My Top 10 Board Games of 2023

I think the title says it all! These are games that I’m pretty sure all released either to crowdfunding backers or in retail (or both) in 2023. This isn’t always reflected in the year that BGG (BoardGameGeek.com) has listed for its release, and the same holds true for some older designs that saw more world-wide release in 2023. Let’s get going:

#10: Motor City

I’ve loved Fleet for years. Dan Riddle and Ben Pinchback’s inclusion of First Nations fishing protections in the Arctic Bounty expansion may have just been about including a reality in the industry, but even so is probably one of the first mechanisms in the hobby to reward participating in Indigenous cultural revitalization.

My partner and I haven’t loved EVERY game team Ridback has designed, but their ethos and mindfulness have made me proud to follow their career and excited to try whatever they come up with next.

To that end, we loved 2022’s Three Sisters. And we also really enjoyed 2023’s Motor City.

In Motor City, you draft dice from a central board to take actions on one of two paper sheets. You can do some R&D on cars, go for drives on test tracks, do some marketing, and all of this in a smaller number of rounds than you’d reasonably want. That said, the arc of the game heightens and tightens toward the end in a really satisfying way, and if you’re a fan of Three Sisters you will be happy with this one too! We don’t own it because it wasn’t quite different enough for us, and I don’t know if I’d say this game is better than Three Sisters because we only played it once, but it did leave a strong impression as a solid 2023 game.

#9: Septima

We’ve been Mindclash fans for years too. In fact, we kickstarted Trickerion back in 2014 and it’s still one of our favorite games to this day.

Septima isn’t at Trickerion’s level of complexity, but it *is* at Trickerion’s level thematically. Mindclash pulled off a similar stunt in Cerebria, but limited the ultimately simple game’s accessibility by letting the rulebook get bogged down in thematic gobbledygook.

They learned their lesson in Septima, with straightforward actions with text printed right on the cards. You lead your coven of witches through the town and forest, trying to elude capture from the easy-to-run Hunters and seed the witch trial juries with the loyal citizens who know the benefits your healing potions have provided the community.

The first time we played the “advanced game” with the “Ritual” track we realized most of the way through that we were doing the action matching too easily, but the second playthrough we did to round out 2023 showed that even with some stricter rules in place, it’s still an interesting tool to both help guide you forward with some extra rewards, but also makes the puzzle you’re trying to solve in each of the game’s 20 brief rounds just a little bit trickier if you really want to go for the gold medal.

Trickerion will always have our hearts and brains, but Septima is going to probably see our table a lot more often.

#8: Micro Cosmos

Micro City was an intriguing 1-2 player worker placement game, and Micro Cosmos is an even more impressive follow-up. Tiny Epic Galaxies is done and dusted, swallowed up in a black hole of its own 4x-iness.

Micro Cosmos is instead a pick-up-and-deliver game that is the ANTI-4x space game. The epic war is over, and you play as a ship that is traveling from war-torn planet to war-torn planet, salvaging resources there to terraform other ravaged worlds and rebuild homeworlds. And what homeworld is complete without people to live there? You can also pick up refugees and return them to their home systems for big points. The rules are pretty straightforward, and while the game can take a little bit of time to pick up speed, the feelings it evokes via its system of incentives and rewards are more than worth it.

Micro Cosmos is probably the game with the most thoughtful narrative premise I’ve played since Messina 1347. Circadians: First Light is close, and works on a planetary level, but Micro Cosmos succeeds at a similar exploration of theme on an interplanetary scale.

#7 Jiangnan: Life of Gentry

Okay, so I need to level with you. I didn’t write the blurbs for this list in order but in order to write this one, I need to talk about another game that is actually higher (lower? Closer to the bottom, which means the higher regard lol) on this list, so I’m going to give you a spoiler here.

Somewhere later on I have given Delta a spot in this list. Delta is a game that involves placing cards out to take actions, and after everyone is done taking actions there are influence stars on the cards that determine the drafting order of additional cards players get for future rounds or endgame scoring.

Jiangnan: Life of Gentry is very similar, in that it is a worker placement game where the workers you place out during the round get turned into influence meeples that are placed onto boats lined up beneath them. As the rounds progress, the boats move across the board to the next placement area, and each round one boat gets spit out the end of the board and whoever has the most influence on it gets to choose a scoring condition for the intervals and/or endgame.

The other thing similar about it is that the resource gathering and spending part of the game is really simple and straightforward.

What Jiangnan adds is that additional layer of timing, as boats you want to score need to line up with the actions you intend to perform. This is somewhat closer to the Ritual track idea in Septima, actually! Another thing it adds is its action selection system, where (in a sort of scaled-back Gloom/Frosthaven situation) every turn you have to pick TWO action tokens in a queue drawn from your bag, and take the action from the top of one and the bonus from the bottom of the other. At the end of each round, you then draft additional tokens to put back into your bag for the second half of the game.

I’ve played two games of Jiangnan so far, and the chief thing that keeps it back is the length. This is an incredibly clever, but VERY involved game! It feels very tidy in going through your bag twice over four rounds (24 turns total), but there is so much that goes into each choice, and so much bookkeeping between rounds, that it is not easy to breeze through and you definitely feel the drag as you play it.

That said, I think this game getting a North American release is so important. Taiwan has been such a rich ground of game design as seen in the releases of publisher EmperorS4 (Realm of Sand, Hanamikoji, Round House are our favorites) and now Moaideas has brought Jiangnan to our tables. Much like S4’s Round House with Viscounts of the West Kingdom, and also China’s “Pingyao: First Chinese Banks” with Xavier Georges’s Carnegie, the games we’re seeing from eastern Asia rival the sleekness and weight of choice of the designs that have the most similarities (and that these Asian games PRE-DATED by years!!!) yet seem to get such little attention in the hobby due to their scarcity, fulfillment difficulties, or niche nature of their releases.

Supporting games and publishers that involve cultural consultants when the designers aren’t from the culture they’re depicting is great, but supporting the actual designers depicting their own cultures and histories can only further help keep the hobby inclusive at both ends of the game pipeline.

#6: La Granja: Deluxe Master Set

Yes, it’s a reprint. No, the original didn’t really get its due when it came out and has become harder to find. Does it hold up in 2023, 7 years after its initial release?

Yes. Yes it does. (Though, as my partner put it, La Granja is a pretty good board game implementation of an amazing dice game. No Siesta! is our favorite Roll n Write.)

The dice draft is interesting, the multi-use cards are so varied with interesting abilities and choices to make. The mish-mash of round phases somehow comes together into a smooth-as-silk complete package of an experience that breezes through its six rounds, even with three or four players.

And hey, with all these deluxe Master Sets out there, maybe you can find a used copy of the original for cheap, since they didn’t actually change anything about the game itself! The original is just a little less user-friendly in the component and graphic design.

#5: Leaf

This is the gateway game of the year, hands-down. I played this game with experienced gamers, I played this game with novice gamers who latched onto it. The different actions are tied to different colored leaves, leaves give you actions based on how many tips of the leaf you place each turn touch them, and the actions are simple enough and displayed clearly on the player aids so no one gets lost.

This should win the Spiel des Jahres, but it’ll probably just get a Kennerspiel recommendation instead.

#4: Delta

Starting here, I’ve played each of the remaining games at least four or five times. And with Delta, it’s easy to do because despite retaining the flavor of Skymines – an EASY inspiration to clock – it pares back the worst of the crunchiness of the card selection system without completely eliminating the consequence. It also keeps the runtime respectable for a 4-player game night. In fact, I had a group of three finish this in under two hours! We also all finished within three points of each other, so if you have experience players there are plenty of levers to pull and maneuver.

My only complaint here is purely artistic/thematic – if you have hot air balloons for airships, why are they depicted as being on rails? And sure, there are robo-horses… but they’re capable of PILOTING AN AIRSHIP?! As long as you can suspend your disbelief (or incredulity!) enough to get into what the actual game has to offer, you are sure to be rewarded with a well-tuned and well-oiled mechanimal of an evening.

#3: Autobahn

Having played Carnegie and Brass and many other hand management games in the past, Autobahn takes the best parts of all of those and wraps them all up in a brilliant, tight package (Sorry, Nucleum). This may have “officially” released in 2022 due to the kickstarter or something, but this didn’t become available until well into 2023 so I consider it a 2023 game.

Mechanically, the road map of West Germany is divided into several colors, and players have a hand of cards in the colors of each region. Each turn, they either play a card to one of a few action slots of their board (each of which can hold 1-3 cards), or they can cash out and pick their cards back up.

The actions involve laying road on the Autobahn, developing segments of road to better road, developing technology, building refuel stations, or moving their trucks to deliver goods to other German cities to get bonuses.

Performing certain actions also allows you to promote a manager to an office matching the color of the section you developed, and there are also ways to promote them further to a separate board, where you can customize and specialize your own endgame scoring based on multiplying your rewards for a few different criteria.

Another neat touch here is that the third “era” of the game occurs after the fall of the Berlin wall, and opens up East Germany for connection to the rest of the newly united country. This provides fertile ground for zooming through the remainder of the road pieces (the timer on the game) and the last scramble for maximizing points is a thrilling frustration and a nice climax to the arc of this game.

#2: Frosthaven

We bumped on Gloomhaven pretty hard when we tried it back in 2017, and the video game port has recently backed up that bump as the grind required to make progress on standard difficulty without absolutely mastering every little nuance of your character is just untenable.

Frosthaven has definitely improved on Gloomhaven and Jaws of the Lion in other ways, primarily by better scenario tuning as far as movement abilities are concerned as well as the inclusion of the Outpost Phase, where players are no longer trying to get just gold but also gather other resources to help build businesses and industries in the fledgling town. These new buildings expand what the players can do between missions, and the smorgasbord of road and outpost events keep us wondering what is going to happen next. The characters are also really creative and we’re enjoying discovering what each one we unlock brings to the table.

Of course, also flavoring our experience is the fact that we’re basically playing the game on “story mode,” where we take the rulebook’s recommended scenario level and take it down one more notch. It has still led to many close calls, while we can enjoy the system and the story without the tiresome grind. If you want to give it a try and the difficulty of Gloomhaven was a barrier for you, we highly recommend doing this.

#1: Artisans of Splendent Vale

The most inclusive campaign game to date takes our top spot. Nikki Valens pulled together an incredible team of writers and artists with Renegade’s backing and delivered a thrilling narrative adventure of dangerous escapades and cozy home lives. Compared to their previous narrative effort, Legacy of Dragonholt, Splendent Vale is a bit more on rails and could be considered as “less of a game and more of an activity” as you cannot “lose” most things. However, like Dragonholt, victory can still be measured in degrees, and those degrees are what is worth fighting for here. The same is true for Renegade’s other bright colorful cooperative game, Aquicorn Cove (which, if you enjoyed Splendent Vale, I would recommend picking up even though it’s not a campaign game. It just feels nice!)

BGG has this listed as a 2022 game, but I was a kickstarter backer on this one and it didn’t arrive to me until 2023. For that reason, I’m counting it as a 2023 release.

We played the whole campaign in, I think, 14 sessions that totaled just over 40 hours of gameplay? Well worth it for couples, or especially if you can split the cost of the game across a group of 4. You can read my much longer thoughts on it on my BGG blog entry here.

The top 5 unplayed

There were some games that came out in 2023 that I wanted to play but haven’t gotten a chance to yet! These include Vladmir Suchy’s Evacuation (Messina 1347 IN SPACE), Capstone Games and Simone Luciani’s Rats of Wister (NIMH: the board game), Earthborne Rangers (solarpunk Arkham: the Card Game), Trailblazers (Pipeline/Curious Cargo but for parks), and Lacuna (the most unique abstract 2-player-only game of 2023 [that I saw] about plucking flowers from a pool).

And that’s it from me!

Happy New Year to everyone, and may the tensions in the middle east find a swift resolution in 2024.

When an apartheid state declares themselves the victim, remember who holds the power and interpret the things you hear accordingly.