The most anticipated new board games of 2025

The board game industry has a tough challenge on its hands. The slate of 2024 releases was incredibly strong, and it’s difficult to imagine this year’s upcoming games being able to meet that established bar. There is always hope, and each year I am continually stunned with at least a couple of high-concept games that deliver a unique and visceral encounter.

It’s impossible to predict how the year will shape up before it’s even begun, but that won’t stop me from laying out several titles that are hotly anticipated. These nine games caught my eye, promising a variety of compelling experiences. With any luck, a portion of my expectations will be met and we will be talking about these titles again at year’s end.

Here are the key board games to keep an eye on heading into 2025.

Cyberpunk 2077: The Board Game

Designer: Łukasz Woźniak

Slip into the body of an Edgerunner and fight your way through Night City by rolling fistfuls of dice and carrying out actions in real time. That’s the hard sell, and it sounds wonderful. This narrative adventure game is app-driven, with your phone or tablet handling enemy actions as well as unexpected events and twists. You must act quickly, rolling dice on your turn and then spending those dice to move about the board and deal out pain to your foes.

The real-time format has been successful before, and it could perfectly fit the frenetic action of the video game. Cyberpunk 2077: The Board Game hopes to capture this spirit and offer a unique tabletop design that provides drama and cinematics. There is enough going on here that I’m concerned it could all bust apart at the seams, but that’s part of the joy of finding out.

Don’t Starve: The Board Game

Designer: Rafał Pieczyński

Video game adaptations have recently been highly successful in the board game hobby. Just in 2024, Slay the Spire: The Board Game and Dead Cells: The Board Game proved compelling translations from digital to tabletop. Don’t Starve: The Board Game will now get its shot, coming from the board game publisher that brought to life the fantastic adaptation Frostpunk: The Board Game.

Don’t Starve has up to four players exploring and surviving in a nightmarish procedurally generated world. You can experiment with both magic and science, interweaving the two together in your bid for survival against both the elements and terrifying creatures that populate the realm. Part horror and part survival game, this should shape up to be a gripping experience on the tabletop.

Prolific designer Reiner Knizia has designed hundreds of games over five decades. Publisher Bitewing Games has published several of his recent releases and just announced that it will be publishing three more in 2025. The most enticing of the trio is Iliad, a two-player, 30-minute tile-laying game set in the epic backdrop of Homer’s poem about the Trojan war.

This has the look shared by Knizia’s classic work, boasting a minimalist ruleset with strong emergent nuance. The goal is to place your soldier tiles in specific rows or columns so that you have the most strength and can earn tokens representing the gods’ favor. It promises a tense affair with painful trade-offs and hand management. How deep the decision-making goes remains to be seen, but I’m eager to experience the struggle firsthand.

Designers: Leo Cunha, Nicole Lobo, and Daniel Pettersen de Lucena

Malediction asks the question: What if the creatures you summoned in Magic: The Gathering actually appeared on a battlefield and could be manipulated? This upcoming card game combines elements of miniatures skirmish gaming with two-player card battlers. Both genres are woven together with a brooding and evocative setting full of detail.

The concept is ambitious. Each asymmetric faction is packaged separately and contains everything you need to play, including a full set of character standees for all of your monsters and warriors. However, those with the necessary hardware and initiative may 3D print detailed miniatures for their warband, as each boxed set includes access to official STL files for the faction. Malediciton is set to debut on Gamefound soon with a relatively quick turnaround time, as the game is expected to be fully available in the latter half of 2025.

Designers: Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle

Molly House is an unusual game that touches on a unique portion of history. Players take on the roles of gender-defying mollies in 18th-century England, attending social events while avoiding moralistic constables. These activities are represented through a hand of vice cards representing encounters and desires frowned upon by the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Players work together to host parties, but they must be careful. An informant could have infiltrated the group, threatening the entire community.

Part of the appeal of this game from first-time designer Jo Kelly is that it was a finalist for the 2021 Zenobia Award. Another feather in its cap is that it’s being produced by Drew and Cole Wehrle. Cole of course has designed hits such as Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right and Arcs: Conflict & Collapse in the Reach, but the Wehrle brothers together produced second editions of Pax Pamir and John Company, two modern classics that are among the best historical board gaming has to offer. Molly House looks to be this publisher’s next big hit.

Designer: Bernard Grzybowski

This is one we won’t have to wait long for, as Purple Haze is currently being fulfilled to crowdfunding supporters and is set to hit retail soon after. On the surface this is a squad-based wargame where players control a United States Marine unit that embarks on missions into the terrifying Vietnam jungle. It has an eye beyond irregular combat, however, seeking to support a rich emergent narrative with scripted story passages. There’s a spirit here that harkens back to the classic Avalon Hill 1983 title Ambush!, where paragraphs of text are referenced at key points in the mission. This flourish adds life to the environment and seeks to achieve something more meaningful by stringing together a larger coherent story.

This game appears experimental for the wargame genre, but it’s actually indicative of current narrative gaming trends from the hobby at large. The potential is enormous for a crossover hit, and fans of films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket will find a tone and demeanor that greatly appeals.

Revenant leads with visuals and story. An ancient cosmic threat has awakened, and players are tasked with carrying out humanity’s last hope. They must maintain and escort the Revenant, a retrofitted imperial flagship holding the secrets of their civilization. Allegiances may shift at any moment and the remnant of society is fragile.

This is a direct sequel to Voidfall, a sprawling 4X board game originally published in 2023. It continues the story from that previous release, allowing a group to play out the last days of a forsaken people.

Mechanically, this is a sophisticated game of competitive worker placement where the various ships in the fleet are utilized to fight the voidborn and collect resources. It appears a fascinating and complex strategic affair, one certainly worth diving into.

Designer: Jarrod Carmichael

Shadow Moon Syndicates is a gorgeous card game. Players take on the roles of various criminal syndicate crime bosses, each vying for control of the mining colony Shadow Moon. Cards are used each round to influence regions of the colony, carry out high-stakes operations, and assemble teams of specialists. Managing your hand of cards is central to the game’s strategy.

With such a rad and stylized setting, this game looks lively and evocative on the tabletop. It features a gripping concept and pits players against each other while performing nefarious deeds and underhanded black ops.

Shadow Moon Syndicates seems to exhale cool, and it’s another game where I’m eager to see how it lands.

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier

Vantage is the most mysterious entry on this list, for details are still scarce. What we do know is that the publisher of Wingspan is putting out an open-world cooperative adventure game in 2025, and it’s likely to be something entirely unique.

Up to six players are scattered across the world and must explore their environs. There are nearly 800 interconnected locations on 400 cards, with over 900 other discoverable cards waiting to be encountered. These numbers are dizzying, but it’s difficult to know what this looks like in reality. Vantage is predicated on freedom, allowing each player full authority to interact and explore their own location from a first-person perspective. The more information discovered about this game the more unusual it sounds. Without a doubt, it’s going to be one of the most talked-about releases of 2025.