More Great Games of 2025 - with Tom Vasel

0:05 Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vassel and welcome to the Dice Towers best of 2025. Now I recently posted my favorite games of 2025. I talked about my top 10 surprise of 2025 and yet so many games come out a year. I'm always feeling like I'm missing some. So these are 10 more great games. This is not necessarily 11 through 20 because some of these some of the 11 through 20 was in my top 10 surprises. So, these are 10 more great games and they're not any particular order here. I just think they're fantastic and want to talk about them. So, here we go. 10 games. First of all, we have Orbit. This is from Bitewing Games designed by Riner Kitia. Bitewing released a trilogy of space Kitia games and this was the one of the three that was brand new. And wow, did I really enjoy this one. Racing around the galaxy. Um, oddly enough, it's called Race for the Galaxy Orbit, but it's because you have these uh, it's more of racing around a solar system, I think, would be a better sense, because you have these planets moving around in their orbits, and you are flying your spaceship around, and you just need to land on every planet. But your cards that you play move both your spaceship and move the planets in orbit. And so if I land on a planet, I can then move that planet and my spaceship really moves along. Or I can move a orbit with a my opponent's spaceship on so that they're away from the planets they still need to get to with other special abilities and a bunch of different modules that could be thrown into it. I really like this.

1:33 The artwork from Vincent Drey does not hurt the matters at all. It's a nice small package. I think it's just a fantastic game. Orbit. Then we have Aquatica Duelum. This is the uh kind of the two-player version of Aquatica. I think Aquatica plays very well at two players, but this game Cosmo drone from Ivan Tuzoski. Uh this game is a back and forth tugofwar, but a more complex one than many games. This is a there's a lot going on in Aquatica. You are uh well, tugof-war is one of things. It it follows the general idea of many of these two-player games where there's multiple ways to win and in the middle there's a tugof-war where you're trying to get a token from one side to your side in the sea, but you're also trying to get points by collecting cards. And the two sides are very different. There's a wheel of cards in the middle. Trying to refill those cards at a critical point is a pretty big deal. If you like Aquatica or dislike Aquatica, regardless, I think this is a very different game. It it's it has some of the similar feels. It has card sliding mechanisms, but overall it has, like I said, something different to offer. Next, we have Wandering Galaxy at Crossroads game. This is the third game in the Plaid Hat trilogy. Uh, Forgotten Waters. Um, and this one here, Forgotten Waters was the first one, the pirate one. And this one here, the third one, is Space Wandering Galaxies. And if you've never played a game like this and

3:04 this they're crossroad games, what's going to happen is it offers you choices and you're going to be following these choice making these decisions and it's almost a role playing game and the there's an app that comes with it with amazing voice acting and you are just trying to make decisions. There's a little card deck mechanism in it where you're flipping over cards trying to accomplish tests and you can build up your deck to do that. It's a cooperative, hilarious, fun adventure that's unlike most games that are out there. Then we have Core of Discovery, a game set in the world of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny, a comic book series, a kind of a alternate history of Louiswis and Clark discover giant minotaurs that eat people and other horrible plants and fauna. Um, in this game, you are doing the same thing, but it's a deduction game. This is not the game. If if you had said, "What game is going to be set as a universe?" I would not have expected this one, but uh Jay Cormier and Senfung Lim did a great job here from Off the Page Games, a company that takes books and graphic novels and turns them into games. And they've done it again with this absolutely fantastic game as each of the different things that you find out there has rules on how it's placed. And you have to figure out by using those rules how to avoid dangerous things and to find whatever you're doing. There's different missions in the game and each one has specific rules and it is just a lot of fun to work together in a logical way and then having this theme on top of that I think is really cool. Then we have recall.

4:35 This is from Alion uh designed by Helgemeer, Christian Amson Ospy Kvet Svenson and Anna Wormland. This, if you notice, those designers are some of the same designers who did a big hit a few years ago called Revive. Recall definitely feels like a cousin of Revive. There's a lot of similarities in it. If you played Revive, you'll say, "Oh, this is just like Revive." But then there's very different things. Revive was a game that was all about card play. There's almost no cards in Recall. Instead, you have these keys and you are inserting them into actions. But the keys can also give you bonuses. You can upgrade your keys and you only have several actions over the course of the game, but each action gets increasingly more complicated and interesting as you do various things and move up tracks and it's just a it's a cool concept. I like it a lot. That's recall.

5:30 Then we have insurrection. Insurrection is a small little card game designed by Tori Ness from Labut. And this is a game that for me reminds me of one of my favorite genres which started with a small game called Fantasy Realm or Fantasy Realm, right? And in this game, you are just collecting cards to your hand. You each turn, you're going to play a card and then take a card. And the cards that are in your hand at the end of the game are worth points. And that's pretty simple. Some cards if you have like for example there's musketeers. If you have one musketeer, they're worth one point or three points. If you have two musketeers, they're both worth minus one. So 9 minus two. But if you have three musketeers now, they're each worth seven and you have 21 points. That's a huge change there. So that's fun in of itself. But what happens is in the middle of the table, these cards are face up and they have these danger symbols on them. And if there's ever 10 danger symbols on them, then the bad guys win instead of the good guys. The good guys win after six rounds and you score your hand. If the bad guys win, you score your hands. But many cards score differently. One card might score a lot of points if the bad guys win and few points if the good guys. another one the opposite. Um, some might even score you negative points depending on who wins. So, you're taking these cards and trying to gauge which side is winning to get rid of the cards. There's also special abilities where you can get rid of cards or add more cards to the middle. Very simple, but a lot of fun.

6:52 Insurrection. Repulso. Hey, an abstract strategy game made my list here. This is designed by Armen Edelat from Girhards Spiel and Design. Ghards is a small little publisher. Their boxes look like pizza boxes almost and they're they're just brown and boring. And then inside is a wooden abstract game of very good quality. Repulso is just that kind of abstract game that I find to be very interesting as you're placing these pieces on the board, but you can never put your color piece next to the same color piece. But you need to have the fewest groups of your colors in the middle. So you have these white repuls when you place them. You can then slide your pieces and your opponent's pieces around. It's a very simple concept, but it's trying to make groups and it's such a back and forth nailbiter. I found it to be very fun and I played a lot of abstract games this year and this was definitely one of my favorites. Next, we have Flip Tunes. Flip Tunes from Thunderwork Games designed by Jordi Aden and Renato Samo. Flip Tunes. I definitely like the art. I definitely like the size, but I like the theming of this game. You're building a 3x two grid of cards in front of you. That's it. At the beginning of the game, you only have six cards and you play these cards, but the way they come out randomly is going to give you a certain amount of fame or talent. And you will use that currency to buy new cards. And what cards you buy, some are riskier than others, some get you a whole lot if they're in a

8:23 certain spot. There's not a ton of strategy in this game, but there's a lot of tactics as you buy these cards and try to manipulate them. And it's just entertaining and fun. It's fun. Everyone's playing simultaneously. You put out your six cards, you groan, and how they showed up. Oh, I can play eight cards because these cards let me play extra ones. You get your money and at some point someone will reach a a threshold and then the next round everyone flips their cards and whoever has the highest total wins. Very cool game. Flip tunes. Then we have Map Masters. Map Masters is a game from Captain Games, a company that I go to every year to see what they're going to do this time. And Matt Masters is a dungeon crawling game, but it's with cards. So, this is a very different style game. It's almost sort of a deck builder where you have a bunch of cards and you're going to put them out and you have a timed limit and you're building a dungeon trying to meet some rules because once you put all these cards out, you must trace your path from one entrance to one exit and you're you can't double back or cross your path and you're trying to cross treasure chests and not cross monsters and things like that. And then when you're if you get money, you can then buy more cards that will go in your deck. So the next time you build a dungeon, you can build a cooler one and get more points. There's a lot of thought that goes into this.

9:39 This is not a silly little game. It looks kind of silly on the front of it, but I found it to be very fun. There's also a cooperative version of it, which I played, which I like. Okay. But I like the competitive version even more because you're just sitting there trying to figure out how to take these cards and put them out as fast as you can, but in a thoughtful, interesting manner. And then finally, leaders. Leaders is another two-player abstract strategy game from Studio H designed by Hugo Fenoi. And this game you are just trying to get two of your pieces next to your opponent's leader to take them out. But every piece moves differently. At the beginning of the game, you just have a leader and then you start drafting from a group on the side. You'll draft a piece. They have special abilities. One might be able to move too. One can pull someone towards them. One can the assassin if they're next to the opponent's leader, they win because they only need one next to them. They all have different abilities and you're mixing and matching those. And we're talking 15minute games, maybe 20 minute games back and forth as you draft. You get your five people, their five, and then figure out who can win quicker.

10:41 It looks cool. I like the the cover and the art and everything in the box. But overall, it just comes together in a really fun, fast, back and forth two-player way. So, there you go, folks. That's Leaders, the last of 10 more great games. There's so many cool games that come out each year, so I wanted to highlight these. Thanks for watching. Until next time, I'm Tom Vassel and this is the Dice Tower. Hey folks, I'm Tom Vassel. Thanks for watching this video. Check out our channel. We have a lot of videos on our channel. We have live videos that go up each week from live Q&As's to videos where we take you a look at the newest stuff on Kickstarter crowd surfing to top 10 lists and more.

11:27 There's lots of stuff on this channel. We encourage you to explore it. You can find out more at our website dicetowwer.com. I'm Tom Bassel. Thanks for watching another video on the Dice Tower.