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Also a more complex title, Lost Ruins of Arnak places players on an uncharted and uninhabited island with the ruins and whispers of a long-departed civilization. You’re there to explore, but there might be creatures and traps that can catch the unprepared by surprise. This title from Elwen and Mín combines elements of deck building with worker placement for a deep and challenging game of exploration, management, and resource collection.

Each round, you can choose to use your archaeologists to explore existing sites or try and discover new ones. While discovering a new site earns you resources and benefits, it also awakens a Guardian, whom you must defeat before the end of the round or you’ll lose points. You can then exchange resources gradually for Artifacts and Items that are added to your deck to be used later or spend them on Research to help advance your understanding of these mysterious ruins. A major component of the game is figuring out ways to make sure what you need and what you’re getting synergize so that you can make even more progress in a limited amount of time. If you’re a fan of exploration and looking for a challenge, Lost Ruins of Arnak certainly offers both.

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In the storyline of this game, the eponymous Spirit Island appeared at first to a group of invaders to be uninhabited. But after many conflicts with the native Dahan population, the invaders have redoubled their efforts to control the island and have made significant inroads. Unbeknownst to them, the island is protected by guardian spirits representing elements like lighting, fire, and water, as well as concepts like fear. Players take on the role of these spirits in a complex cooperative game of management and prevention to stop the invaders taking over entirely.

With rich art, a compelling narrative, and deep, strategic gameplay, Spirit Island is one of the most intriguing games to come out in the past few years. It’s certainly not the easiest, though: this two-hour experience will task you with growing your power and influence and then figuring out how to use your burgeoning abilities to stop the invaders from growing too powerful. This does require a lot of cooperation, however, and players will have to work together in concert to keep from getting entirely overrun. If you’re seeking a complex and challenging experience to share with their friends, Spirit Island is a great choice for a game day.

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In The Quest for El Dorado, players again find themselves searching for ruins. This time, rather than knowledge, they seek the legendary city of gold. Naturally, that means that someone probably wants to get there first, and the race is on. This deck-building game has you create a deck of cards that allows you to move through certain spaces and hazards on the board, trying to reach El Dorado before anyone else. You can cut through jungles, navigate rivers, and force your way through blockades with the cards in your hand, and then work to buy additional cards to make subsequent hands even better.

The Quest for El Dorado is less complex than some of the other games on this list, as its strength is in making for a thrilling race. Players can block each other, take shortcuts, and make risky moves that may or may not pay off in the hopes of being the first to the legendary city. Plus, the game comes with many distinct modular board components, allowing you to construct your own path to El Dorado (or use one of the many contained in the rulebook). It’s an approachable racing game with some fun strategic options.

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In MonsDRAWsity, the unthinkable has happened: A player has just seen a monster! The other players work for an agency with interest in such strange goings-on, and they’ll need to sketch the monster from the witness’s description in order to best understand what they’re dealing with. Memory is a funny thing, however, and eyewitnesses aren’t always reliable.

MonsDRAWsity is a party game of drawing silly monsters. Each round, one player plays as The Witness and looks at a new Monster Card for twenty seconds. After that, they have to describe what they saw to the other players, who have to attempt to recreate the drawing as faithfully as they possibly can. After a short time, the drawing time is over, and The Witness chooses which monster best reflects what they remember. Then, players get to see the actual monster, and they must vote on whose drawing best captures the essence of what they saw. This is an extremely silly venture, and that makes for an excellent party game, even for the players in the group who are convinced that they can’t draw. Eric Slauson’s MonsDRAWsity has the essential essence of a great party game: It’s easy to learn, engaging, and gets players interacting and invested.

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The Guild of Merchant Explorers gives players a wide-open map, a single city, and a goal: Explore as much as you can over four ages. However, after each age, your pathways are removed and only the new villages remain. The ebb and flow of exploration will allow you to discover treasures and crystals and new abilities, but you only have so many chances to explore and expand over each age.

This is an interesting new release by Matthew Dunstan and Brett Gilbert, both of whom are having a very prolific couple of years in terms of game design. Each round, players work on their own private boards after a card is flipped telling them how many tiles they can expand. In the beginning, each player only has one city, but over the course of the game, they’ll find additional ones, allowing them to start from or expand to new territories and build trade routes for additional points. Each round, players also gain a powerful and unique ability allowing them to further explore one of four unique maps included in the game. Add in some lovely cartography art, and you’ve got a peaceful and soothing game of discovery.

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In Icecool, the goal is simple: You’re penguins, and you need to sneak out of class to get some extra fish for lunch. Unfortunately, one student among you is the hall monitor, and if they catch you, you’ll certainly end up in detention after school.! So slide around the school, catch fish if you can, and watch out for the hall monitor.!

This dexterity game tasking players and the penguin they control with getting fish in their color to earn points over several rounds. To do so, they must flick their penguin token around the constructed school to slide through doorways or jump over walls to get to the fish that match their player color. Each round, one player takes on the role of the hall monitor and attempts to flick their penguin into other players to take their ID card and score fish for it at the end of the round. This is, fundamentally, a very silly game, and kids and adults alike will find joy in the little wobbly penguins and the antics that result with flicking them around the cardboard school. Plus, this isn’t really something that players intuitively know how to do, so there’s a pretty even playing field.

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Trick-taking card games are a classic genre. Think Bridge and Hearts, which many people know or at least vaguely understand, especially if they’re in the generation that grew up clicking cards at random on their parents’ computer implementation of Hearts. Cat in the Box, however, presents a new spin on that. Each card has no suit until you play it; you can then choose what suit you want that card to be, specifically to try and take a number of tricks that you predicted at the start of the round. But be careful. There are only so many suits to choose from, and if you end up with a card that can’t be played, you might cause a paradox that destroys the space-time continuum.

Cat in the Box puts a lot of control over play in the hands of the players and adds some interesting scoring rules based on what cards and suits you choose and when you choose them. The interaction is interesting, as players can trap you in a state where you can’t play anything and you get stuck.

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With such a variety of new board games popping up in the last several years, it can be challenging to find a great game that the entire family can sit down and play together. But one that’s come out very recently is Starry Night Sky, by Emma Larkins. In it, players take on the role of amateur astronomers charting the night skies for new constellations. As you do, you discover all sorts of exciting and wonderful shapes (and even the myths behind them), from the Trusty Lantern to the Joyful Dancer to the Distinguished Snail.

Starry Night Sky is a new and great quick game of moving around the board to discover new constellations and complete challenges on Exploration Cards. As you do, you make it easier for your opponents to move around the board, as well, so while you can only reach the inner constellations at the beginning of the game, you can usually move across the board before the game’s over. Each player has a few Myth Cards that are specific combinations of constellations that they want to have fully discovered by the end of the game, but the cool thing is that it does not matter who discovers them. Even if your opponent discovers it, you still score. After enough constellations are discovered, the sun rises and players total their scores to see who won.

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It can be pretty easy to get a game to the table if it looks great. Something about great art really lowers the barrier to entry, but then the gameplay has to measure up. Beth Sobel’s work on Randy Flynn’s Cascadia follows through with great art and fantastic gameplay in a game set in the Pacific Northwest. Players are tasked with building ecosystems that support the various animals that can live there, each with their own unique scoring conditions.

Cascadia’s been a popular title since it came out in 2021, earning both the coveted Spiel des Jahres and American Tabletop Award for Strategy Games. It’s a very quick game to pick up, play, and then play again. Each turn, you’re taking a tile and an animal token and trying to place them such that you score as many points as possible based on that animal’s scoring condition. With multiple different combinations of animals, the scoring and the strategy are never quite the same from game to game, but they’re familiar enough that you can hop right into it and play again. It’s a game that manages to seamlessly blend strategy and play into an excellent experience for all experience levels of players, and it certainly looks as good as it plays.

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Many families have their “go-to” game that they bring out, ranging from euchre to Uno to Monopoly, if they’re looking for a fight. It can be challenging to get new games into that rotation, but there have been some pretty good contenders that have emerged in recent years. One such game is Mantis, from the folks behind Exploding Kittens. If you’ve already got someone in your family who’s a big fan of mantis shrimp, this game will be right up their alley. But for everyone else, this is still an engaging title that’s quick to learn, faster to play, and will leave you wanting another game after a player’s victory.

Mantis’s charm is in its simple core gameplay. On your turn, you either try to score or steal. To score, you flip a card from the deck and if it matches any of your cards, you add them all to your score pile. To steal, you flip a card into an opponent’s zone, and if it matches any of their cards, you steal them all and add them to your zone. The game gets a bit more complicated in that the backs of the cards show three of the seven possible colors that can be on the front. That might help you plan! Play continues until one player has scored ten cards, but you’ll almost certainly play again.

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It can be challenging to find a puzzle game that’s level-appropriate for all ages. There’s a skill required to scoping the puzzles so that they’re engaging without being too difficult, and not every game meets that bar. The Exit series of escape room puzzle games has traditionally done very well, expanding from a small escape room game to escape room games with a jigsaw puzzle component to even an advent calendar. But Kosmos only recently started making kid-friendly puzzles that can introduce a new audience to escape room games.

Jungle of Riddles provides kids with a reading-free experience where they’ll solve a set of puzzles that are chosen at the start of the game (there are six puzzles of each of six types), and then as they solve those puzzles, they’ll earn keys that can be used to unlock a variety of treasure chests at the end of the game. This is one of the few truly replayable Exit titles, so even once the kids are done with the game, it can be passed along to another family. Plus, the puzzles can engage the whole family together and teach some basic skills around shape recognition, path-tracing, and other problem-solving techniques. It’s a great way to engage everyone in puzzle-solving.

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