Top 12 Hottest & Most Popular Board Games Right Now (October 2025)

0:00 We just learned everything there is to know about the hottest and newest board games out there and we're going to tell you all about them. So, let's go. You heard us right. We have 12 board games that are super popular right now. Everybody's talking about it. Most of them just came out or will come out soon and it they are all the hype. We're going to tell you everything you need to know about those games, why they're hot, and then we're going to rank them in our monthly top 12 hottest board games, so you don't miss out on any of the most popular board games out there right now. Let's start out with the 12th hottest board game right now, which is Aquaria. And do you know what this game is all about? Let me guess, creating your aquariums. Exactly. You will have your own player boards right here that you will fill out with fishies. and taking care of those fishies, you will score victory points and hopefully win the game. To get all these fishes, you will have to pay with oxygen. And you can get this oxygen by planting different plants and things in your aquarium beforehand.

0:57 And whenever you feed these fishes, you will score victory points. But also, there's one keyword right here. It's set collection. What that means is all of these fishes are categorized in different ways. Like for example, these fishes like to live in bunches, right? So you will be motivated to get bunch of different fishes or similar fishes like for example this one has the same category and if there's one thing board games have taught me that bunch of fishes are called schools

1:25 schools schools

1:27 schools of fishes or just schools and the placement also will be very important where you place the fish. For example here uh if you place the fish it will be cheaper because uh you need to pay seven oxygen for this fish to be placed but if you have two of these plants nearby it it is cheaper. It doesn't need that much much oxygen. So, the placement is just as important as just what fishes will you place. And there will be these cool looking knobs around here.

1:51 I love these. These look great.

1:52 Yeah, that's how you make sure that they have enough uh like food and oxygen and stuff. So, do you know this man?

1:59 No. Do you?

2:01 This beautiful looking gentleman right here. Uh you should know him to be honest. You should know him. He has probably designed a game that you're going to go like well because he's designer of this game. He's designer of these two games and Galileo Galile.

2:20 Yeah. So he's author as well to this aquarium and I think that's the biggest selling point. He has done really good games and this is kind of lightest one. 2.5 is kind of family game. So this should be family plus game in the gateway from a really really good and established author at this point that you really like. Where would you rank our excitement of this game?

2:40 Well, I'm not too excited about the theme, but since now I know as the designer of STI, I'm a bit more excited. So, somewhere here. I would place it here.

2:47 Let's go here. Is your game much more exciting than building aquarium? Doubt it.

2:52 Yes, it is. Cuz it is about boss fighters.

2:56 Okay, you get this one. You get this one. This is more exciting.

2:58 Yeah, that's it. And that's all you need to know. What do you think QR stands for?

3:03 There's going to be QR codes and you're going to scum them.

3:05 That's it. I literally have nothing else to tell you about this game. It's a boss fighting game with QR codes. In this game, you're going to get pick one of four heroes and then mix it with one of the four classes, so it can go either way. And each game you can pick a different combination. Cool, right? So, a little bit of replay-ability right there. You are fighting. Well, it was in the name. We know what we're fighting. We're fighting bosses. But the really cool part is that when you attack it with one of your items or spells, you don't know what it's going to do to the boss.

3:35 All right. Is it going to do a lot of damage? Is he immune to it? Is is what's going to happen? And it's not in the rule book. That's something you get to discover for yourself each time you play. Do you remember Chronic?

3:47 Yes. Chronicles of Crime is detective game where you talk with witnesses and suspects by scanning their QR codes and then picking up answers or questions. So, this game has that same basic principle that you will scan a card with the phone or tablet you're playing and then it's going to give you whatever happens next. You will take a card, back of it has a QR code. You will scan it and then something will happen. Maybe you'll deal a ton of damage and that's something I cannot even tell you if I wanted to because I've not played it. And that's something they tell you in the rule book. You have to discover for yourself. Here are the life points. Uh here's some info we already have found out about that uh has been covered by that card, but it's there. So, sounds exciting. Uh, and it's a co-op game where you're trying to defeat 10 different bosses, and each of the 10 bosses has different levels of difficulty.

4:32 From your presentation, I'm pretty excited. I feel like it could be a bit fiddly, right, with

4:38 Yes. Uh, I I u Yeah, I'm not a big fan. So, you probably need a tablet, right?

4:44 Cuz this tiny phone, she's not going to see a lot of it. That's a minus point, I think, for that.

4:48 Yeah, definitely. It could be fiddly, it could be bad, but it could be also really exciting. So,

4:53 we'll place it right there. It's It's kind of the same as Aquarium. Let's move on to the 10th Potest board game that's all about water. Water has taken over the world. Uh there was this Water World, I think was the movie, the box office failure.

5:08 Whatever you say. Whatever you say. It's a great Kevin Cosner movie. I like it.

5:12 I liked it as well.

5:13 When I watched it when I was like 12, probably should never watch it again, right?

5:16 I think it's a pretty good movie. The problem was that the budget for it was just over the roof and it failed miserably. Will this game fail miserably? We'll find out because you will try to scavenge a lot of things to then build a city from all these all this trash.

5:31 You don't even know if the game's good and you're already calling it trash.

5:34 Yes, because the trash will come out of a bag right here and from these tiles, you will be able then to pick a few of them and place them inside of your city. Another key word here is pattern building, which means that whenever you place some tiles, you really are interested in how they align with each other. Because during the game when you build your own city, you will then be able to send your little workers there and pick up few actions there and do things and it's really important what's next to what and how to boost all of those actions. This is your player board how it will look like. There will be different like uh objectives and things and bonuses. There's actually plenty of things going on here. As you can see here, there are different player boards. And one of the things is that this game can be played cooperatively. Oh,

6:18 competitively or solo. Says they're kind of doing all those things. Hard to manage, but possible. How excited are you to try it next year? Like here? No. Okay.

6:28 Here.

6:28 Yeah, there.

6:29 Okay, we'll see. Next game on our hotness list is The Druids of Adora.

6:36 Talking about covers that we really like.

6:39 Yeah, this one looks this this looks like a back of the traditional playing card deck, right?

6:44 Could be. Could be. I don't know why. It's just a association, I guess. So, it's a dice placement game, right? You're going to place dice on the board. This game has amazing components as you can see right here like all of these little things and and stones. Yeah. And and just player board where you can place uh your marker. It just looks gorgeous, doesn't it? Right.

7:02 It does. All right. So, so far it has the looks and it's by the designer of Castle's Burgundian Evolution. Sold.

7:08 Okay. No more questions. Let's move on. It goes up there. And let's move on to the next game. I mean, it's a dice placement game by Stefan Feld. What else do you need to know? One game that has a little bit more info, but also comes from a designer that is already established from Stonemer Meer Games. Uh, this is original story. Well, you basically are going to play one card and then all other players will have to play the same color of cards and hopefully a bigger number because whoever played the biggest card will pick up the whole pile, aka the trick. I like trick tagging games. What's so special about it?

7:44 Here you will be a superhero or a villain. Based on what you are, you will either want to pick up the tricks or won't want to pick up those tricks. And you also will have some like powers and things going on here because you are a superhero

7:58 and superheroes have powers, right?

7:59 Another thing you will have are story cards. And these story cards you will be able to play in front of you, building your own blow, making your moves or actions stronger. So you get better while the game goes on. And last thing, events. All superhero movies, things, stories need crazy events.

8:17 Of course, if you shown me these two last slides before you shown me the cards, I be like, how is this a trick taking game?

8:22 Exactly. That's the thing. It's basically trick taking game with a lot of things around it. So, where would you rank this one then?

8:29 It's very tricky.

8:30 Well, it is a trick taking game.

8:32 Exactly. Uh, so either here or here. Here or here? Here.

8:37 Let's go here.

8:38 Let's go here. because we like trick taking games. Trick- Taking games are a little bit niche. So, next game on the hotness list is forestry. Also nice uh cover and it is a a Euro game where you are going to well plant and cut forests. But the very cool thing here is that you have two workers. We have our harvester and we have our manager. And each of those workers is going to take care of a different thing. And you will have to split your action points between those two workers. So, do you want to manage your projects? Then you have to use your manager. If you want to cut more trees, then you have to use your harvester. What is better this turn? I don't know. Seems kind of unique, right? You just don't place it and do it. But no, you have to spend action points. And another really cool thing about this game is it is actually based on real things. How you take care of the forest.

9:36 That's how you do a board game.

9:37 Exactly. And you might think, "Wow, this comes from kind of study manual or anything." No, every other page in the rule book has this info about how the mechanisms in the game relate to real life. Like these are the trees that are in the game. Actually, if you don't want to know that, you can skip over it. It doesn't push you to know that. But if you want to know that like me, it's right there. So, where would we place this one? It's pretty nice.

10:01 It's pretty nice. It's a euro, but I like the educational aspect. So, maybe move aquatia one lower. And then there.

10:07 Sure. Sure.

10:09 I like that.

10:09 Is it even higher? I think I somehow I don't know.

10:12 Well, you do it.

10:14 Yeah.

10:14 Aquarius slipping down a little bit, but we'll next game slip uh as well or not. This game is called Sweetlands. And one thing I want to point out, it's a super heavy game. The what? The cover doesn't fit the weight.

10:33 Well, but the looks does.

10:34 Oh boy. Nice. It's also a Euro game where you will try to manage your industry of sweets. So you will have your own player board with all of these tokens and things and you are doing bunch of actions right here. Placing discs and doing then these kind of actions you will be able to then take those pieces and place in the actual land and try to build your own industry. This is how your player board will kind of look like. You will you will build Yeah. You'll build your own roads and things and buildings and obviously you need to produce.

11:05 Yeah, but that's a building. Here's a door and then

11:07 but that's actually it looks great. It does look amazingly great

11:10 and there's a bunch of things you can do and most importantly you just take a disc, place it somewhere and then you will be able to do those actions but first come first serve. Be sure to get to your actions that you really need first. All right, because there's only few spots right here. Mhm. There's a bunch of other things like tiles, scoring pads, like upgrades and things and just lot and people have actually gotten to play it and it actually has a lot of nines and tens and eights. So, it's highly rated. So, pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.

11:40 Maybe you're a game that looks fantastic.

11:42 The older I get, the more random games I love.

11:46 And I think Magical Athlete is going to be right up my alley whenever I get to play. So, Magical Athlete actually is a reprint of an older game. However, this designer has been joined by the superstar designer Richard Garfield, who we know by Tokyo, Mind, Magic the Gathering. So, they probably made it better. One thing I do have to say is I don't know which cover is better. Which cover do you think is better?

12:11 The left one.

12:12 The the the old one. Yeah, it's it's pretty tricky. So, what is the game about? It's a racing game. Uh, you will just roll a dieice and move your piece that many. No, no, no, no, no.

12:22 You keep explaining.

12:23 You have to you have to listen to it. See, there's the board. We can finally take a look at the game. So,

12:29 there's the board and here's the ranking.

12:30 And you will have your uh piece going around and then to the finish line. Hopefully, first two places score. Each of the racers will have special rules. For example, this frog will skip spaces with other racers on them. How do you get these is at the beginning of the game you will draft them and let me tell you there's a ton to choose from and each of them will have a special unique power. For example, banana. Each time you pass it, you stumble and like skip the next turn.

13:00 No, it's fine. I'll leave it there.

13:03 No.

13:04 Yes.

13:04 Okay. Moving on to the fourth spot, which is Don't Starve. This is actually the only game we have actually talked about before because we have a review about this game. Watch out for that one because it is on Kickstarter right now and it's based on the video game all about the same topic trying to survive and not starve. This game is cooperative game where you will go out, scavenge things and then use those things to craft or fulfill the mission. You move, get stuff, fight a little bit with dice and fulfill missions

13:34 and then die.

13:35 Well, that's probably in the middle somewhere.

13:37 Either go mad and starve or go mad and starve.

13:40 How much are you starving to play this game? It's around here, I'd say.

13:45 Okay.

13:45 Yeah.

13:46 Yeah, sure.

13:47 As it usually is with the IP products, if you know where this comes from, you're like, it's just like the video game. And for us, it's like, I just died. I don't know why. All right, we're down to top three hottest games of the month. Number three is Dogs of War, which again is a reprint of another game which came out way back when, and right now it's being brought back by the help of Shut Up and Sit Down. All right.

14:12 This is Matt. We met him once. Can we say that we're great friends with him now?

14:17 Yeah. Best of friends.

14:18 Best friends with Matt and our best. You really want to do that, huh? And uh we like Matt and uh we think he knows his games, right? Depending on when this comes out, it might have just ended or is still going on. But what is the game about? This is the old board cuz there are not a lot of pictures of the new one, but I'll show you a new one later on. But essentially, there are houses that will fight battles, and you are a mercenary. So, you can send in your captains to fight those battles for whichever house you want. But you want that house to win cuz if it will, you'll get some points, right? And get some rewards. And you want to mess up the other player as well, cuz he might be winning. So, you want to kill his troops. So, there's tons of things going on. You get money to buy new troops. You get victory points. You can screw each other over. There's a lot of interaction. Seems like a great game.

15:10 And what they have done is just created a great new look for the game. So, this is what it looks like now. It looks better. These are your captains that you send into battles. You put in your troops right here, like insert them in. Looks great. And I mean, shut up and style knows their game. So, maybe check it out. So, how excited are we to play this? Maybe move Calypso up and then that right after Calypso. Yeah, sure. So, a high comfort game right up or early. Let's see how it works. So, the second hottest board game is going to be Railway Boom. And in the 19th century, a new thing just came into Japan, which is what?

15:47 Railroads. Woo!

15:48 What?

15:49 So, you want to jump in that wagon?

15:52 Nice. But the biggest selling point to this game is that it's an auction game, okay? And there will be four separate auction phases that you will go through each round because you want to get locomotives and wagons as well, right? But there's only few each round. So you auction who's going to go first and pick the this thing first. The really cool little part is that for each of those rounds, for each of those things, you auction with other different resources. For example, if you you want that locomotive, you want a lot of wood because then you will use wood to auction for locomotives. And there's bunch of different resources. You will get these resources by building up your infrastructure and building up your income. But which income? You can't do all of them. So you kind of lock your yourself in and being better at some auctions and worse at some auctions, but you need all of those things. Pretty pretty excited about this. It's like kind of auctions, do something, auction, do something, auction, do something. We haven't talked a lot about train games on this channel, so maybe it's time

16:51 we rearrange a little bit and we're going to place some railway boom right here. It sounds interesting. It sounds cool. The hottest game of the month is secret societies. In this game, you will pick a faction. For example, reptilians aka the society or my favorite faction being old. No influencers. Wink. This is a bidding game. you will bid money to get deeds which essentially influence in countries. And it also is a set collection game cuz you want to have sets of countries that are next to each other because when you play them, you will get certain bonuses for matching regions adjacent to each other. And all of these resources will let you improve your secret society by doing projects, by getting more resources and money, whatever you will have in a standard Euro game. But the coolest thing is that essentially like your game, it's also mostly just auctions. You do auctions, tons of interaction, and what is cool here, if you lose an auction, you also get some rewards.

17:57 Yeah. Are you that excited?

17:59 Yeah, I'm that excited. I wasn't until I researched it. And now since I've researched it, I'm excited. All right, so these are the hottest 12 board games out there right now. Let us know which ones are you most excited to try down in the comments and consider supporting us. Just, you know, FYI, for us to keep on doing this, we have to have your support. Otherwise, uh it's sad days for us indeed.