The best board games of 2023 so far

The first half of 2023 has been a bit slow for board games. Many of the major releases won’t be available until the second half of the year, during convention season. Nevertheless, there are still new releases worthy of attention. Although it’s only June, several titles have arrived in a fury, taking their place among other recent releases of great board games.

This list is not ranked. Instead, titles are listed in alphabetical order. Everything is currently in stock and available for sale.

City of the Great Machine

CrowD Games’ City of the Great Machine has been a surprise. One player controls a steampunk mechanized AI whose grip on the floating sky city has been tightened. The rest of the group resists the technocratic authority by inciting dissent and sowing destruction. The goal is to unleash three riots before the clock strikes midnight and the machine has squeezed the last sparks of life from the city.

This is a great hidden motion game. Players plot their paths on the map using hidden cards, while the Great Machine tries to deduce their plans. Location powers and special abilities are activated each round during a dramatic reveal. There is scope for creative solutions as you can move parts of the cities and reconfigure the map layout. In addition, it is a flexible design with an alternate ruleset to the game itself to control the Great Machine, allowing for solitaire or cooperative play. It’s an underrated design that deserves more attention.

Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients

Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients is a wacky, heavy-metal skirmish game where players control hordes of aliens battling in a post-apocalyptic fantasy hellscape. It’s an indie title that promises more than its diminutive stature, with competitive, solitaire and cooperative game modes. You can command armies and go head-to-head in dozens of scenarios, or take on any faction with a simple AI system that controls your enemies.

This is a thrilling tactical venture where you spend limited actions to run across the map pursuing faction-specific objectives such as destroying enemies or collecting enough resources to build an overlord. Each of the different warbands is unique, with asymmetrical play being an important part. This is a relatively simple core design with a ton of features piled on top. There is nothing comparable on the market today.

Soil

Photo: James Paul Correia Photography/Inside Up Games

The genre of tableau building – where players place tiles, tokens or, as here, cards on the table – has been revived in recent years. hits like Terraforming Mars And Arc Nova helped make tableau games more mainstream, and now Inside Up Games’ Soil is ready to take things to the next level. It’s a whole world better than its competition.

Players try to build a self-sustaining engine of flora and fauna. The game feels like an open world, supports different areas of exploration and allows you to shape the environment as you see fit. The ruleset is simple, but the interactions between the various cards and skills are rich and satisfying. It’s also much less demanding than its peers, clocking in at around an hour for veteran players.

Frost harbor

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

Frost harbor is the highly anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed dungeon crawler Gloomhaven. This successor is a cooperative RPG board game identical in spirit to its predecessor. However, it is even bigger than that previous monstrosity. The players control a group of adventurers who dive into the tunnels beneath a frozen landscape north of Gloomhaven itself. New encounters, creatures and characters will all be discovered.

The most interesting new feature is an element of base building. Between adventures, the group manages resources and develops an isolated outpost. Your home can barely hold up in the harsh elements, so you’ll have to work to survive and ultimately thrive. The classic mechanics of advanced card-based combat offers the same engaging gameplay we’ve come to love from the original. Frost harbor is something to behold.

Vote for women

Tory Browns Vote for women is a wonderful product. It contains replicas of voting registration cards, newspaper articles and personal letters of historical importance. All this sets the tone for a map-driven area control game focused on the struggles of the women’s suffrage movement in America. As a series of systems, it is similar to a historical war game; as an experience, it is a sobering retelling of moral achievement.

There is something particularly nasty about playing the opponent in this game. You use cards to sow dissent for the proposed 19th Amendment and rally states against your opponent. Fortunately, the game includes an automated system to control this side of the conflict, allowing one or two players to lead the suffragist movement and fight for women’s rights. This is a riveting release on par with genre greats like Twilight battlewhich wields intriguing mechanisms alongside an important historical moment to produce a wonderful educational experience.