10 Best Board Games of 2017

The hottest tabletop games of the year so far.

By Matt Thrower

There are now far too many brilliant board games coming out to keep up with them all. Most are designed to have huge replay value and never really “end” like video games do. So this is a problem that’s only going to grow bigger and bigger, the deeper you get into the tabletop hobby.

To help you keep track of this ever-growing snowball of awesome, we’ve selected some of the best and hottest new board games of 2017. Our list spans the range from light to heavy, competitive to cooperative, whimsical to serious. Take a look and take your pick - you can’t go wrong with any of these choices. As long as you can find them in stock, of course.

1. Gloomhaven

Let's start with Gloomhaven, 2017’s biggest hit. The massive box weighs over 8 kilos and promises untold hours of play. At its core, Gloomhaven is a classic dungeon exploration game. Players cooperate to clear out treacherous tombs and risk-filled ruins. What’s made it so popular are several clever twists to the formula. It's got strategic combat, a choose your own adventure style book to add narrative heft between adventures and, best of all, it's a legacy game. That means you'll physically change your own copy as you play, until it becomes visually and mechanically unique to you and your group

2. Near and Far

Staying with the fantasy theme, Near and Far is a reworking of 2015's Above and Below, a surprising blend of resource management and storybook. Near and Far throws exploration and adventure into the mix. It also improves the writing and mechanics of the previous game, creating something smart and fresh. Heroes need to carefully balance their selection of equipment and provisions in town. They travel into the wilderness, strike camp and take up quests. Between the illustrated atlas and the book of stories, playing Near and Far builds a potent and palpable sense of place.

3. This War of Mine: The Board Game

Board games lengthy paragraphs of background fiction, which add depth and detail to the narrative, date back to 1985's Tales of the Arabian Nights and surely even earlier. But they're becoming 2017's ”big thing”. This War of Mine, an adaptation of the video game, is another example using extended fiction to great effect. In many respects it follows the mechanics of the original. Players cooperate to survive in a war-torn city by improving their shelter during day and scavenging for supplies at night. But the added richness from the story book and the social dynamic of playing with friends lends extra emotional gravity to proceedings. Given the bleak scenario, it can be a roller-coaster ride.

4. Santorini

Let’s lighten the mood with some lighter fare - not every hit new game is a bleak battle for survival. The basic version of Santorini is a simple but devilish family abstract. Players race to build towers, but the trick is that well-placed buildings can box in your opponents while also advancing your own citadel. What catapults the game into red-hot territory, though, is the god powers variant. This gives each player a unique way to break the rules, making for huge replay value, and the game as a whole a shiny layer of mythical theme. It's sold out, but a restock should hopefully be inbound soon.

5. Kingdomino

Although printed in 2016, this won 2017's most coveted gaming award, the Spiel des Jahres. This German prize seeks to reward accessibility and inventiveness in game design, and Kingdomino has both in spades. It's based on the classic end-to-end piece matching of dominoes. But rather than a shared number grid, you use pictures on the pieces to build your own kingdom. Clever piece-selection and scoring rules add considerable depth for only a little extra effort. It's family-friendly but the shallow learning curve makes it fearsomely addictive for players of any age. A more challenging stand-alone variant, Queendomino, is due later this year.

6. Anachrony

Moving back to heavier fare, Anachrony is this year's top worker placement game. This staple mechanic sees players assigning pieces to certain tasks to gain resources. Although it's a rich vein of strategic depth, designers have mined to death in recent years. Anachrony, however, has found one last lodestone: time travel. If you want a quick boost you can "borrow" resources from the future. The catch is you then need to make sure you have them spare on the appropriate turn, else you risk devastating paradoxes. With some other smart tweaks to the formula and high production values, this is one of 2017's heavyweight champions.

7. First Martians

Worker placement doesn't always have to be competitive. 2012's hit Robinson Crusoe tasked players to use their workers to help them survive a variety of desert island scenarios. Now, the same designer has tasked us with the trickier problem of surviving on Mars. As well as the change of setting, this game boasts a bunch of design boosts over the original. Most intriguing is the use of an app to generate random encounters and to "save" the game state. That, in turn, makes it easy to try the campaign mode which links all the scenarios together.

8. 5-Minute Dungeon

This is another game with a companion app, which it uses to ensure it's one of the very few board games to boast an accurate estimated play time. It achieves this astonishing five minute feat by having the app set a stopwatch for the session.As it ticks down the timer, players have to work together to match symbols from their cards with those on a random selection of monsters. With hidden hands, hero abilities and the thrilling terror of that timer, it's much harder than it sounds. Make it through one dungeon and another, harder one awaits until you manage to defeat the big boss at the end of the fifth level.

9. Sagrada

You'd expect a game about making stained glass for churches to be beautiful, and Sagrada doesn't disappoint. Players use transparent gem dice to represent the panes in their windows, but there's more meat on offer than just drafting beautiful designs. They have to draft the dice too, from a limited pool, for starters. Then a variety of placement and scoring rules curtail your creativity into a fiendish Sudoku-like challenge. Secret objectives and bidding to use helpful tools elevate the Sudoku like puzzle aspects with some added strategy. Simple rules, striking aesthetics and satisfying puzzle solving give Sagrada a very wide range of appeal.

10. Century: Spice Road

On the surface Century: Spice Road is a quick-fire game of resource management. As a merchant in the historic spice trade, you start with a meager selection of wares. It's your job to build up a hand of cards to acquire, trade and upgrade your stock to victory. With players having just one action per turn, it's fast paced and very simple. Yet as with all the best games, it belies surprising depth, forcing trade-offs between spending spice on better cards and saving it for points. It also heralds an interesting new concept. This is the first of a trilogy of titles, each of which stands alone but which will combine into one grand game of mercantile bliss when they’re all released.

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