Sure, you’ve heard about ARCS, and for good reason, but don’t let Cole Wehrle’s latest distract you from what was another great year in board games. The list below holds twelve of 2024’s best titles for tabletop gamers a cut beyond Catan, so read on, and have that Want List ready.
Mistwind
In the last two years, games named Mythwind and Mistwind launched. We talked about Mythwind, a cozy adventure, a few weeks back, but today we’re talking about flying whales and cutthroat trading. Mistwind takes the classic euro setup to the skies, playing over four rounds as you deliver cargo, set up routes, and jockey with other players for contracts.
Beyond the neat setting (again, flying whales!) Mistwind (Adrian Adamescu, Daryl Andrews) uses a nifty worker placement/blocking mechanism that helps it stand apart. Every round, you’ll get action discs with a number on each between one and five. You’ll ditch one, then use the others to do, ya know, actions. The trick is, once a player has put a disc on an action, no other disc with the same number can use it. If Jimmy’s dropped his three to score some cargo, and you’ve only got your three left, you’ll have to make a hard decision. It’s a little more interesting than “I put a guy there, so it’s mine” style of blocking, and it helps Mistwind stand out as a tight euro, where planning and strategic blocking keep the group engaged through its two hour play time.
Also, whales.
Nova Roma
There’s something satisfying about a rich point salad, and Nova Roma (Stan Kordonskiy) delivers on the do-a-thing, score-some-points principle by taking you back to ancient Rome, a time and place where needs were abundant. Playing a noble house, you’ll be throwing workers around trying to capitalize on new trade routes, building up the city, winning in chariot races, and all sorts of things the Roman elite did to score life’s victory points. While all those things might seem a bit standard, albeit dressed up in thematic gloss, Nova Roma adds some great spice with the individual player boards.
These Bingo-esque grids shower you in points if you manage to complete rows and columns through careful planning and stellar execution. At a glance, trying to fulfill various conditions might seem random until you consider you’re actually growing your noble family’s prestige. Closing more deals, winning more races, building the fanciest amphitheaters all work in concert to bolster your standing in the city. Nova Roma’s a solid, strategic euro that’ll transport you back to the time of leaded wine and togas, and a perfect complement to the gladiatorial games we featured a few weeks back.
Inventions: Evolution of Ideas
Stop me if you’ve played this one: a heavy, thematic euro game by Vital Lacerda. Okay, so the designer has a niche, but boy, what a niche and what a series of games. Play one, whether it’s The Gallerist, Kanban, On Mars, or this one, Inventions, and you’ll learn whether you find his layered systems intoxicating or confusing. I’m in the former camp, and find it easy to get lost in the stream of actions, points, and thematic flourishes. With Inventions, we’re getting more abstract, essentially developing ideas into tech to advance our own respective civilizations.
All the Lacerda hallmarks are here: Ian O’Toole art making everything functionally gorgeous, combo-riffic gameplay that’s incredibly satisfying to pull off and challenging to set up, and a heavy allotment of rules grit to make the whole thing hold together. That last bit bears repeating, both as a warning and a calling. Inventions lands near the top of Lacerda’s titles in complexity. Parsing its secrets, learning new ways to make your ideas sing, is both an act of determination and discovery, one that will reward you with a game full of depth.
Find two or three folks willing to tackle games like Inventions with you, and you’ll never be bored.
SETI
Listening to radio signals from space in hopes of finding aliens has been a hobby of sorts for nearly a century. SETI, the board game, is, er, quite a bit fresher than that, but keeps the initiative’s spirit. Attempting to make the most groundbreaking discovery, you and your fellow players will race to launch
probes to distant worlds, peer into the unknown with your telescopes, and upgrade all the related equipment. You’ll do all this through a large deck of cards, each of which will offer ways to score points. And, if you’re successful, those aliens might just show up and change the game.
SETI (Tomáš Holek) sits in a comfortable medium-weight euro slot, teachable without too much fuss, but with enough variation in the card draw and scoring possibilities to bring people back to try new strategies. If you’ve played Terraforming Mars a billion times and want something with a similar sci-fi theme, SETI is a fun complement, or, if you’re wanting a solid step up from lighter fare, SETI is a great gateway to more advanced euros, drenched in high quality production and theme.
Civolution
Best known for classic Castles of Burgundy, Stefan Feld’s Civolution dials up the strategy for a full-blown civilization builder. You’ll be taking on a deity’s mantle to guide your nascent people through several early ages. You’ll explore, build, and research through dice placement (roll and use, similar to Castles of Burgundy), draft a small card tableau with key effects, and try to achieve points-earning goals in each of the ages. There’s a lot of space here, with freedom to take your people across a desert or right up to a volcano, to nab a key tech before other players, or to stay in your lane and craft a concentrated city.
Civolution feels heavier than it is, with options creating a tantalizing maze but the gameplay flow smoothed out by the dice and their constraints on your choices. You’ll have to adapt while growing your civ, not follow a glide path to an arbitrary score at game’s end. There’s light interaction, but you won’t be marching troops into each other’s lands, making Civolution a great 2024 euro game for those who love Ark Nova or Terraforming Mars.
Black Forest
C’mon, if Uwe Rosenberg makes a game, odds are it’s going to end up on one of these lists. Black Forest is no exception, continuing Rosenberg’s quaint village and farming obsession with predictably satisfying results. This time, he blends the resource wheels of Glass Road with Agricola’s worker placement. You’ll recruit specialists, construct buildings, and try to keep your resources balanced and score all the points amid the cheerful German woods.
Black Forest, though, strikes a balance between both of its related titles. Agricola has a vicious edge to it, with tight blocking and resource needs to avoid starvation. Black Forest is kinder, as you’ll rarely find yourself prevented from getting your spots, and you’ll not, er, lose all your points because your farm was a swampy misery (I’m not good at Agricola, okay?). Glass Road gives you benefits (or hurts you) for guessing what your fellow players will choose to do every round. Black Forest does away with the cards, and sands off that edge.
So what’re we left with? A game with a pleasant theme, an enjoyable puzzle, and a gentler on-ramp to Rosenberg’s more prickly titles. Worth a look if you’ve ever been curious about Rosenberg’s heavier work.
Maladum
All right, that’s enough euros. Time to get to the dice-chucking, the card battling, the wild edges of 2024’s board gaming options. First up is Maladum
(Stewart Gibbs, Colin Young), Battle System’s fantasy pseudo-sequel to Core Space. This is a unique dungeon crawl with an emphasis on extraction—it’s not enough to get the treasure, you have to get out alive. Characters left behind will need to be rescued in follow-up missions, your mercenary crew will need to get paid to stick around, and you just might find a mauling bear hiding out in the next room.
Maladum falls squarely in the chaos factor of dungeon crawlers, one less concerned with a precise experience than in creating memories. Event cards can warp scenarios in ways that in other settings or game styles might feel broken, but here just add to the flavor. Characters and classes develop in fresh avenues, and should you find yourself without a weapon, you can indeed throw a chair at that skeleton’s face. It’s a big game, a unique one, and refreshing in its innovations.
If you’re looking for a dungeon crawler but want to branch out, try something different from the rest, give Maladum a long look. It’ll reward you.
Dune: War for Arrakis
Fans of big, IP-driven, two-player war games have been holding firm with Star Wars: Rebellion and War of the Ring for years, so when CMON released Dune: War for Arrakis (Marco Maggi, Francesco Nepitello) this year, the breath of fresh air was palpable. Pitching a battle on the desert planet between the Harkonnen’s high tech armies and the House Atreides and the Fremen’s sandworm freestyle, War for Arrakis brings the best elements of this genre to the fore: big faction differences, multiple paths to victory, and a play time that will take your afternoon but not your weekend.
That last line is important, as War for Arrakis packs its playtime with big moments, events you’ll see more than once or twice a year because we’re talking two hours, not four or six. You’ll leverage an action dice system similar to War of the Ring, with your roll driving troop movement, card play, and special abilities, as both sides go for different objectives. Balancing advancing your own victory against stopping the opponent proves fruitful ground for strategy, bringing you back to the desert time and time again.
Agemonia
If Maladum is a classic dungeon crawler spruced up with modern twists, then Agemonia (Max Wikström) is the modern storybook adventure, where your heroes grow, make skill checks and battle enemies, all in service of an epic narrative crafted by your own choices. Adopting the fresh style of map books, where setting up a new adventure is as simple as turning a page, Agemonia delivers dice-driven tactical combat spiced with options, and where your action defines when you’ll act on the next round. That conceit forces cooperation with other characters, with skilled play letting a team dash, slay, and cast spells in smooth synchrony.
What will draw you into Agemonia most, though, is the story. Leveraging keywords to twist the narrative based on your actions, similar to Tainted Grail, Agemonia is less a story told to you, than one you create. Helping with the immersion is the wholly optional, but definitely worth trying, companion app. With full narration and soundscapes (who doesn’t love some good fantasy tunes?), the app helps bring the adventure to fresh life, while ensuring you and your friends can focus on your characters. It’s also a great asset for solo players, helping to track stats and remove the need for paper. All told, if you’re looking for a new story-driven adventure, Agemonia is one to explore.
Primal: The Awakening
Monster hunting is a tried and true gaming theme for the simple reason that it’s generally a good time to gather up your friends and go challenge some mighty beast. Primal: The Awakening (Tommaso Mondadori, Alberto Parisi) introduces a unique take on the genre, making every battle against wild creatures one of strategic card play, hand management, and tactical movement around a small (four zones) board. That slim arena size might seem strange, but works incredibly well with Primal’s monster AI, which works through a behavior deck triggered by your actions. Attack from the front, say, and the monster might bite back, but if you maneuver to the side, that strike could land without a counter. This seems simple, but Primal is the definition of hard co-op. You’ll have to work together, or the monsters will definitely be eating humans for dinner.
Primal also strikes a balance between a campaign game and one-off session. The core campaign lasts about a dozen sessions (each lasting about two hours, in my experience) with plenty of branching paths to encourage replays. You’ll pursue quest lines, unlock new gear and cards, and change your hunter’s strategy to play best with your pals. There’s also an expedition mode, letting you dive into a fight with any beastie using preset, custom decks as a standalone challenge, perfect for when that urge to wield a great blade strikes hard. Primal is a challenging game, worth a look for any fans of co-op boss battlers, deck-construction games, and folks who just want really cool, really big miniatures of fantastic beasts (me).
Star Wars: Unlimited
It’s always a risk putting a collectible card game (CCG) on this list, because you never know how long they’ll be running. Star Wars: Unlimited (Jim 
Cartwright, Tyler Parrott, Daniel Schaefer, Jeremy Zwirn) comes in as that rare exception, exploding onto the scene in 2024 with a potent mix of Destiny-derived action-by-action gameplay coupled with classic sci-fi personality. In Unlimited, you’ll usually be competing with 50+ card decks, crafted from your collection and using both a leader and a base. That base acts as your life, and you’ll win if you can destroy your opponent’s before they blow up yours. The leader, like Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, gives you a unique ability and can, for enough resources, take the field to deliver some personal pain.
Beyond the back-and-forth actions (unlike, say, Magic, where one player takes their entire turn before play swaps), Unlimited brings some other neat evolutions to the table: for one, combat is split between space and ground—no Ewok vs. Star Destroyer battles here—meaning you’ll have to have strategies for both. You’ll also get new resources to spend by placing cards from your deck facedown on the board. You’re never starved for ‘mana’ here, but deciding which card to lose is never an easy choice. It’s a 15-20 minute game packed with decisions, swings, and action.
Star Wars: Unlimited opened with three sets in 2024, releasing approximately every quarter, with more planned out for years. If you’ve been looking for a new card game to dive into, Unlimited brings innovation and strong community support (Fantasy Flight knows how this works now, folks) to the practice of popping packs. Stop in on a draft night and find yourself launching off on a new adventure.
Halo: Flashpoint
New miniature skirmish games crop up all over the place, so pairing with one you enjoy is usually a matter of theme. If you grew up in the 2000s and had an Xbox around, you probably jumped into Master Chief’s armored suit and bashed some aliens. Halo: Flashpoint gives you the chance to put that Spartan armor back on and get into the battle, with a number of clean updates to the format that make gameplay as swift, furious, and fun as any Slayer match.
Halo streamlines play by eliminating rulers, slimming down the often massive list of keywords, and turning combat into an easy opposed roll, with cover and abilities adding or subtracting dice for either side. You’ll be able to blitz through matches in 90 minutes or less, leaving time to try new tactics or experiment with some of the many modes on offer (King of the Hill, anyone?). Different editions offer alien forces or teams of Spartans squaring off against one another, making it easy to build a manageable collection without breaking your budget. The minis come assembled, and the terrain arrives as foldable cardstock. That might irk more hardcore Warhammer junkies, but Halo is all about speed, ease of play, and fun, which is exactly what it delivers.
2024 again delivered a great selection of next level games, no matter your genre. Euros, boss battlers, and dungeon crawlers all received fantastic new entries, with several setting the stage for expansions and sequels in the years ahead. As ever, leverage that Want List to know when a game you like comes in, and have a great holiday gaming season!
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