The 6 Best Strategy Board Games of 2025

If you like your economic games with a side of auctioneering: Power Grid (now being sold as the Recharged edition) is a classic. This engine-building economic game has you play as a utility company trying to power the most cities in either Germany or the USA.

Players have to balance buying power plants, paying for fuel, and expanding their network across the board, all while competing with the other players over these shared resources. This interconnected system makes the auction portion of the game sizzle, as each player tries to assess how valuable any particular power plant is to each player, and how they can make them spend more money than they otherwise would have.

With this mix of contentious auction jockeying peppered in between bouts of intense strategic management, Power Grid ends up providing a ton of excitement and tense moments—more than you might expect from a game where a phase in each turn is called “Bureaucracy.”

If you’re looking for a deep strategy game that you can explain in five minutes: Give Small World a shot. One of our favorite board games, Small World is essentially a sped-up version of Risk, populated with fantasy species instead of world powers. It’s an area-control game, with 14 different factions competing to dominate a space that’s way too small for all of them.

Each faction comes with its own unique power, but it’s also randomly paired with an ability that gives it an additional perk (for instance, one power provides extra points for controlling forest sections, another piles on extra money, and one even comes with a dragon). This keeps the game fresh for each playthrough. Small World is also quick and easy to explain while still remaining strategically satisfying.

If you want something that’s completely different: Cryptid is a game of strategic guesswork. The players are cast as cryptozoologists, competing to see who can be the first to discover proof of a cryptid (essentially a mythological creature, like Sasquatch) in the North American wilderness.

At the beginning of the game, each player gets one piece of information about the cyptid’s habitat (like “the habitat is within one space of a mountain tile” or “the habitat is within two spaces of a bear territory”). Over the course of the game, they try to suss out what the additional clues are by asking other players to confirm or deny that it’s possible, based on their clue, that a given space could contain the cryptid.

It’s a bit like Minesweeper, which sounds dry but is tense and exciting in practice, as each question reveals a little more information.

If Arnak sounds fun, but you prefer a sci-fi theme: Dune: Imperium Uprising is mechanically similar—with a mix of worker placement and deck building—but encourages more direct confrontation between the players. And, of course, it’s themed around Frank Herbert’s legendary Dune universe.

Gameplay focuses on gathering resources by sending workers to various points on the desert planet Arrakis, “persuading” advisor cards to join your deck, and sending warriors (or sometimes huge sand worms) to battle other players for points and resources.

The combat mechanism and unique leader cards give this game a bit more flavor and asymmetry than in Arnak. While we think Arnak is a better fit for a wider range of players, if you want a bit more to chew on or just prefer the sci-fi theme, this is a good option.

If you’re a Wingspan fan but want a bit more complexity: Wyrmspan looks like a simple re-skin, but don’t be fooled—it adds a few new layers to the engine-building game that make it a more intense mental workout.

Like its aviary counterpart, Wyrmspan focuses on collecting creatures in an individual tableau that grants you resources. You can then use those resources to attract more creatures and more points.

Wyrmspan adds a layer of exploration to the standard Wingspan game loop, requiring players to acquire and play cavern tiles before they can attract their winged wyrms. It also has a guild system that grants additional resources and replaces the stack of bird cards with a collection of whimsical draconic creatures that range from adorable to intimidating.