While our Diamond Climber Awards are on hiatus, we still want to make sure we, as a team, talk about our favorite games of 2025. These are the games that stand out, stand up, and won’t stand aside. Maybe it’s a light card game, or maybe it’s an hours-long space odyssey, the games on this list are our collective favorites that we played in 2025. Please join our team as we celebrate the best that board gaming has to offer.

Tom Franklin

Ingenius 3D

Thanks to my friend W. Eric Martin. I borrowed his copy of Ingenious 3D at the end of 2024 and forced it on all of my gaming friends in January 2025, from North Carolina to Maryland.

If you’ve played Reiner Knizia’s original Ingenious, you know how good the game is. Now, condense the board into a much smaller hexagonal shape and allow players to randomize the colors in the corners. The pieces are thicker, with a bar on the underside, across your pieces two hexes. This means you can only play on top of two adjoining pieces, and not completely cover a single piece.

Play starts on the first level of the board, but you can place a tile atop two other tiles at any…

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