Top 10 Games of 2025 - with Jordan

Hey, I'm Jordan. 2025 was a fantastic year for games. I think some of the games that I'm going to be talking about today will end up being pretty high on like my alltime game rankings. I think there's some really fantastic games and I think some of them are just going to get better over time the more I play them and I've already played all 10 of these games a bunch.

U I played some of these games for the first time like last December and they are still in my top 10 of the year. That's how good they were. So, uh, little if you guys don't follow my, uh, videos or channels or whatever or me here on the Dice Tower, uh, I I just like lighter games, uh, generally. So, this g this list is going to be a little lighter than some of the other lists you might see, uh, for top 10 uh, lists.

And I'm I'm totally cool with that. I don't think a single game that I'm going to talk about lasts more than an hour. Maybe one is pushing it. It's probably about that hour mark, but most of these are going to be pretty quick games. A lot of them you'll play more than once at a time. Uh, a weekn night game, if you will.

I think, uh, that's a great explanation for these types of games that I like to play, but I'm not necessarily I'm staying on brand, but it's not necessarily on purpose. This is just kind of these are the games I like. So, let's get started. Flip Tunes is a game that I thought looked really cool, and I wanted to try it almost based solely on how it looks.

It has that kind of Cuphead style artwork and from what I heard it was kind of a kind of a deck building auto battler kind of game. I didn't really know what that autobatler thing was going to be about. I played challengers when it came out and I didn't enjoy it, but I thought uh this one seemed cool.

So, I I wanted to try this one out. And it's such an interesting kind of take on this. You're going to be you have this market of cards. You're going to be adding cards to this deck and thinning your deck out almost as efficiently as possible because every round you're going to flip over these six cards.

Three on top, three on the bottom. And depending on how those cards flip up, they can uh interact in different ways for different points. Might cause other cards to flip. You might be able to stack some cards. And you're trying to pile up as many points as you can. Once you read a certain reach a certain point threshold, the game is over and everybody has one final flip at that point.

For a 20-minute game, there's a lot packed into it, which I I really appreciate. So, Flip Tunes, can't wait for more cards. I hope they're coming. I have no information about that, but more cards for Flip Tunes will be great in the future. I like that one a lot. Duel forcardia is a two-player game, and there's going to be a lot of two-player games on this list, but this is the first one on my list here.

And this is a two-player kind of card battler, but it's almost like war where every every turn you just have one card. You're going to flip over a card. High card wins. Um, but you do have a hand of card. So, you are going to, you know, pick it to it a certain extent. And if the your high card wins gets you a point.

If you're the loser, your card gets to use its special ability. And so you don't want to win many of the rounds because you're trying to maybe set yourself up for another win in the future that's going to score you two points or more points or maybe you're trying to do something that's then going to affect previously played cards and maybe it's going to increase a value here which gives you a win there.

And it there's so much clever card play in here that both of you have the same deck but the cards are coming out at different times. So there's a lot of really great back and forth there. And there's actually multiple decks in here. So you both play the same deck, but then you can play them play the off, you know, play different decks and then you can mix and match cards between the two decks.

There's a lot in this little tiny little card game box. If you like two player games, check this one out. Dual forcardia. That's a cool one. All right. There's been a lot of talk about deduction games over the last couple years. And Logic and Lore, I think, is a really great compact two-player only deduction game.

You know, you got your searches for Planet X, you got your uh Cryptids, you got your big deduction games. For a small deduction kind of card game, Logic and Lore, this is you're getting a lot of bang for your buck with this one. It's got a nice little little little slidy box right here. It's got that cool um Weird giraffe uh wicked and wise artwork.

And essentially, you're just trying to get these numbers lined up. uh zero through nine, one through 10, something like that. You're just trying to get them all lined up. They're all going to be randomly out in a row in front of you. And you're going to take these different actions across the center.

And as you take those actions, you can rearrange, check the placement of different cards, and just learn about the placement of your cards. And as you're rearranging them, it's super quick, super light, and breezy um for a deduction game. And it's a game that's usually quick enough that if you, you know, you beat somebody and they're like, you know, let's try this again.

Let's shuffle it up and try again because it's I'm gonna, I'm going to get it this time. Really cool. I like this one a lot. Logic and lore. My number What is this? Eight of the year. All right. I went back and forth about including this one on my list at all, but I just really like it. I'm going to put it on my list, my rules, whatever.

This is Jungo. This is a new. So, this is a take off. There's a couple games that have recently come out like this. In Japan, there's a game called Hotchi Train and then recently also Nanatory Dory came out from Kid Table Board Games and Jungos from Happy Camper Games. And this is the one I own. This is the one I'm going to talk about today.

This is the one that's I think most available around here. Um, but it's a card shedding game. Things scout. You can't rearrange your cards and you're getting rid of groups of cards. you know, two twos, three threes, uh, five fours, that kind of thing. You're just playing larger groups out onto the table.

And as you're doing that, you have the option of adding cards back into your hand that you just, uh, if you just like one up some cards, you can add them into your hand, but you can't because you can't rearrange your cards, you're going to be able to slot these new cards into your hand, creating bigger groups of cards, and those cards have to come out of your hand in the same kind of groups.

There's I I mean, I could describe it more, but that that's really the whole game. I like it a lot. If you like Trio, this is the company that brought Trio a couple years ago. I think this one is just kind of maybe like a quarter step down. I think I like Trio better, but this one's like right there with it.

I think this one is really wonderful, especially with kids and families. Uh people that don't play games a lot. Jungo is a great one to have in your pocket uh for those kind of uh situations. This next one's a party game. I love it. It's a thinkier one. This is alibis. This is sort of like code names meets that's so clover kind of kind of thing.

It's a very thinky game where you are trying to do word association. There's going to be a whole bunch of u suspects who may have done a crime. It's like a 4x5 kind of grid or 4x3 kind of I don't know. It's a grid of these suspects. Each of them has a word assigned to them and then you have two of the suspects kind of cards and they are you have to come up with a word that's going to associate those two things together.

Everybody's going to do that and you then have it's cooperative. Everybody then has to try to figure out what those pairs of suspects are and there's one word one suspect that's left on the table that did not uh kind of you know that wasn't selected. So you're trying to process of elimination figure out uh who that person is.

My family absolutely loves this. My sisters, their families, we play this one so much. So good. If you want a thinky party game, you like code names, you like So Clover, you like, you know, things like just one or uh Decrypto, things like that, this is a thinkier side of party games that I think is a lot of fun for a lot of people.

This is the biggest game on my list. This is my number five game of the year. This is from Bitewing Games. It is Orbit. Orbit is a new Riner Kinesia game. I don't believe this is based off of anything. And it's a race game. You're trying to get from point A to point B to point C to point E to point D to E to you're getting across all of the planets uh through this uh clever movement system.

You're getting through all the planets and then back to your home planet before everybody else. There's no points. There's no like no rounds. You just take you play a card, do what the card says, move around, and you're getting to these planets. But the thing is, as you're playing these cards, you're also moving the planets.

Everybody on their turn is moving a planet or more than one planet. And so the targets that you're trying to get to are moving at kind of irregular rates. So the players have a ton of control over where they can go, but also how to get in the way of the other players. There's so much interaction. And this one is just really boiled down excellent racing type of game.

Orbit, I like it a lot. And this is another Bitewing game. I love Bitewing. I could have put I don't think they released 10 games this year, but I could have uh I have enjoyed everything that they put out this year. But this is Iliad. Iliad is such a good two-player only game. And this is not the last two-player only game on my list.

There are more. This was a fantastic year for two-player games. Iliad is a gridbased game where you are putting out these number tiles. Red has to play on red, blue has to play on blue. So, it's going to be a checkerboard to begin. It's going to end with a checkerboard pattern as well. And all of them have a number on them.

That's the strength of the tile. And most of them have a special power that you can use as well. Whenever you finish a row or column, you're then going to add up your strength in that row or in that column. You're going to collect these tokens. Whoever has the highest value gets first dibs on the tokens.

The loser gets whatever is left over. Some of them are positive points. Some of them are negative points. Some of them uh count towards your gods. You have to collect all of the gods uh like favor from all the gods in order to be eligible to win. And if you're not eligible to win the game, no matter how many points you have, you might still lose because you didn't collect the right kind of tokens.

So good. Super slick. I This is such a slick game uh for two players. Check it out. Iliad. It's a good one. I played this one later in the year. I think it is now just being releasedish, like to wider distribution. Um, it's so good though. This is Tag Team from Scorpion Mask. Um, it is a two-player.

I already talked about Flip Tunes being an auto battler. This is also kind of an auto battler, but you get to choose the order of the cards. In flip tunes, you're like you shuffle up your deck and then you flip them over and see what happens. In in tag team, you are almost programming and it's like an autobler, but you're programming the order in which these cards are.

And you're never going to remember really uh how you want the cards to come out because once you flip over a card, it that card is now going to battle your opponent's card. They flip a card at the same time. And so you sometimes you want your cards to battle certain of your opponents. you have two almost uh smashup style.

you have two of these uh heroes that you're combining and they have your opponent has two heroes that they're battling and so you're you know you're sometimes you want maybe the the swordsman's kind of card versus the the the voodoo princess kind of card and you're like battling those two and they have like this brute kind of guy and then this like western guy or something like that and you're I want my you know I want my uh voodoo person to attack the brute but then they actually like flipped over a different card.

So, there's so so much interesting interaction with the cards here. This has been a fantastic game to explore. It's on board Game Arena. I've been playing just ongoing just over and over on board Game Arena. So, good. I tag team has been great. All right. This is another one from All Play. I could have All Play did more than 10 games this year.

I've enjoyed more than 10 games that they've released this year. Um, but this one is one of my all-time favorite games already. This is Twinkle. has, you know, some, you know, it's kind of got that little king domino drafting where you d where you draft, what you draft is going to set turn order for the future future round.

So maybe you take something that's not as uh important to you right now so you can get something important to you later because there is that kind of future market available to you. And essentially, you're going to be drafting these really nice clear acrylic tiles and they're going to be creating constellations above a child's bed.

And there's so many different tiles in there. You got the stars, you got uh the expansion comes with like moons and aliens, but the base game has like more normal stuff like uh what do we got? We got like nebula or black holes and planets and things like that. And they're all going to score differently.

There's a whole lot of different scoring options in here that you can kind of mix and match and create your own experience every single game. And it just looks so pretty when it's all done with these double-sided acrylic tiles that um just come together and just make this really pretty like constellations across across your board game.

I think this one is uh just something I want to I like I like tucking into, you know? It's Twinkle, Twinkle. And my favorite game of the year um was pretty obvious the first time I played it how much I loved this. I have since played it. Um, I don't know my numbers. Um, Board Game Arena and in-person plays, it's probably close to a hundred.

Um, I'm pretty certain about that. I don't track my plays super well, but u Board Game Arena does for me. And I'm pretty sure this is near 100 plays. It's be partially because it's so quick, but there's just so much in this box that I don't think is always apparent up front. And this is Toy Battle. Toy Battle is a two-player game.

This is the last two-player game on my list, uh, incidentally. And this game is so so good. You It's almost got a Toy Story theme. You have like almost strateggo like as also where you're trying to capture your opponent's base and you have these uh kind of paths that you're following in these different spaces that you can put the pieces down onto.

And every piece has its own special power where it might bump another piece or it might uh uh help you draw an extra one or maybe rem discard something off your player's board or maybe it can be placed in a special way. Every single board plays differently as well. Characters interact in interesting ways.

There's it's a very abstract game with a lot of upfront strategy uh with it that you can definitely kind of slowly wade into that as you're trying to not chess. I mean, I don't want to talk about like chess moves or whatever, but there's definitely some like I don't want these numbers out. I want these car I want to lead with these characters if I have them.

I want to be able to play these in certain ways on certain boards. There's a lot here. But I like this one. It's really nice. I like it a lot. So, there you have it. Those are 10 games I really liked in 2025. Um, I'd love to hear I mean, I have a pretty You can probably tell what my tastes are, so I'd love for folks to recommend some other games for me.

Maybe I have played them, maybe I haven't. Um, or if you guys want to hear about some other games that I really liked, uh, let me know. You can follow me on other stuff as Jordan Plays Blue and here on the Dice Tower uh, sometimes as well. So, there you go. Thanks, guys. I'm Jordan. Hey, uh, thanks for watching another video here on the Dice Tower.

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So, definitely check it out. But either way, we're glad you watched us. Tell your friends about the Dice Tower. Until next time though, I'm Tom Vassel and I hope you enjoyed this video.