and I'm not tired of playing it. Now, if I recorded plays of The Crew "by the hand," I surely would have logged numbers that high in previous years. But with The Crew, you're not going to finish a campaign playthrough in one sitting. It feels natural to me to deal as many hands as we care to play in an evening, then log that as one play. With The Gang, you explicitly win or lose in a "best of five hands" format, and that feels to me worthy of its own separately logged play. Maybe I won't feel the same when The Gang becomes my most played game again in 2026 -- I'm pretty much betting right now that it will. We'll see.

• I enjoyed The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, but we played it through exactly once and then never revisited it. Given the post-campaign staying power that both versions of The Crew had (especially Mission Deep Sea), it's safe to say I don't like it as much.

• Another campaign game without staying power was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- Aang's Destiny. It's a reskin of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (without the J.K. Rowling baggage). But in my view, the few tweaks it makes to distinguish itself don't ultimately work in its favor. It was fun to play the campaign, and we haven't visited it since. I never blogged about Avatar; perhaps it's worthy of a post of its own at some point.

• My favorite new game of 2025 was definitely Vivo. With its fast run time and novel take on trick-taking, I think it'll stick around for more in 2026.

• There were 17 different games that I played for the first and so far only time in 2025. Of those, the ones I'd most like to visit again in 2026 include Galileo Galilei, Kabuki Tricks, Red Outpost, and Shackleton Base.

 I'm looking forward to more fun and games in 2026.