The Best New Board Games

Burgle Bros 2: The Casino Capers successfully ups the ante from its predecessor as it gets the gang back together for a massive Vegas job. You’ll be trading in your masks for costumes and your guards for bouncers and pit bosses if you want to pull off your most daring heist yet. And Ryan Goldsberry’s art really conveys the bright lights and the color you’d expect to see on the Las Vegas strip.

To win Burgle Bros 2, players need to explore an unfamiliar casino, revealing tiles and their inhabitants while trying artfully to avoid bouncers or to cause too much commotion. Getting seen or slipping up forces players to take on heat in the form of tokens, but take on too much and it’s game over for everyone. Each heist is unique, but they play the same way: find the mole, find the safe, crack the safe, and see what happens next. One of nine unique finales awaits players, and getting into the safe is often much easier than getting out with the loot. This caper might be challenging to win on your first play, but if you fail on one heist, the next in the game’s nine-heist campaign gets a bit easier. Even having experience with the first game, we were surprised by the challenge of the sequel. But a wise friend once told us that a great game is one you enjoy losing.

As the giant cheese-person on the box may suggest, Cubitos will not be the most serious board game in your library. In it, players are racing to the finish line as quickly as possible by using custom dice to roll, re-roll, and roll again so that they can move, collect credits, and use special powers. The exciting thing is, every game, the dice have different abilities, and if you roll too many blank dice faces, you’ll bust and miss it out on moving and buying new dice. Do you try to buy a few Reckless Cheese dice to get a lot of movement if you can avoid busting? Or do you hope that a Rollasaurus die will land face-up for you on this turn and let you move four spaces right away?

We like Cubitos because it’s silly, fun, and surprisingly easy to learn. Plus, in our experience, players really like rolling a lot of dice at the same time, and it’s really built for that. With multiple different abilities per die color and many different race tracks, Cubitos is a highly variable game that can really appeal to players who are looking for a fun racing game that’s quirky and colorful.

Dominations: Road to Civilization is a sprawling, strategic board game. It challenges players to take a civilization in its infancy and use their knowledge and mastery to build camps, cities, and monuments over three ages. The core game is simple: every turn, you place a tile and collect Knowledge (the primary resource) based on that tile and the adjacent tiles. What happens next is where it gets interesting: do you spend that Knowledge on new cities? Do you construct a monument? Do you develop Mastery in certain skills to give yourself a future edge?

No matter what you choose, the game has a lot to offer over its two- to three-hour runtime, making it a great choice for players who are looking for a deep, challenging game that they won’t need to spend the whole day playing. It also looks great on the table, with colorful tiles and 3D monuments that stand above the camps and cities to really give the game a sense of scale.

As travel becomes increasingly feasible again, portable games are a popular item. As a publisher, Oink Games essentially prioritizes travel with its line of extremely compact, fun games. One of its latest releases is the bluffing game Durian, in which you play as clerks in a jungle fruit shop. Every player has an inventory card in front of them that they can’t see, and you have to decide each turn: Do you want to take another order, or are there more orders than your total inventory will allow? Ring the bell to summon the manager, but you better not be wrong. In either case, the now-furious manager shows up to penalize either the player who incorrectly called him or the player who took too many orders.

Oink Games, in general, focuses on creative themes, colorful art; and simple-but-engaging gameplay. And Durian is certainly no exception to that rule. Its fast-paced play and quick turns are great for late-night gaming or even as a break between longer games.

Exit: The Sacred Temple is a new spin on the popular single-use escape room game series. In your typical Exit game, you have a series of riddles that you and your friends need to solve in order to escape a haunted house or a museum or a spooky roller coaster. The Sacred Temple flips that by encoding these puzzles into another puzzle, specifically, a jigsaw puzzle. Now, players have to assemble four puzzles over the course of a few hours in order to get the tools and clues required to solve these mysteries.

We’re big fans of the Exit series at large and love what they’ve done with the jigsaw puzzles. Originally, the puzzles were just on cards, but adding the jigsaw component makes the game feel more tactile and interesting. And the puzzles are still a little challenging at times, even though they’re smaller.

For those of us who dream of flipping the perfect pancake, Flapjack Flipout lets us make it into a reality. As the newest short-order cook, you’ll have to quickly slap pancakes onto the griddle, flip them, and then keep them ready to fulfill orders. If that weren’t hard enough, you have to compete against your opponents in real-time and hope that nobody drops a moldy pancake onto your stack. Flapjack Flipout is a challenging dexterity title for any player without experience flipping cardboard pancakes (read: everyone who hasn’t played this game before), but that’s part of the fun.

Flapjack Flipout, aesthetically, hearkens back to a classic Americana look and feel, which may be up your alley if you’re looking to feel like you’ve stepped into a classic diner and now have to make more pancakes than anybody has ever seen.

Floor Plan is a quick game for pretty much any number of players. Each gets a blank space, and everyone shares a set of clients who have specific desires for the place they want to live. Players will roll dice each round and use the results to draw rooms of certain shapes and sizes as well as add features to the house in order to satisfy client preferences.

While we’ve all had some time to work on our interior design skills in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Floor Plan challenges players to design the walls of the house and how the rooms fit together and flow. It’s a really fun theme for a game, and as a result, we’ve consistently enjoyed playing it. There’s also a very diverse client pool, which can let players of all backgrounds see themselves in the game, which is important too. Plus, since you’re relying on dice rolls, you can end up with some weird houses. The one you designed may not have any doors or windows, but it’s got a great pool. And that’s really what counts, right?

Dream Runners is an interesting one. Each round, a card in the center is revealed, and on that 3x3 grid there are bonuses to potentially gain, keys and chests to unlock, and nightmares to avoid. Players have sets of tiles that can let them take bonuses or block nightmares, and they need to make a grid of their own that corresponds to the center grid. Is it better to assemble your pattern so that you get useful bonuses? Or would you rather prevent harmful nightmares? You’ll have to make these trade-offs in real time if you want to gain enough points to end up in the lead, as once one player finishes they start a timer for everyone else. What makes Dream Runners interesting is that the strategy is shifting and not obvious; so much of what makes the best move at a certain time is what tiles you have, what card is in the center, and what rewards you want. As any good dream-centric game should be, Dream Runners is also engaging, colorful, and just surreal enough to draw players in. But the quick turn of an hourglass can always quickly jolt them back to reality.

Whether it was a blanket fort, a treehouse, or some weird clearing in the bushes behind your patio, many kids had a space of their own for pizza and adventures growing up. Fort, a new title from Leder Games, seeks to capitalize on that nostalgia by challenging you to build the best fort in the neighborhood by recruiting local kids with specific skills. That said, if you don’t play with them on your turn, they might leave and go hang out with your opponent instead. Fort is an interesting twist on deck building where every card counts, and your opponents can take the cards that you didn’t play on your last turn for themselves. It’s one the more challenging end of deck builders, as players need to really think about the cards that they’re taking and plan their strategy in advance, which makes for a really interesting challenge during the game.

We grew up playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, and we’ve always wanted a board game that can recreate the excitement of constructing our own theme park. Funfair, a spinoff of the Unfair board game series, does a great job in that regard. Players are given their own theme parks to fill with rides and upgrades and restrooms, and the local city gives you bonuses and incentives to make it the best park possible. Unlike Unfair, you also can’t attack or dismantle your opponents’ rides, meaning that this engine-building game is purely up to your park construction ability (and a bit of good luck). You literally build up your park, too, stacking upgrades under cards to make a giant attraction.

Funfair also looks the part, and that’s pretty critical. The makers understand that the cards need to be loud and boisterous and exciting, and the game’s appearance is as good as its play. This is a great choice for players looking for a little challenge, but not a lot.

We all know what color a Gamecube is. It’s purple, right? Unless you had the silver one. Or that orange one. Barring that, how purple was it? These are the questions you’ll have to answer if you want to win at Hues and Cues, a colorful party game. Each round, one player cues by providing an object or idea, and the other players try to discern the hue in question. You get points if you’re close, but so does the player who gave the cue.

With party games, there’s always a need to innovate in some way or do something a little different, and Hues and Cues achieves that here by providing almost too many possible color options. This inevitably leads to arguments and then (hopefully) laughter as players passionately disagree on the exact shade of red that corresponds to the word “love.” Party games are about that kind of silliness, though, and Hues and Cues does a great job with delivering a fast, simple, and often funny experience.

Codenames has now come out long enough ago that we’re experiencing a wave of successors. And it’s nice to see how various games iterate on its very successful formula. In Letter Jam, from the same publisher, rather than guessing a collection of words, you’re trying to guess a collection of letters that your partner has given you, so that you can assemble them into a word. Each player has one letter face-up in front of them, but they can only see other players’ letters, not their own. To spell a word, players number the letters in that word, meaning that you will have a word composed of letters that you can see and the one letter that you can’t, giving you space to figure it out. The problem is whether “*ell” means tell, fell, bell, or something else entirely.

This cooperative word game is great for groups of players that are excited to work together and will enjoy the occasionally hilarious ending where you have to form a word out of whatever letters you think you have. Letter Jam’s spin on classic word game formulas makes it a great successor and a welcome game for any party night.

Ever try to describe a dream to someone, only for it to completely fade away? MonsDRAWsity is much the same way, as players have only a scant few seconds to look at a monster card before they need to describe it to the rest of the players, who have to draw it based on the description. After a few minutes, drawing time is over, and everyone votes on the monster that they think is the most accurate. The artists’ pick gets points, but if the player describing the monster votes for the artists’ pick as well, they get points too.

Many players hate drawing games, saying that they’re bad at sketching. But that’s kind of the point here. Add in probably bad information and your monsters may look even scarier than they’re supposed to. You end up with some real nightmares on the marker boards, and it’s frequently very funny.

In Rosetta: The Lost Language, players have to decipher a mysterious set of glyphs found at a remote location. One player, the Author, has a special role. They choose the meaning of the glyph and help players solve it. What makes this game exceptional is when players guess a word, if it’s close, the Author has to draw the word, translated into the same language as the game’s set of glyphs. Does one part mean “water”? Maybe that squiggle means “person.” Rosetta is a daring and exciting word game even for players that don’t love drawing.

Personally, we’re huge fans of word games, and Rosetta is one of our favorites. There’s added complexity given how the glyphs can change meaning based on the player, the location, and even the orientation. It’s also a small-box game, meaning it’s great to travel with and plays well at a variety of player counts.

When kicking off a game night, it helps to have something quick. Something that seats a few players, takes a minute to learn, and you can play until more people show up. Sequoia is a great recent example. In it, players have five dice. During a round, all players roll simultaneously, secretly choose one die to discard, and make two pairs from the remaining four. Once all players are ready, they reveal and place one tree token on the spaces equal to the pairs’ values. So if we had a seven and a ten, we’d place one tree token on seven and one on ten. After ten rounds, players get points if they have the most or second-most tree tokens on a given space.

With quick play and great art, Sequoia may not be a particularly high-complexity title, but it provides a nice runway to more complex games or serves as a great way to wind down after some more challenging titles. And it’s been known to start feuds between players competing aggressively for the same spot.

For players looking for a longer, multi-game experience, Sleeping Gods is a hefty title that promises up to 20 hours of gameplay per replayable campaign. You play as the captain of the Manticore, lost in a strange sea under a stranger sky. As you explore the world you now find yourself lost in, you will need your wits and the skills of your crew to find totems and wake up the gods with the power to send you home.

Not just a visually striking experience, Sleeping Gods also has a deep and interesting narrative fueled by player choices as they cross the seas. Help, ignore, forsake, fight, or even steal; all of these options are available to you and more in various narrative quests you can try. Even with a map and all the answers, the campaign may not be the same twice with new cards and new questions emerging after every play. Red Raven has done an excellent job with Sleeping Gods; it feels like the next step of the work they’ve done on previous titles, like Islebound and Near and Far.

In the past couple of years, roll-and-write games went from a relatively obscure genre to a fairly popular one. It stands to reason that we would start seeing more hybrid titles emerge, and Sonora purports to be the first “flick-and-write” game, adding dexterity to the genre. A game of Sonora is essentially four different mini-games, with your flicked disc determining which of the four games you play and the number on the flicked disc representing the value you can use for that game. Players spend a round flicking discs onto the board, and once all players’ discs are down, you resolve them. This may mean exploring the ruins, the canyon, the mud cracks, or the creek bed, if you want to win. Each area plays differently, as well: the canyon uses your value to draw shapes, the creek bed lets you trace a path, the ruins has you cross off circles and the mud cracks lets you use your value to create triangles to surround symbols for points.

Dexterity games are some of our favorite games in the genre, and Sonora does a great job giving players a colorful backdrop to flick these discs into, as well. We were impressed with how puzzly Sonora is, and each of the four games is a cool experience. Players who don’t mind moving around the table a bit but still want to have some strategy, too, will appreciate it.

Sorcerer City has players take on the role of local magicians tasked with rebuilding a city after monsters attack. Unfortunately, those monsters keep attacking, so you keep rebuilding, and you have to do so quickly so at least some commerce can happen. It’s a bit like a combination between a deck builder and real-time Carcassonne, as players rush to place stacks of tiles and build districts of the same color to get points that they can use to buy increasingly useful tiles.

The game’s a blast if you enjoy playing in real time; there’s a lot of strategy as to which tiles you buy, what tiles you place where, and dealing with the monsters that attack and what they do to your city. And you have to do all of that planning on a timer. Given that the monsters can be swapped out every game, the same strategy never quite works twice, making for new excitement.

There’s a strange subset of games that are as much fun to watch as they are to play. There may be no better example than Stay Cool, a new party game from Scorpion Masqué. The premise is simple: One player has red cards, the other has blue cards, and they both take turns asking a question to a third player. That third player must answer either aloud or with a set of lettered dice. The problem is there’s a timer, as well, and the red player and the blue player can ask their questions fairly rapidly. How good are you at multitasking?

Stay Cool achieves what many party games aspire toward, which is a limited form of player trauma. And it looks great while doing it. The graphic design is clean, and the colors are bright and inviting to distract from the increasing difficulty. Stay Cool may be the most fun when it’s not your turn in the hot seat, but even then, it’s a great time.

Strike is a classic dexterity game with a fresh coat of paint, as Ravensburger recently re-released it after it went out of print. While this latest version has the same rules and gameplay, it’s still an excellent edition of one of the all-time greats. You throw one of your dice into the center of the play area, and any that come up with the same value get taken out of the center and placed in your stock of dice. If all the dice show different faces, you can throw another in or end your turn. Also, if any dice land on X, they’re removed from the game entirely. The part that makes it most fun is that if you ever empty the center, your opponent must roll all of their dice into the center on their turn. This may (and often does) mean that your opponent has to leave some of their dice in the center after their turn, and you might be able to steal them with a good roll. If a player runs out of dice in their stock, they immediately are eliminated, so you can imagine the tension of rolling all of them.

Strike is tense, fast-paced, and incredibly silly, so this is an excellent title for families, as long as you can keep the dice in the bowl.