I always have a great time at Gen Con, seeing friends and acquaintances, playing new and old games, leaving the day job behind for a long weekend. But I also usually leave with more games than I can fit in my suitcases (yes, plural), and with a different sort of buyer’s remorse, the kind where I wish I’d gotten other things too. Gen Con 2025 was the first time I went to the convention and left a little empty, in both senses of the term. I didn’t play anything new that blew me away, which has never happened to me before in my eight previous times at the convention.
One of the biggest trends was that many publishers are playing it safe. It appears board gaming is headed in the direction of Hollywood, where existing IP is getting prioritized over novel content, so we had a slew of games that were just line extensions, spinoffs or sequels of existing titles, or that were based on IP from other media (mostly movies). To be clear, I’m all for seeing good games come back into print; we had several booths showing new editions of classics like Samurai and Hacienda or overlooked cult favorites like Camp Grizzly and Panic on Wall Street (now Wolf Street).
Another trend was that there is nothing else, there is only trick-taking. Everything is Spades now. There have been enough breakout hits in that space in the last few years, like The Crew, SCOUT, and Trio, that everyone’s making trick-takers now, trying to put their own spins on the genre, with cooperative ones and card-shedding ones (think UNO) and narrative-based ones and more. And there were definitely more small-box games at lower price points this year relative to the number of big-box, $60+ titles, which have long been the beating heart of Gen Con even though those games appeal to a narrower part of the market. There wasn’t a big buzz game that created huge lines when the doors to the exhibit hall opened each morning; the lines I saw were for TCGs or CCGs like Lorcana rather than for tabletop titles.
Finally, my Gen Con experience was a little different this year, as the first day of the convention fell on the MLB trade deadline, which meant it was a busy time for me at the day job. I actually left the exhibit hall to go sit in a corridor in the Indiana Convention Center and write up analyses of several of the day’s deals, went to my hotel, ordered food delivered (which I never do while traveling), and wrote for another two hours before heading back for some late-night gaming. That means I didn’t quite get to everything on my hit list this year. I blame Rob Manfred.
As usual, I’ve got my top 10 new and also new-to-me games of the convention. And tomorrow Endless Mode will have my comprehensive wrap-up of everything I saw, watched, demoed or played in my four days in Indianapolis.
Here are the 10 best board games I played at Gen Con in 2025.
10. No Loose Ends (Gamehead)
Previously published in Japan as Shut the Books, No Loose Ends is a trick-taking game with a bank heist theme, where players bid on how many tricks they’ll win, then try to win specific card values or suits to cover up those bid cards—the ‘evidence’ of their crime—so they don’t have any loose ends when the game is over. The art is appropriately noir-ish for the game and the Jim Thompson-esque title.
9. Pergola (Asmodee/Rebel)
Rebel Studios published Meadow, and this game has an extremely familiar look in the art, although it’s an entirely different game. Players will collect flowers and insects to build out the prettiest pergola, with each flower and insect type (four apiece) scoring differently, and three additional mini-boards where you can move tokens to collect more flowers and insects as the game goes on. Each flower type can only take one insect type, and when you get an insect, in most cases you can only collect it, and then must later use a flutter action to fly it over to a plant. It’s very puzzly under the hood.
8. Propolis (Flatout)
I didn’t know propolis was an actual word until I saw the title of the game, but it’s a material bees collect off tree buds and use to repair their hives. Propolis the game is indeed about bees, but invokes a little wordplay, as you’re building little bee cities of a sort, using engine-building, worker placement, and tableau-building mechanics. And it all comes in a small box, playing in under 30 minutes. I’m pretty excited for this one.
7. Citizens of the Spark (Thunderworks)
One of the few tabletop games here that generated significant buzz around the exhibit hall, Citizens of the Spark is a set collection game where you select three cards to add to your tableau on each turn, then discarding one from the tableau to activate and discard; the more cards (citizens) of that type you have in your tableau at that time, the more powerful its action becomes. It comes with 30 different citizen types, and you only use seven to 10 per game, so there are (does math) a lot of combinations.
6. Panda Spin (Moon Gate)
A SCOUT-like trick-taking and card-shedding game from designer Carl Chudyk (Innovation, Glory to Rome), Panda Spin has cards with white and blue values. You start with your cards oriented with the white values at the top, and if you win a trick with one or more of those, you discard them. If you lose a trick with all white cards, you take them back but flip them around to their blue valued sides, where the numbers are different, they may have some bonus powers, and where you can discard all cards if you lose a trick where at least one of your cards was blue. When one player ditches all of their cards, a round ends, and that player scores points equal to the number of cards held by the player with the most still in hand. Once any player reaches 15 points, the game ends. The cards’ art and printing is exceptional, too.
5. A Place for All My Books (Smirk & Dagger)
You couldn’t come up with a more apt theme for board gamers: This is a game about being a book-loving, book-collecting introvert, where leaving the house requires that you build up a significant amount of energy, and the only real reason to go into town at all is to acquire more books. It’s a set collection and pattern-matching game where you want to get different types of books (and also can collect board games) to build not just the biggest collection, but the best organized one, so you never have to leave the house again.
4. Duel for Cardia (Asmodee)
I hate the name of this, especially since the box has the word “CARDIA” in bigger letters, so, uh, is that Cardi B’s older sister? It’s a better game than title, though—it’s a two-player battle where each player gets a deck of 16 cards, numbered one to 16, and they play them one at a time from their hand to the next spot in the center row, so it looks like a capture-the-flag game (like Battle Line or Riftforce). You evaluate each card pair as they’re played, however; the winner gets a gem, with five gems winning the game, but the loser gets to activate the card, and sometimes that can even change the outcome of an already-decided card pairing. The 16 card lets you win immediately if you activate it, but it’s the highest card, so you have to be able to modify it with a different card and hope doing so gets it below what your opponent played. It’s a very elegant design with an inelegant name.
3. Logic & Lore (Weird Giraffe)
A very elegant two-player deduction game, Logic & Lore has a row of nine cards in the middle, numbered one through nine. Each player shuffles their own nine-card deck and lays them out next to the central row, face down. Your goal is to get all nine of your cards “aligned” with the same number card in the middle row. On your turn, you hold up two of your cards so your opponent can see them, asking them up to four specific questions about the cards, in order, until you get a yes: is either card in the right spot? Are they consecutive? Do they add up to 10? And which one is greater? There are also two variants in the box, one with more questions tied to specific cards in the middle, and one that adds a Black Hole card to each player’s deck that screws with the answers.
2. Ace of Spades (Devir)
One of the games I heard people talking about the most at Gen Con was this one- or two-player game from first-time designer Benje Amorín, where you work through a series of bad guys using poker hands to kill them, trying to get to the final boss. The better your hand, the more damage you can deal. You get some chances to discard cards and refill your hand, but that’s limited, and you have two shots at each villain before you lose the game. When you defeat each card, though, you get a new power or ability to help you in future rounds. Two players can play a cooperative game, but I think it’s really designed for solo play. Poker-themed games are having a moment here with this and The Gang.
One of the toughest demos to get over the weekend, 12 Rivers has a 3D board where players place their tiles on the inclined part of the board to try to trap some of the dozen marbles that will be released to flow down the rivers at the end of each round. Collecting those marbles to match your villager cards’ requirements is the heart of the game, but you can boost your powers with cards, use one of your three tiles to skip getting a marble so you can take another villager and move up in the turn order, or take fairy tiles to break a rule one time to make an action more powerful. It’s the kind of board that’s impossible to walk past, and despite a large footprint on the table, it’s a quick-playing game with very short turns.
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.
