As 2023 comes to a close, it’s time to think about the best new games of the past year and the most played games of the year.
Top Five New Games of 2023
(5) Fit to Print – I was sold on this game by Peter McPherson’s excellent designer diary, and it’s been a hit with several different groups. This light, speed-based polyomino game is not for everyone, but it’s certainly an accessible successor to Galaxy Trucker that is so incredibly adorable (certainly much more so than the brilliant thematic predecessor Extrablatt). As a huge fan of Galaxy Trucker, this one doesn’t quite measure up to that high bar for me personally after 6 plays so far, but it has still been a joy to play as lighter, introductory fare. The clever headlines and the artwork really make this game stand out in a crowded field. Kudos to Ian O’Toole for bringing this vision to life.
(4) Lacuna – The strange wild card game of the year. Such a silly and odd experience, but entirely enjoyable and lovely to play on a weeknight after work or after a tense cooperative game (like the new Lost Ruins of Arnak cooperative mode). Not sure this game will stand the test of time in a few years, but for now it’s a novel, bizarre, and fun experience over the course of 6 plays to date.
(3) Forbidden Jungle – The cooperative game of 2023, which is another game with a great designer diary. This is a complete coincidence, but it turns out that I’ve also played this game 6 times so far. I have enjoyed Jungle much more than Forbidden Sky, and I’ve found it to be different enough from the excellent Forbidden Desert to be worth owning both. I’ve been impressed with the various ways that the Forbidden series games work, and while Desert remains my favorite of the bunch, I think Jungle is a solid second.
(2) Mind Space – The roll-and-write of the year. I love this type of game, with Cartographers and Railroad Ink being top tier favorites (along with Silver & Gold, Mosaix, Let’s Make a Bus Route: The Dice Game, Next Station: London, and Penny Papers). Mind Space is a great new entry in that cube of the Kallax shelf. I really enjoy its theme, particularly the goal cards and the different things that each color represents. Moreover, the decision-making process (over my 4 plays to date) is fascinating as you consider the various shapes and colors available to select from in each of the handful of rounds.
(1) Apiary – The new game of the year is undoubtedly Apiary… even the Smithsonian agrees! I’ve had the pleasure of playing 7 times so far and each game has been so different, tense, and engaging. I have been a huge fan of Caylus since 2005, and I have bemoaned the lackluster worker placement games that followed in its wake. But Apiary is easily the best two-player worker placement that I’ve played since 2005. While Stonemaier describes this as a 1-5 player game, I highly recommend playing with 2 players (just like William Attia’s masterpiece Caylus). I think the decision-making in Apiary is simply fascinating, and the balance among the six different actions is a real joy to explore. I particularly enjoy the challenge of figuring out where, when, and how to use your crucial 4-strength bees. Keep an eye out for this new designer’s next couple designs, which I’ve had the pleasure of playtesting, because I think they may turn out even better than Apiary!
Top Ten Played Games of 2023
I’ve been tracking my games played since 2005, having passed 13,000 games played earlier this year. In the new year, I hope to be able to write up once I’ve reached 2,000 different games tried because I’m currently at 1,973. I just need to learn and play 27 new games to reach that fun milestone. In the meantime, I’ve played 174 different games over the past calendar year a total of 594 times. Here are my top ten most played games of 2023:
Honorable Mentions: Seven games just missed the list with 7 plays each – Apiary, Boop, Colorful, Crokinole, Dixit, Doodle Dash, and Klask. This is a fun list with some great dexterity games and party games, along with the best new game of the year. Sadly the best board game ever, War of the Ring, only had 5 plays in 2023 (but at least I’m scheduled to play it in early January with the new expansion to get the new year off to a great start).
(10) Cartographers / So Clover (8 plays each) – Cartographers is definitely my favorite flip-and-write game, and I love all of the expansion maps (such as Undercity and Kethra’s Steppe). I really enjoy the mix of scoring methods and the decisions presented each turn. I get great pleasure out of drawing little forests, rivers, farms, towns, and monsters, and in seeing the resulting creations. So Clover is not entirely my cup of tea, but my family seems to enjoy it a good deal, and anything that gets the family playing games is a win in my book. I’d rather be playing Decrypto or Trapwords, but those don’t seem to be crowd favorites in the same way as So Clover and Just One.
(8) Guild of Merchant Explorers / Under Falling Skies (9 plays each) – This reminds me that I need to get Guild of Merchant Explorers back to the table! I played this game a bunch back in February and March, but not recently, and it was definitely fascinating. Guild felt like such a throwback to classic Euro games from 20 years ago. I enjoyed the idea of Under Falling Skies more than the gameplay, which involved a bit more counting and calculating than I would have liked, but it was interesting enough to be worth a handful of plays.
(7) Starship Captains (10 plays) – I cannot figure out how to describe Starship Captains, but I really enjoy it. Like Guild of Merchant of Explorers, this feels like another classic Euro game, but doesn’t really fit neatly into any category like area control or worker placement. Starship Captains has awfully clever mechanisms hiding underneath its flashy exterior, and there’s great pleasure to be had in getting your crew to line up just right.
(5) Santorini / The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (14 plays each) – I had the chance to enjoy Santorini a bunch over the past year and to begin exploring some of the Golden Fleece expansion characters as well. As a longtime fan of Greek mythology and of two-player games that offer lots of match-up possibilities (like Summoner Wars), Santorin is right up my alley. The Crew is also a blast when played with folks on the same wavelength about the joys of cooperative trick-taking. These are both games that only come off the shelf for particular situations, but it’s great to have these for when the right opportunity arises.
(4) Ark Nova (17 plays) – I can’t figure out if I actually like Ark Nova, but I keep playing it, so I suppose actions speak louder than words. I’m intrigued by Ark Nova, and I think I enjoy my two-player games of it. I cannot imagine ever wanting to play it with more people, given how solitary it is and how much downtime there would be. And I think the game is fundamentally fairly flawed given the extremely high randomness of the card draw and the limited ways to mitigate that, as well as the huge deck of cards and the large number of card prerequisites that reward a level of planning that is not really feasible. That being said, I love the action selection mechanism here and the decision-making process of which actions to use when and in what order. So maybe it is a great board game, or maybe it’s just a fascinating experience and decision space to explore (even if those decisions have limited meaning).
(3) Lost Ruins of Arnak (19 plays) – In stark contrast to Ark Nova, I think that Lost Ruins of Arnak is a phenomenal game. This is probably one of my favorite games of the past several years. I was such a skeptic of deck-building games for so many years after Dominion, but Lost Ruins of Arnak is easily my favorite deck-building game. I think the asymmetric Expedition Leaders expansion is a fantastic addition to the game, and I am currently enjoying the cooperative campaign introduced by the latest Missing Expedition expansion. The decision-making process about which actions to prioritize on any given round is wonderfully tense and especially interactive at lower player counts. I haven’t given a game a 10 out of 10 on BoardGameGeek in five years (since Root), but I’m certainly considering adding Arnak to that short list (alongside all-time greats like Imperial, Through the Ages, Stephensons Rocket, Dominant Species, and War of the Ring).
(2) Unpublished Prototypes (39 plays) – This is mostly playtesting for a new design that I’m working on with Jason Matthews called Kangaroo Island. It’s a tile-laying, 3X style game (no extermination) that I’m really enjoying. Hoping that it finds a publisher in 2024. I’ve also had the pleasure of playtesting some upcoming designs from local designers Elizabeth Hargrave, Connie Vogelmann, and Corinne and M. Yeager, which also fall under this entry. There are so many creative designers and so many exciting designs on the horizon!
(1) Android: Netrunner (41 plays) – Unsurprisingly, Netrunner tops the list again. After 1,783 plays since being released in 2012, Netrunner is far and away my most played game of all time (in addition to being my most played game of 2023), and at around 30 minutes per play, it is also the game I’ve spent the most time with overall. As I wrote earlier this year, Netrunner has long been the reigning champion for me, and Null Signal Games has done an absolutely stellar job with the game. Netrunner is alive and well. Long live the greatest game (except maybe War of the Ring, but alas I have only played that 5 times this year and 70 times overall so far).
With games like the 15 mentioned above, it’s been a great year! In 2024, I’m looking forward to more Apiary, Netrunner, and Cole Wehrle games (including Oath, Pax Pamir, and Arcs); to expansions like Kings of Middle-Earth, Arnak’s Missing Expedition (and I suppose Ark Nova: Marine Worlds); and maybe even to First Monday in October or Kangaroo Island finding their way to publication. What have been your gaming highlights from 2023 and what are you looking forward to in the new year?
My main gaming highlight from this year has been establishing a gaming group in our new location. It was great finding a bunch of gamers who like the same kinds of complex games I do.
As far as the games go, Nucleum is my favorite 2023 game so far. More Luciani goodness–gotta love it! My older discovery is Star Realms, which I completely ignored when it first came out, but which I’ve found is a really good 2-player game, with a lot of replayability. There’s a deck building game I actually like–what a surprise!
In the new year, there’s a bunch of 2023 titles I still need to try, including Voidfall, Rats of Wistar, Evacuation, Annunaki, Planta Nubo, House of Cats, and more. I’m also very much interested in Civolution, the monster Feld game that should debut sometime in 2024. It could be great or it could be a flop (or, even worse, I might not find anyone willing to play it with me), but it sounds fascinating and I’m really looking forward to checking it out once it’s released. Of course, if Talia’s First Monday in October gets released next year, you know I’m going to want to play that a bunch. Happy New Year, everybody, and I hope all your 2024 gaming wishes come true!
Glad you’ve found your people down south! I had a great game day yesterday including Jason and Vonda where we got El Grande, Princes of Florence, Apiary, and Nucleum to the table. I rate them a 10, 9, 9, and… 3 (in that order). It was such a joy to get El Grande and Princes of Florence back to the table, and to teach Apiary.
I continue to be just utterly confounded by people’s enjoyment of Luciani designs. It reminds me a lot of my bafflement back in 2006 at Friese’s popularity, but now turned up to 11. In the face of brilliance like El Grande and Princes of Florence, it’s hard to fathom, but I’m glad to have tried it, and I hope to see that action selection mechanism find its way into a different game that lets that concept really shine.
Well, as regards Luciani, Talia, all I can say is different strokes. As I mentioned in my review of Nucleum, it’s not just me; since Luciani released Tzolk’in back in 2012, *every single one* of his heavier designs are highly rated on the Geek (with a rating of at least 7.5). That represents over a decade and about a dozen games of uninterrupted success. I’m not sure I can think of another designer who’s shown such consistency–maybe Rosenberg at his peak? So *someone* is enjoying these games.
There’s no such thing as a game everyone likes. As you know, I’ve played your beloved El Grande seven times and each one was an unmitigated disaster. Needless to say, my rating for it is pretty low, despite how many gamers whose opinion I trust love it. Then there’s Lacerda, an exceedingly popular designer whose games are comparable to Luciani’s in weight, but none of them work for me at all. Oh well, as long as new games keep coming out that I love, I’m happy to focus on them and ignore the rest.
Yes, absolutely! The transformation of the BGG Top 10 from games like Princes of Florence, Ra, Caylus, and Tigris & Euphrates into games like Terra Mystica / Gaia Project, Brass, Feast for Odin, etc. tells me that Luciani and Lacerda style design has a sizable following. Hence my lament for the way that Xavier Georges has gone from the brilliance of Ginkgopolis / Tournay to the “thick sour soup” of Carnegie… https://opinionatedgamers.com/2021/03/25/talia-rosen-the-tyranny-of-the-kitchen-sink… I can see how El Grande wouldn’t work for you or for everyone though, much like how Mysterium was the antithesis of your type of game, but I’m sure we still have some good overlap to enjoy… Hansa Teutonica? Through the Ages!
As usual, a very good read and reference, Talia. My 1,767 plays in 2023, bring my total logged plays since 2002 to 21,609.
My 2023 summary is:
Quarters: 15 Titles including Challengers, CUBirds, Forest Shuffle, Innovation, Ark Nova, Age of Civilization, It’s a Wonderful World, Earth, Thurn and Taxis, Luxor, Castles of Mad King Ludwig and a few other guilty pleasures…..
Dimes: 18 Titles including Wingspan, Pax Pamir, Feast for Odin, T&E, Isle of Cats, Attika and Pax Porfiriana among others
Nickels: 45 different titles of which my faborites were Founding Fathers and 1960: The Making of a President
Pennies: 122 different titles of which 67 were more than one play
The only overlap of my plays and your plays was Ark Nova this year. Shows how big our hobby has grown :-)
That is exactly 200 different games played 1,767 times this past year for an average of 8.8 times each. You averaged 3.4 plays each for your 174 different titles. See what you have to look forward to when you retire one day, like me, Talia!! Also, I will be picking up a copy of Apiary based on this article!!
The hobby has certainly grown so much that the days when I’d try to play all the big new releases every year are long gone, there’s certainly something for everyone now! We had a bit more overlap though in terms of games played since I definitely played some Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Wingspan, and Pax Pamir throughout the year, including teaching all three of those to new players and enjoying those experiences a ton! I’d love to play Pax Pamir more though, although some of that time might be taken up by Arcs in 2024…
The Game of the Year for me is definitely Forest Shuffle!! Predict big things for this title with its amazing challenge, art work and fascinating game play with so much indirect player interaction and reaction.
Ooh, interesting, I’ll add Forest Shuffle to my “want to try” list on BGG, and hopefully either come across someone else’s copy (perhaps at MAGfest or the Gathering) or break down and just buy it at some point :-)