Copyright Polygon
Tickets to the world’s largest board game fair, Germany’s SPIEL Essen 2025, sold out this year, with 220,000 people attending to get first looks at more than 1,700 new board games from 948 exhibitors, hailing from 50 countries. (For perspective, Gen Con, the biggest board game convention in North America, brings in 72,000 people and has 575 exhibitors.) Many of the most anticipated titles quickly sold out, and people gathered just to watch fully booked demos of some games that won’t be available to play at home until 2027, like Don’t Starve: The Board Game. Over the course of four days and nights at the game fair, I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what was available. But I did my best to try a wide range of games from a mix of new designers and industry legends, including Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave and Ra designer Reiner Kinzia. Here are the 10 best things I played at SPIEL Essen 2025. 10 7 Wonders Dice Antoine Bauza’s 7 Wonders is one of the most celebrated board games of all time, and it’s previously been spiced up with multiple expansions and a two-player version. 7 Wonders Dice reinvents the drafting game as a write-and-roll that can be played with two to seven players, with the simultaneous gameplay centered on a shared dice box, ensuring the action always moves quickly. The dice are used to unlock upgrades on your board, and even allow you to access more powerful dice in later turns. 7 Wonders Dice feels fresh while staying very true to the satisfying gameplay that made 7 Wonders a classic. Available now for $32.99 at Asmodee 9 Ants I’m so used to designers’ promised durations for heavily strategic games being wrong, especially on a first-time playthrough with a full table, that I was pleasantly surprised to finish a game of Ants in the 90 minutes listed on the box. Each player controls an ant colony, competing for resources and exploring the terrain as efficiently as possible. That involves trying to predict your future needs by raising specialized ants from eggs, while picking cards that can help you immediately, provide edges throughout the game, or improve your score at the end. You never fight your opponents head-to-head, instead trying to adapt to their strategies to seize the advantage when the game quickly pivots from ramping up to racing towards victory. Available now for $69 at Cranio Creations 8 Cosmolancer Reiner Kinzia’s classic board game Kingdoms gets a sci-fi spin in Kinzia’s Cosmolancer. As a freelance space photographer, your goal is to capture the best images you can of vibrant neon-colored cosmic phenomena while avoiding dangers that will mess up your shot. This takes the form of players placing tiles representing photo ops and hazards, along with camera tokens signifying the shots they’re trying to line up, all while hoping they don’t get sabotaged by their opponent’s next play. It’s super-fast-paced and chaotic, simple enough to play with older kids and adults without much board game experience while still feeling like it’s got some satisfying strategy when it comes to conserving resources reading the board. Available now for $22.40 at Amazon 7 Don’t Starve: The Board Game Glass Cannon Unplugged raised more than $4.8 million on Kickstarter for the adaptation of Klei Entertainment’s Don’t Starve, and like the developer’s previous video game adaptation projects, This War of Mine: The Board Game and Frostpunk: The Board Game, it’s very faithful to the source game. Up to four players work together to explore, gather resources, and craft items they’ll need to slay monsters and endure the elements. The pieces look great, combat is fast and intuitive, and it was very satisfying to flip through a booklet of cards representing recipes, looking for what I could put together to improve my chances of survival. Expected release date: March 2027 6 Fateforge: Kin of the Wild The app-driven dungeon crawler Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan was already a standout in a crowded genre, thanks to its fast-paced, creative combat system. The add-on expansion Kin of the Wild adds something everyone can love: pets. The animal companions have their own striking miniatures and small boards representing their distinctive abilities, like hunting down enemies with stealth or defending their PC companions, without adding so much complexity that the new addition feels intimidating to someone who’s never played the base game. Having some extra actions, or ablative hits (pets always come back restored after an encounter, so you don’t have to worry too much about them) just makes it a bit easier to race to complete objectives in time. Expected release date: Late November 2025 5 Heroes: Write & Conquer Fans of the Warcraft and Heroes of Might and Magic video games can get the feel of building up a fantasy army and claiming territory in Heroes: Write & Conquer. Eschewing miniatures and a big map in favor of just a set of faction sheets, Heroes: Write & Conquer is shockingly compact for a war game. Each of the six factions has its own abilities and tech tree, and you’ll build structures, recruit units, gather resources, and battle other players and monsters as you try to earn the most points by the end of the game. There are no dice — every move is determined by the players, with just a bit of hidden information to keep things exciting. Expected release date: TBD 4 Origin Story Players craft their own superhero (or occasionally supervillain) over the course of five rounds in the trick-taking game Origin Story. You start with a gorgeous player map giving you a starting power, then pick up a wide variety of other additions to your character, such as allies, backstory events, and equipment that can grant you additional abilities for either the entire game or the course of a round, based on how you invest your resources. These allow you to earn more points by taking tricks if you’re going the hero path, or avoiding taking them if you’re pursuing the much trickier villain path. The game is also shaped by events that can make players team up against each other, pass their cards around, or otherwise play by different rules, throwing a wrench in your established strategy. The art is gorgeous, and the myriad combinations give Origin Story a high level of replayability. Available now for $27 at Stonemaier Games 3 Sanibel The latest soothing nature-themed board game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave is releasing in 2026. But while the chill vibes are the same, Sanibel’s mechanics are very different from Wingspan and its follow-ups, Finspan and Wyrmspan. Players guide their meeples along a beach, picking up shells and shark teeth to add to a mat representing their bag, forming collections and patterns with their own scoring conditions. The strategy comes from the placement and whether you race ahead to grab your preferred prizes before other players, or take your time to try to fill as much bag space as possible. Expected release date: January 2026 2 Take Time Dixit and Mysterium publisher Libellud Studios offers a new beautiful game about working together with limited communication. Take Time tasks players with placing cards around a clock face so the values are always going up, even though they don’t know what the other players put down, unless they use one of their limited numbers of clues to play a card face-up. Forty different challenges add extra restrictions, making each go-around a fresh struggle, as you hope you can trust your fellow players’ instincts. Available now for $32.99 at Amazon 1 Wispwood Reed Ambrose’s tile-laying game Wispwood is for Cascadia fans who prefer cats and goth vibes to scientific accuracy. Players build out a forest by slotting in colorful wisps, each of which has its own conditions for scoring, plus trees that fill in space like Tetris pieces. At the end of the first two rounds, you score and the trees go away, leaving you with an oddly patchy network of wisps to grow a new forest around during the next round. The strategy for deciding how and where to expand and what patterns to pursue gives the game plenty of complexity, though it’s easy to learn and fast to play.
