Best Strategic Board Games of 2025

Star Wars: Shatter Points receives all your favorite characters from the Clone Wars era and drops them into a classic team-based tabletop combat experience, allowing your imagination to do the rest of your work. Miniatures are available in simple assembly kits with little guidance needed, each one being relatively easy to paint to your personal preferences. Like miniatures, the rules of the game do a pretty good job of balancing the low learning curve and flexibility. Whether you’re not used to the tabletop miniature world or a veteran of this classic game style, there’s a lot to love about this game.

Because this conquest game feels very different every time you play it. Essentially, players are named because they are fighting for control of the board, like the risk of too little space to accommodate everyone. Bid for one of dozens of fantastic creatures. Each pairs randomly with additional special abilities. Then use special abilities to spread and collect coins based on the territory you control, leaving that race for a new race. This is an addictive gameplay loop, often equivalent to the interesting and competitive part, and can be learned and played within two hours.

The Twilight struggle, set during the Cold War, balances the strategic complexity of a “big” game with the simple mechanics of traditional conquest games like risk. One player takes on the role of the United States, while the other plays as the Soviet Union when they struggle with existence, domination, or complete control of various battlefield regions around the world. Both sides set people on the moon, to deconstruct the status of DEFCON through military operations, carefully avoid the devastation of nuclear war (immediate loss), and to spread influence around the world with a tug of war for global power. We’ll compete.

Agricola is one of the best board games ever designed and one of the best examples of worker placement mechanics. The concept is simple. Each player uses farmers and wives (called “workers”) to take various actions as seasonal progress, such as gatherings of wood and vegetables, upgrading farm homes, building pens, buying animals, and children. It’s finished. more. Over time, players will have children (using more workers) and expand the farm. But all of this problem is rarity. Agricola is a tough game. Even if the other person isn’t blocking you from certain actions, it often feels like you’re just worn out – get enough food to feed your family for the winter. Players often have very few (or negative) points in the first game, but once they start learning, they feel incredibly satisfying.

If you’re spending the day and want to play a long and rewarding game, you can’t do better than the food chain big name. It’s a very deep game of restaurant construction and staffing, menu design, ad payments, and money gathering. It is the extent to which the food chain big names are so much fun. You can hire dozens of different types of employees, sell dozens of foods, and use half a dozen ads. With the city and your enemies. This fun game is an investment, especially when it comes to expansion, but has been one of the most fun and unique takes in the Strategic Board Game format for many years.

Star Wars: Imperial Assault largely avoids the role-playing elements of dungeon crawlers like Gloomhaven, opting for solid combat mechanics that instead attack Imperial players with rebel players. Different missions have different setups – modular boards keep things fresh – so players understand bonuses for a particular group, how they can play allies, when to find a cover and when to charge. Fighting will be better.

The conquest game has come a long way since the risk, and one of the best is the rising sun. This is a game in which players control various regions of feudal Japan and spread it using samurai and other miniatures. What makes the game interesting is the non-traditional means of conflict and the end of conflict. Alliances lend your enemy more power, but betrayal can detract your reputation. You can earn points by winning battles, but committing ritual suicide, taking hostages, hiring a historian to amortize the warrior’s honor is actually a great victory for you. can.

What could become a simple game about conquering the region will be about your clan’s development, preserving their honor, and strategic partnerships with your enemies. If you want a game with lots of conflicts – but if that conflict is rarely easy or not clear, Rising Sun is the perfect game for you.

Many of the best strategy games take hours to play, but satisfying strategies don’t have to take all day. The Burgundy Castle is the perfect example of a great game that usually only takes about an hour. You know how to play – and is surprisingly playable. Each turn, the player rolls the dice. That number allows you to pick up specific land tiles from the central board or place them in specific spaces on your player board when expanding your kingdom. The central rules can be learned in minutes compared to some of the larger Euro games above, but Burgundy Castles make tough choices about how to deal with your uncontrolled dice rolls I’ll continue doing it.

In the Gaia Project, players are trying to expand their control over alien race galaxies, make planets habitable to race, build structures on them, acquire knowledge, and promote research. This strategic board game has a rather steep learning curve for those new to the Euro game, but once you enter the first game you will be able to understand the basics of a round or less than two times. The strategy is deep. It can be played as dozens of different races with unique abilities and research bonuses. Modular boards mean that the galaxies you are colonizing will never look the same. Also, many of the scoring and construction bonuses are randomized for each game, so the same strategy won’t win every time. The Gaia Project is a master class in game design and a complete joy to play.