What a year. Best of times, worst of times, that’s what we’re supposed to say. For board games, though, 2025 was a banner year, full of tremendous titles both big and small.

As ever, Best Week is a celebration of the board games that struck me the most roundly, and today I’d like to cover the games that won me over thanks to their beauty, at least in part. These are the games that transported me to new places, that showed me wondrous sights, or that used their visual design in such a way that I found an old topic illuminated in a manner I hadn’t considered before.

#6. Skara Brae

Designed by Shem Phillips. Published by Garphill Games.

I have a thing for the Neolithic. Mesolithic, too. Chalcolithic, Paleolithic, Bronze, Iron, you name it, if it’s about humans I’m probably at least a little bit interested in what we were getting up to. Skara Brae is the tale of a human settlement that was old long before the period it covers. That’s the point. Its homes are dug into the midden left by centuries of human activity, that sediment of shells and bones becoming the foundations and walls of something new.

And it’s a looker. Not only for Sam Phillips’ illustrations, although they’re lovely. But also for the layout. Skara Brae is an inventory management game, your stockpile filling with tools and food but also waste. Everything has a use, if you bother to search for it. The result is a particular interpretation of human settlement that’s optimistic and vibrant, a counterpoint to more hard-pressed titles about human survival under harsh circumstances.

Review: Stuck in the Midden with You

#5. Nature

Designed by Dominic Crapuchettes. Published by North Star Games.

There’s a hint of sadness to Nature, at least in my reading of it. As the natural world retreats mile by mile, as microplastics crowd into raindrops and highways enclose the wilderness, the biomes and food chains that are the domain of Crapuchettes’ masterpiece recede like my hairline until all that remains are the fringes.

I’m being morose. Nature isn’t about such things. This is a card game, one descended from the competitive scene of Magic: The Gathering and a hundred other titles, worked and reworked until every card interaction is perfect, gorgeously illustrated to evoke a realm most of us will never get to encounter. Calories and population are the objective, evolution is the method. As your creatures develop more traits, hopefully they emerge better suited to tackle the challenges arrayed before them. Not often does a game leave me in awe of both its mechanical and visual purity; this is one such design.

Review: Apex Card Shark

#4. Vantage

Designed by Jamey Stegmaier. Published by Stonemaier Games.

Have we exited the phase of Vantage’s discourse where it’s cool to rag on this thing? Vantage is a shocking accomplishment, arguable weaknesses included, offering a multilayered world that unfolds like a map only to unspool like a ball of yarn only to peel apart like a sticker book. Every nook and cranny has something new to see, to touch, to taste. Sometimes to kiss. If those wonders should prove a little… undirected… well, that’s how actual adventures turn out sometimes. Even the principal criticism of Vantage reveals something wonderful about it.

And what a place. Part science fiction, part fantasy, all colorful dimensions, Vantage is both an illustration and a solution to the “map problem” that hounds pretty much every other adventure game. By offering a space you can actually get lost in, Stegmaier pulls the best trick of all: letting you find yourself.

Review: Life in First-Person

#3. Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars

Designed by Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini. Published by Ingenioso Hidalgo.

Somebody’s going to insist this is the mismatch of the list, but hear me out. Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars is a revelation. Not so much of individual illustration, but of what a hex-and-counter wargame can accomplish. Rather than stacking its chits to the heavens, Mori and Zucchini limit each space to two pieces, their arrangement providing a visual shorthand for the unit’s capabilities. Two chits beside one another make a firing line; arranged in a square means a column; splayed apart communicates a broken unit in need of a good smashing.

It isn’t long before the battlefield, in all its complexity, lays itself as bare as a color-coded chart. By making its space legible, the game gives the player command of its shifting lines and flanking horses; in turn, it isn’t long before clever maneuvers and risky feints become possible. This isn’t how Napoleon saw the battlefield — it’s far too vertical for that — but in its own gamey way, it feels like it.

Review: Hex-and-Counter Meets Its Little Boney

#2. Harmonies

Designed by Johan Benvenuto. Published by Libellud.

In abstraction, clarity. Harmonies is another title about the natural world, albeit one where humans have some limited presence, their red houses sharing space with mountains, rivers, and forests. More than that, it’s a game about topography and elevation. Trees soon pile atop trunks, mountains crane upward, and rivers and prairies settle into their basins where they belong.

And into these niches wander creatures. Even represented as cards and cubes, Harmonies evokes a particular impression of nature, like seeing a model of the surrounding area at a natural park. Carving a river in between mountains in order to place otters in their proper habitat is its own sensory delight. Or maybe I just like stacking those wooden discs. They feel so good.

Review: Two Minds in the Wild

#1. The Old King’s Crown

Designed by Pablo Clark. Published by Eerie Idol Games.

I have a jealousy in me for The Old King’s Crown. It isn’t right that a single person be this talented. Pablo Clark designed, illustrated, world-built, balanced, you name it, and seems to have emerged on the other side with his sanity intact. Maybe he would say “relatively” intact. So now he’s humble and charming, too? What a world. What an unfair world.

More seriously, The Old King’s Crown is perhaps the densest lane-battler ever made, which makes it all the stranger that it was never intended as a lane-battler. Two to four factions jostle to rule a kingdom that’s coming apart in the absence of its ruler, and each of them presents its own culture in miniature. Whether you’re playing as the old guard, the barbarians at the gates, the revolution, or another completely distinct revolution, everyone brings their own story to the table. It’s a game of bitter reversals and successes that are very hard to not whoop about. If I didn’t have to write about other games on occasion, I would try to play it one hundred times. For starters.

Review: All for Freedom and for Pleasure

There you have it: my top six beauties of the year. What were yours? Feed me that engagement. Drip it right into my veins by commenting below.

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