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Justin’s Highs and Lows for 2025!

January 13, 2026
Justin Bell
24 Min Read

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Justin wrote 175 articles last year and logged more than 540 plays. Let’s see where he lands in our traditional Diamond Climber categories, plus a few categories he crafted just for this article!

Another year in the books! Our writing team will soon publish an article with our single-favorite games of 2025. However, I played a lot of other games last year—more than 200 different games, in fact!

In the spirit of my roundup of the highs and lows from the games I played in 2022, 2023, and 2024, please enjoy a few other awards and my personal top 10 from 2025.

(A note about this article: these winners are based on articles I wrote in 2025, not necessarily games that were released in 2025. Game release dates are pretty fuzzy, between prototypes, crowdfunding pre-production copies, retail releases, second print runs, games that first debuted in another country before I got my hands on them, and/or “deluxified” anniversary versions. Just pretend that everything rated here came out in 2025, because it did. At least, to me.)

With that, let’s jump in, using some of our Diamond Climber award categories and some of my own categories too.

Favorite Gaming Moment of 2025: Standing in the Same Card Location as Another Player: Vantage

I talked about this at length in my review, but I’ll simplify it with an analogy: imagine that you and a friend are randomly plopped onto a world that has about 900 unique locations and through a mix of skill and sheer luck, you find yourself in the exact same spot as the other person. Wild, right? What made the moment more special is that the two of us got to play the rest of the game together, like it was Interplanetary Date Night. Vantage has a lot of wild moments, and while I don’t recommend playing it with more than one, maybe two other players, you only get moments like the one I had by playing the game with others.

Honorable mention:

  • When a player’s 10 was one-upped by the next player’s 11 on the final trick of my five-player game of Tricky Kids (I can still hear the laughter)
  • When my then-eight-year-old won Space Diamonds, the tutorial variant of our first play of High Frontier 4 All
  • Andromeda’s Edge and Nucleum being added to Board Game Arena’s Alpha catalog (joyously profane texts were sent to other gamers in my local groups)
  • Gideon realizing that “The Bear” might be a reference to the word “restaurant”, Codenames
  • The arrival of my production copy of Speakeasy 
I mean…obviously.

Best Individual Game Component: the cardboard box, Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game 

For my money, the Metal Gear Solid series is still the best video game series on the Playstation. The board game only needed to check one box for me: Snake needed to have the ability to move around the maps in the famously ridiculous cardboard box item he can somehow stash in his backpack. The team at CMON had a bad year, for a lot of reasons, but the work with Konami here was solid and the cardboard box token was maybe the easiest pick in this entire article.

Honorable mention:

Favorite Gaming Mechanic: the Restaurant space, Speakeasy

Yep, I get it: I called this out as one of my favorite things last year, too. After receiving my production copy of Speakeasy and getting more plays in, not enough people are talking about this. I still believe this single space is the best work of Vital Lacerda’s career. The space is genius: it’s the only place to claim public milestones. It’s the only space where all players can always use their Capos. It’s critical to change turn order, in order to more efficiently protect a player’s buildings. And in an area control game, you really want to go last. 

Honorable mention:

Most Thematic Gaming Experience: Speakeasy

Another easy winner, Speakeasy made me feel just like a gangster in 1920s New York. The box cover, the card art, the player boards, the casinos, the trucks, the rum runners, “cooking the books”, you name it. Watching players the first time they place a Family Member next to a building is a joy. Putting Tommy gun-toting VIPs next to a building just feels good man, and it really does make me feel like the cops aren’t gonna mess with my business.

Honorable Mention:

Best Dice: Covenant

Not a great dice year, especially since Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan games have been on the list here before. Still, I really enjoyed how dice are used in Covenant, including the list of the die faces in the appropriate area of the board to alert players to their complete list of possibilities.

Honorable Mention:

Best Graphic Design / Iconography: Ian O’Toole, Speakeasy

This was a particularly crowded category, in part because O’Toole did the graphic design for so many titles I played in 2025. It was also crowded because designers, artists and publishers are getting a lot better at visually telling players a story. Speakeasy is a big piece of chicken, but it does an exceptional job at guiding players even without its incredible player aid. This is particularly critical with game elements such as the City Tiles, because players need to be able to parse out benefits from a glance with 30-40 tiles in play at any given time.

The next ten best:

The Most Game You Can Play in the Least Amount of Time: Ayar: Children of the Sun

Given my experience with Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa, I was a bit frightened that Ayar: Children of the Sun was going to be a slog. Boy, was I wrong, and it’s hard to beat the amount of game you will get out of Ayar at the full player count in just 90 minutes. No matter who he is working with, designer Fabio Lopiano is absolutely crushing it right now, and Ayar is some of his most efficient work.

Honorable Mention:

Best First-Player / Active Player Token: The Revolver, 18RoyalGorge: The Rails of Fremont County and the Royal Gorge Wars

This might have been the only award that was locked up before I even played the game! While sitting through a walkthrough with the game’s designers, Kayla Ross and Denman Scofield, they showed off 18RoyalGorge’s priority deal marker and that was all I needed to see. The game attached to that revolver is good, but I’m much more excited to see what Ross and Scofield have up their sleeve next.

Honorable Mention:

Publisher of the Year (minimum three releases): Allplay

Three years ago, I thought of Allplay as their heritage name: BoardGameTables.com. It was a place where one would go shopping for gear, tables, and the like, but certainly not for board games, at least not at first. Now, Allplay is officially “destination viewing.” They’ve shown exceptional savvy at offering a wide mix of games, at prices that are very reasonable in a world where $200+ luxury goods regularly hit the market. When Allplay uses crowdfunding, the deals are always worth a look; their “tiny box” collection of games featured bangers that I still get to the table, such as For the Emperor and Slambo!. Their reprint campaign of the classic Euro Container might have been the best sneaky-great crowdfunding hobby play of 2025.

Allplay Slambo Card Game for Adults and Families - Hand Management Game of Keeping Balance - Play Your Cards Right and Don't Get Slammed - 5 Min 2-4 Players Ages 6+
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Magical Athlete Board Game - A Party Game of Pure Racing Chaos
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Allplay Waddle Board Game for Adults and Families - Connect Groups of Penguins to Claim The Most Fish - 1-Minute to Teach in A Small Box - 15 Min 2-5 Players Ages 7+
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Honorable Mention:

  • CMYK (Hot Streak, Magical Athlete, the Magenta series)
  • Eagle-Gryphon Games (Speakeasy, La Pâtisserie Rococo, and the Baseball Highlights: 2045 “Bases Loaded” edition)
  • Cranio Creations (Railway Boom, ANTS, Echoes of Time, Barrage Big Box)

Best Rules for Selecting the First Player: Unconscious Mind (the player who most recently made a Freudian slip)

As usual, too many designers leave the rules for selecting a first player to something worthless; why would I want to pick someone randomly, when I can have a fun icebreaker to shake things up? Unconscious Mind picked a fun one, and for a game that is anything but lighthearted, I loved this choice for the subject matter on display in the game.

Honorable Mention:

  • 18RoyalGorge: The Rails of Fremont County and the Royal Gorge Wars (the player who most recently “shot someone in cold blood” for trying to build track through the Royal Gorge)
  • Jungo (whoever last ate a banana)
  • Federation (the last player who voted)
  • Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age (the player who last won the title of “king”)
  • Builders of Sylvan Dale (the player who most recently climbed a tree)

Best Individual Player Boards: Speakeasy

“Justin, didn’t you give this award to Speakeasy last year?” Yes, I did, and I don’t care. This is still the best player board I handled in 2025. One detail I either missed, or failed to recognize in my review in 2024: each of the four player boards features two different Ian O’Toole covers from other Lacerda games. The board’s artwork is almost as stellar as the ability to slip cards into the top of each board, illustrating things in the windows of your hideout. The Capo seats are holding areas for your worker tokens. The trackers are money. It’s a blast to have your gangster “Associate” staring back at you from the middle of your board. I dare you to find a better player board from 2025!

The next ten best:

  • Galactic Cruise
  • Ayar: Children of the Sun
  • Covenant
  • Tianxia
  • Minos: Dawn of the Bronze Age
  • Transgalactica
  • Unconscious Mind
  • House of Fado
  • Endeavor: Deep Sea
  • Thebai
  • Recall

Best Rulebook: Galactic Cruise

Teaching Galactic Cruise live is actually a bit of a nightmare, but that nightmare is eased quite a bit with the exceptional rulebook produced by first-time publisher Kinson Key Games, and their design team of TK King, Dennis Northcott, and Koltin Thompson. Yes, the rulebook is too long (50 pages!!), but the detailed examples paired with the “Zoe” sidebars explaining why certain mechanisms exist work wonders to help players understand the game.

Honorable Mention:

  • Endeavor: Deep Sea
  • Men-Nefer
  • 18RoyalGorge: The Rails of Fremont County and the Royal Gorge Wars
  • Railway Boom
  • Recall

Best Player Aid: Galactic Cruise

Everyone who has played Galactic Cruise or followed its development backstory knows that Lacerda designs produced by Eagle-Gryphon Games are the inspiration for Galactic Cruise, right down to its player aid, which very much reminded me of what worked so well with the aids for games such as The Gallerist, Lisboa, and Weather Machine. The Galactic Cruise player aid isn’t taking the cake from the best player aid of all time—SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—but for a heavy strategy game, the aid for Galactic Cruise is a handsome piece of hardware.

Honorable Mention:

  • Halo: Flashpoint
  • Covenant
  • Tiletum: Prospect for Silver (which adds player aids to the base game!)
  • Tianxia
  • La Pâtisserie Rococo

The Table Presence Award: Speakeasy

This was the only category I would call a coin flip for 2025, because Galactic Cruise is as good a looker as Speakeasy was. Here’s the edge: the player boards. Both games feature gorgeous main boards, ridiculously cool components, and that very necessary, “Hey, what IS that you’re playing?” vibe passers-by get when they see both games on a table. But the Galactic Cruise player boards—handsome in their own right—can’t hang with the best player boards of 2025. Or maybe it’s the cute truck tokens. Or maybe it’s the board state by the end of Speakeasy’s 11th turn. It’s tough to say.

Honorable Mention:

Best Storage Solution: Galactic Cruise

I think Galactic Cruise is a fine game, but as a production (a production from a first-time publisher!), it is exceptional. That starts as soon as you open its glorious box. Another nod to the Eagle-Gryphon/Lacerda collaborations of the past few years, it is clear that the designers of Galactic Cruise wanted to give players that A+ feeling that hits as soon as a buyer opens their new toy. I’m still laughing at how cool the individual player storage solution is, with a Game Trayz container shaped like a rocket ship with everything packed just right.

The next ten best:

Is that…an EYEBALL????

Best Artwork: Andrew Bosley and Vincent Dutrait, Unconscious Mind

Almost every heavy strategy game gets blamed for being essentially themeless, so it was a joy to both enjoy the gameplay of Unconscious Mind and marvel at its stunning imagery. Some of the illustrations from the cards in this game haunted me for a day or two after each play. Bosley and Dutrait have separately had board game hall of fame careers, if there is such a thing, so to have two legends on the scene for this game was a win all of its own.

Honorable Mention:

Most Evocative Box Cover: Montage

Montage, a game released in 1973, has a cover that absolutely screams “1970s game show”, from the font to the random dot tokens splashed across a muted yellow background. That the game is such a joy is one thing—another reason I keep tabs on the extensive back catalog at Eagle-Gryphon Games—but this cover was my favorite from a “new to me” game in 2025.

Honorable Mention:

  • Unconscious Mind
  • Transgalactica
  • Railway Boom
  • Night Soil
  • Covenant
Leaders (Studio H)

And now, some of the standard-issue best-of winners:

  • Best Card Game: Jungo
  • Best Filler: Jungo
  • Best Roll/Flip and Write Game: En Route: Special Edition
  • Best Party Game: 25 Words or Less
  • Best Dedicated Two-Player Game: Leaders
  • Best Train Game: Railway Boom
  • Best Co-Op Game: Vantage
  • Best Solo Game: Vantage
  • Best Escape Room/Crime/Mystery One-Time-Play Game: Masters of Crime (all of them!)
  • Best Family Game: Monkey Palace

The Best Games of 2025

First, three honorable mentions:

Bagged & Boarded: I first played the Bagged & Boarded prototype almost three years ago, and since then, I’ve done more plays and know that this will be one of the best games to hit tables in 2026. I didn’t add it to my 2025 list because its crowdfunding campaign will not fulfill until later this year. From the comic book artwork to the wide range of player counts to an exceptional rulebook with a snappy playtime, I know gold when I see it, and Bagged & Boarded is going to do just fine with “the people” later this year.

Bagged & Boarded (Octoraffe Games)

Expansions: my friend John joked that the game he was most excited for at SPIEL Essen 2025 was “every single expansion debuting here.” (I don’t consider expansions for my top 10 list.) John wasn’t far off, because some of the best titles I played last year were expansions, another sign that the crop of original releases was a little weaker than in past years. It’s impossible to pick just one, so I’ll steer you towards five expansions worth your time. (Also, all but the first title here have expansion content that fits into the main game box!)

Tiletum: Prospect for Silver (Board&Dice)

Board Game Arena: I wasn’t kidding last spring when I said that Board Game Arena was my GOTY—it is absolutely the best value in gaming. And while I thought 2025 was a middling year for physical tabletop games, there’s no doubt in my mind that BGA was the big winner last year. The service has nearly 1,400 games available, many of which are free to play. For just $42 a year, you can access all of them as a host, an investment I highly recommend. Dozens of my favorite games hit the service in 2025—from classics such as Lorenzo il Magnifico and Concordia, to solid lighter fare such as Tower Up and Cities, to well-regarded strategy titles like Rats of Wistar, Andromeda’s Edge, and Nucleum (the latter two of which are currently in alpha). I get it—I prefer playing games in person, too. But nothing beats async options like the ones on BGA right now.

And now, my top 10…

10: En Route: Special Edition

I don’t really enjoy “blank and write” games and I’ll admit that the bland cover of En Route: Special Edition was a minor turnoff. But I slept on the team at CrowD Games in 2024 and later found that Bestiary of Sigillum: Collector’s Edition was one of the best games I played that year. So, it wasn’t a surprise to discover that En Route was one of the big surprises coming out of Gen Con in 2025. The Special Edition has so much content inside, in such a wonderful, easy-to-teach system, that one of my review crew members bought a copy during our first play. I’m still shocked no one is talking about this game!

9: Men-Nefer

The worst thing about the recent Devir release Covenant? It was by the same designer as Men-Nefer, Germán P. Millán, and not nearly as innovative. As noted earlier in this article, Men-Nefer’s action selection mechanism was one of my favorite game mechanics of 2025 and the game is a looker on the table. This is a hard game to teach, and I still think Men-Nefer has one too many scoring areas for players to explore, giving it a bit of a sandbox feel. No problem: Men-Nefer is the best work of Millán’s initial slate (which includes games like Bitoku, Sabika, and Bamboo), and I’m thankful the team at Ludonova sent a copy of Men-Nefer for review. It’s a winner.

8: Railway Boom

The math on Railway Boom, a game first released in 2022 then re-developed for release in 2025, is really simple. The original design for Railway Boom is by Hisashi Hiyashi, the man who gave us Yokohama. The game’s updated design and development was done by Simone Luciani, my favorite designer and a man who has given us countless Euro-style classics. And the new version’s graphic design and illustrations were done by Ian O’Toole. Railway Boom was on our Most Anticipated list from SPIEL for a reason, and the game’s auction elements were the best auctions I saw on tables all year.

7: Recall

Recall didn’t really sneak up on anyone, in part because many of the same designers worked on Revive, a strategy game still on BGG’s top 100 list. While I still enjoy Revive and play it on BGA from time to time (BGA keeps killing it!), even I had to admit that Recall might be the better game. Recall’s key-slotting action trigger is fun, it’s got all the Euro fixins, and the variability with the factions both with players and slotted at the top of each track make for interesting ways to attack the game’s systems each and every time out. Whenever the inevitable expansions begin to arrive for Recall, I’ll be ready!

6: Railroad Tiles

When Railroad Tiles—a tile-laying iteration of the roll-and-write Railroad Ink system—was announced, I was optimistic, but I just assumed it would be fine. Happily, I was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that Railroad Tiles is now my go-to game in the Railroad Ink system. The tile drafting is fantastic, scoring is easy to parse, and the system is very easy to teach to new players. If you’ve got the money and the interest, there are already a zillion mini-expansions available to spice up play. I only have the base game and that’s all I will ever need!

5: Ayar: Children of the Sun

Ayar: Children of the Sun is the only game with a major asterisk on my top 10 list. That’s because it is a vastly different game based on its player count. As a solo and/or two-player game, Ayar is so bland that it wouldn’t even be on this list. But at four players, it is the second-best pure Euro design of 2025. Ayar, the third in a series of games published by Osprey, is such a joy at its maximum player count, with the kinds of tension missing in many similar designs. Designers Mandela Fernandez-Grandon and Fabio Lopiano also did the second game in this series, Sankoré: The Pride of Mansa Musa, a game I did not enjoy. Ayar is lighter, more interactive, and faster than Sankoré, and features almost everything I look for in a medium-weight Euro: easy to teach, difficult to master, progressively limited options, and a dope scoring system, all in a package that plays in about 90 minutes.

4: Jungo

Jungo was the game I played most often from this list, in part because you can knock out a full game in about five minutes. That’s part of the design’s genius; designer Toshiki Arao has given us a title that is a shedding game, built around the ability to selectively build up your hand before trying to get rid of it all. Jungo, an update of the design Hashi Train, now brought to you by the folks at Happy Camper, is not likely to challenge the leader in the ladder climbing/shedding game category in my circles—that would be SCOUT—but as a family-weight shedder, Jungo is highly recommended.

3: Masters of Crime: Rapture

The Masters of Crime one-shot mystery game series from KOSMOS is brilliant, and I could have listed any of the titles I’ve tried so far on this list. Masters of Crime: Rapture (a title released in 2021) is the perfect solution to mystery box date night at home, with a scenario that feels plausible and a difficulty level I would frame as “just right” for anyone who has danced their way around one of these types of games in the past. The writing, the blend of website research and real-world map interaction, the scoring system, and the ability to gift the game to friends after completing it are all reasons to grab a copy of Rapture, or any other game in this series, stat. The playtime is a full night—titles in this series list 3-4 hours as the average playtime—so that might be the only downside to an otherwise wonderful investigative experience.

2: Speakeasy

Speakeasy was a tricky one for me, because I covered the game before its crowdfunding campaign launched in 2024. But after doing seven plays for that review, then doing two more plays after receiving my production copy, I can confirm Speakeasy is a top-tier Vital Lacerda experience, one made richer because of its Prohibition-era mobster theme. For people turned off by some of the designer’s recent work (as was I, especially with games like Weather Machine), Speakeasy is a return to form that gets almost every single thing right, in a box featuring Ian O’Toole’s best graphic design work since Voidfall. The main barrier to entry here is the still-shocking $170 price tag for the game’s Kickstarter edition…but now that I have a copy on my shelf, I’m telling you to spend that money if you have the right group to get Speakeasy to the table.

1: Vantage

Opinions of Vantage ranged far and wide, both in my gaming circles as well as with members of the tabletop media. I get it; the Vantage sandbox is going to look different based on player choices, and that’s before we address the fact that Vantage with six players is a whole lot different than Vantage solo, or with a single friend. My Vantage experience across seven plays was exhilarating, and it featured my gameplay highlight of the year, noted earlier. The secrets I discovered while wandering through its world were a joy, and some of the character builds I earned were crazy fun. And, I died fast on a couple of trips, which just made me want to fire it back up right away. But Vantage was the most unique gaming experience I had in 2025, from a publisher that has provided me with more misses than hits, in a tabletop industry that is taking fewer and fewer real risks. The narrative journey of Vantage was one of a kind, AND it was really, really good.

The Five Most Disappointing Games of 2025

Apparently, the word is out: if I don’t like a game, I will post a review saying how much I didn’t like that game. (I’ll politely say that this is not common in our industry.) This means that I am getting the chance to cover fewer and fewer titles that aren’t very good. Still, I think it is wise to call out a small list of titles that failed to meet expectations.

A quick sidebar: 2025 was only an OK year for games. While the Golden Age of Board Game Production rages on, established publishers took fewer chances on new designs but upgraded the quality of the bits across the board. That means I am seeing a much higher floor on high-end components, which is a step in the right direction, but a lot of games that feel like publishers are playing it safe. I can’t necessarily fault that approach—tabletop is a business—but that means it is getting harder and harder to find truly unique, breakout designs in a world where everyone has a new just-above-average trick-taker, or a samey-feeling, track-heavy Euro, or any kind of a game with cats. (Oh my goodness, there are so many games with animals!)

So, here’s to hoping that tabletop in 2026 packs more surprises up its collective sleeves.

A big thanks to everyone involved in my 2025 gaming year, from the designers and publishers who put so many great games into motion, to the manufacturing and distribution partners across the globe for producing lots of quality products and working with shipping partners to get those games into our hands. A special shout-out to the team at Mindclash for being incredible hosts during my visit to their offices in Budapest. To those who put in the tireless effort to run conventions, giving us all a chance to play and talk about these games in person, another big thanks for the massive amount of work you put in. For the fellow writers here at Meeple Mountain and to my other peers in the media/influencer/content creation space, it’s been a pleasure creating and expanding relationships with so many other people who love games the same way I do.

And to the game groups I am a part of in the greater Chicagoland area: I couldn’t do any of this without you. Tabletop critique is a tough task, but it might be even tougher to help play games that you don’t always love; so thanks for coming out, week after week, to play so many new-to-you games. It was an adventure for us all, an adventure that I do not take lightly.

One last shout out: to my wife and kids. Thanks for putting up with me as we tabled some of the best and worst games the world has to offer. No matter how the game played, I treasured the time I got to spend with each of you. The best part? Writing so many articles that featured you as the stars of the show.

Happy gaming to all in 2026!

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Justin Bell

Love my family, love games, love food, love naps. If you're in Chicago, let's meet up and roll some dice!

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