Each month, our game shelf shifts, but these ten titles, for reasons mentioned below, made it to the table a few times in May 2025.
1. Brass: Birmingham
Boy, what a slow burn. It’s the kind of game where you’ll spend a lot of time fiddling around with the imperfect manual, reading BGG supplements, and watching YouTube playthroughs that are interminably long. But once you get halfway through the game, at the end of the Canal Era, it’s like a bitter candy. You can’t stop reaching for it. You’re not sure why, but you hate and love it simultaneously.
Then you flip the board over and see the super evocative nighttime version. Suddenly, Charles Dickens’ novels start to spring up in your imagination. You find some great STLs to print to make the tableau even more evocative, and suddenly you’re trying to play just one more time to figure out a better strategy.
You’ve heard it all before. It’s the number one game on BoardGameGeek, which I don’t think is the proper placement, but it’s been really fun to play this month.
2. Forbidden Jungle
This is another one that surprised us. It seemed daunting, and then it seemed overly simple. But besides the awesome miniatures and the super weird theme, it’s a great puzzle game.
It took us a little while to figure out that what the game is really about is getting on these column mover tiles that have you pushing around placements to the one open space, such that you can create an engine that will get you to safety while avoiding these terrible eggs, then hatchlings, then deadly spiders from spamming.
And then you notice that each playable character really changes the gameplay’s nature. This is just a great, fun game to put on the table.
3. Star Wars: Outer Rim
Here we go again. It’s easy, fun, and super thematic. You get brand-new stories every time you play through. It can be challenging, but it has such a wonderful table presence and lots of fun things to do without too much complication.
Something we keep wanting to play right away, as soon as we’re done.
4. Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter
Another Martin Wallace game. It’s so elegant and simple on one hand, but again—lots of theme, fun, and super interesting puzzles with the cards you’re dealt and what options you can take. Making the right choice at the right time.
It’s easy to get to the table, and it looks awesome. All the artwork is great. I can’t get enough of it.
5. Backstories
Well, this one came out of nowhere. It’s sort of like a cross between Mystic Vale—in that cards have punch-outs and you can see something under the card you’re playing, and the next card.
But these cards have so many interesting uses in telling stories. Sure, at the most basic level, it’s a choose-your-own-adventure game. But how they do timers, reveals, and mysteries is so clever.
What a great package this is.
6. 51st State
Again, we had to figure out that all of these rows that you’re building have defense and that you have to overcome them and make some weird trade-offs and choices about whether to raid, whether to draw the sure-thing cards that are in limited supply, and how to use every turn to its maximum efficiency.
The rulebook is hilarious, and the theme is on full tilt. Awesome game.
7. Destinies
Lucky Duck is a special kind of game publisher. We love the Chronicles of Crime series, and we love Destinies. Super small miniatures, tile-based exploration with fog of war, and an app-supported story—all the things that could make someone hate this game from afar.
But it just works. It’s fun, easy to play, and has lots of interesting items and encounters. Choices matter, and the game remembers those choices throughout the entire game.
Beautiful themes, and it has replayability. Once you add the additional character trait cards and take a different path, morally or otherwise, it’s highly recommended.
8. Clank! Catacombs
No one needs to be told that Clank! is awesome, widespread, ubiquitous, and has a million expansions.
But Clank! Catacombs is something special. The way that you have this modular board that changes every time, and you can build this artificial sense of security—that you’ve got it unlocked, you’ll drop in, grab the thing, get back out.
But then all of a sudden you’re in some haunted chambers that have no way out, and you’re getting stuck in cyclical dead ends and having to find a way to survive.
Having ghosts added to the Clank bag—it’s just great. It looks fantastic on the table. The expansion adds a lot of new ideas, and we were surprised and thrilled by this one.
9. Star Wars RPG: Edge of the Empire
How weird is it to put this one on a list of board games, especially ten years after it came out? But we can’t get enough of this Genesys dice system and the sheer generosity of every part of the core rulebook and every expansion and adventure that they made.
This game has so much love and craftsmanship, and it’s so easy to play. The complaint that there are too many die rolls for everything is entirely up to you. You can choose to make more things rollable or fewer things rollable.
As the rulebook says, the point is to keep the action flowing. Everything slightly skews in the player’s favor, and it’s an actual cooperative game in the sense that you’re collectively deciding—or arguing—for what the die pool should be.
And then once those dice are chucked, you’re reading them like tea leaves and having to decide what that outcome really means. Even if it wasn’t a game, it’s an incredible treatise on great storytelling and keeping things exciting and interesting.
Every player is given a goal, a purpose, and interesting decisions to make. This is an awesome package. I highly recommend it if you haven’t touched it yet.
10. Joyride: Next Gen
This is a barely masked family version of Gaslands, and apparently another game that somebody ripped off from somebody.
But it’s a functional, great-looking package with a lot of humor. It’s easy to play, follow, and get going, and surprisingly interesting for such a simple set of components.
It’s a hex-based car racing smash-’em-up game with weird upgrades you can pick up along the way. Lots of engaging scenarios to try, and harder than it sounds to do two or three laps around the course.
I don’t know where this one will sit over time, but we played it more than I expected this month, and it’s worth mentioning. I like the Next Gen version because it’s got the whole cyberpunk vibe. We also added the two expansions—the Safari expansion and the Pirate expansion—which added some interesting new mechanisms.
Note on Customization and Home-Made Upgrades
We don’t play these games vanilla out of the box. We like to bling them out. We sleeve every card, upgrade every coin, print small 3D components, and add custom box inserts—anything that makes the games feel more immersive and premium. There’s a real tactile quality that gets enhanced, boosting both enjoyment and longevity.
For example, our copy of Outer Rim has metal coins, acrylic transparent upgrades, glittery spaceship boards, and copper card holders—it feels like a thousand bucks. The same goes for any game that can be upgraded. It’s worth doing, and it protects the game, too.