So it’s 2025, and I know I’m a little late with my best of 2024 list, but hey, it’s still early January! That’s got to count for something! 2024 was another memorable year. I attended two conventions for the first time – Granite Game Summit and Circle DC – enjoying some touristy stuff while I was there. I also attended my usual ones – Consimworld, SDHistCon and RinCon. Last year, I also rejoined a weekly gaming group, so I’ve been fortunate to be able to get in more gaming than I had done so in the past few years. Without further delay: here are the top 10 games I played in 2024. 

10. Chicken 

Chicken! is a fast dice-rolling game that plays 2-8 players in about 20 minutes. It’s a dice-rolling, push-your-luck game that comes with 4 white dice, 4 orange dice, 4 yellow dice, 8 player tokens and one very snazzy cloth board. All these things fit into a tube canister adorned with yellow orange retro chicken artwork. 

The goal of the game is to chuck your dice to get a bunch of chickens before rolling 3 foxes, ending your turn. As you roll dice, you may spawn even more dice for your next roll, doubling the reward but also increasing your chances of getting those pesky foxes. If you don’t bust though, you count your chickens and then roll all those dice to the next player. It’s pretty fun seeing them sweat with the handful of dice you hand over. They can roll their dice or just forfeit their turn, which can prompt some playful “are you chicken?” teasing. The first person to get 25 chickens wins the game. 

9. Bonsai

In Bonsai, players take on the role of bonsai masters growing their own tree. It plays 1 to 4 players in about 40 minutes. It’s a charming card-drafting and tile-laying exercise in tranquility, with a bit of puzzle play. The game comes with a slim horizontal board to hold a deck of zen cards, and each player begins with a pot tile and a seishi tile. There’s also over 156 bonsai tile, which will be used to create individual bonsai trees. 

On your turn, you do one of two things: either meditate or cultivate. If you meditate, you choose one of the face-up cards from the board. Depending on which spot you take the card from, you may receive one or more types of bonsai tiles in four varieties: wood, leaf, flower and fruit. Each type has a distinct placement restriction and scoring value. If you instead decide to cultivate on your turn, you can build as many bonsai tiles in your tree as seishi growth cards allow. As you collect more tool cards from the meditate action, you can potentially drop a lot of bonsai tiles all at once when you take the cultivate action. The game is so zen and it’s so fun seeing the fruits of your labor in the bonsai tree in front of you. 

8. Let’s Go to Japan

I got a chance to play Let’s Go to Japan right before my own Japan trip this year, and the game pretty much mirrored my life leading up to the trip because I am an insane trip planner! I mean, how can anyone stay organized without spreadsheets and lists? In the board game, players draw activity cards to strategically place them on different days of the week during their weeklong itinerary. Players must decide if which attractions they have to go to 

In Let’s Go! To Japan, you are a traveler planning, then experiencing your own dream vacation to Japan. The game consists of thirteen rounds in which players draw activity cards illustrated by Japan-based artists and strategically place them on different days in their week-long itinerary. These can’t-miss tourist attractions will have you bouncing between Tokyo and Kyoto as you try to puzzle out the optimal activities to maximize your experience while balancing your resources. The game ends with a final round in which you ultimately go on your planned trip, activating each of your cards in order along the way. The player who collects the most points by the end of their trip wins, and it’s so fun reading over the cards of the trip you planned in front of you. 

7. White Castle 

In White Castle, players are working to become the most influential clan in Japan’s Himeji stronghold. It’s a Euro-style game where you take three actions in each round, a total of nine actions in the entire game, but of course, you may be able to combo actions depending on which of the dice you choose for your action.

The red, white and black dice (equal to the total number of players plus 1) sit on these dainty cardboard bridges in ascending order, and you may have to pay to place a dice on an action slot or receive money depending on what dice is sitting there already. Overall, players can tend the gardens, defend the castle or progress up the social ladder of the nobility. The economy is extremely tight and if there’s a bad roll, everyone is choosing from less-than-ideal dice, but I love how crunchy the game is for a game that’s under 2 hours, even shorter with 2P! There’s an expansion that just came out for this game, and I’m totally looking to buy a copy when it’s back in stock. 

6. Raising Robots

Part Wingspan, Part Race for the Galaxy, Raising Robots is a delightful engine builder tableau builder where players are young famous inventors attending school, getting good grades and creating robots. In each round, players secretly and simultaneously assign two of their five phase cards to two energy cards they’ve drawn. When everyone has picked their phase cards, they’re revealed and those selected phase cards will be the only phases in play for the round for everyone. Additionally, if an energy card has a cube printed on it, that cube goes onto the main board to show that action is available for everyone should they do those to do it. 

Then players on their own go through each of their phase areas, activating actions they’re allowed to do this round, whether collecting resources or building robots in various rows on their personal tableau. Gameplay continues for eight rounds, and if you’re an efficient tableau builder, you’ll have a whole army of cute little robots pumping out resources and victory points for you. The artwork is just adorable and lots of punny names for the robots themselves. 

5. Fromage

Fromage is a delightful cheese-wheel of a game! Players are simultaneously making, aging and selling cheese blocks (yep, little plastic pieces) by placing them onto inlaid spots on the quadrant of the cheese wheel that’s facing them. When players have completed their turn, the circular board rotates, and another section of the board is now facing you for you to take your turn. 

I love the timing element of this game, a less brain-burnery version of Tzolk’in. You only have three cheese pieces for the game, and you don’t get that piece back until it’s facing you again on the board. Placing your workers in high-return slots will delay their return to you for possibly up to three turns, so planning your moves is a huge part of this game. You don’t want to start a turn without any workers in your hand. The game plays under an hour and pairs perfectly with cheese and crackers, of course! 

4. Rock Hard: 1977

Rock Hard: 1977 came out in 2024 and is designed by a real-life 1970s rock star, Jackie Fox. In the game, players are up-and-coming musicians and are working hard to practice songs, play gigs, get a record deal and become a famous rock star of 1977. Turns out, the road to stardom is a challenging one as players need to balance working an actual job and collecting money in order to follow their dreams. Players can dabble in “candy” to accomplish more each day, but too much “candy” will land you recovery. 

I love the entire retro look of this game as well as its top-notch components of this game, including dual-layer cardboard to place the character you’re playing, the groovy music dials that represent your various tracks, and cardboard candy and guitar picks. It’s one of those rare cool euros that oozes with theme!

3. Red Dust Rebellion

Volume 12 of GMT Games’ COIN series takes us to an unexpected place: Mars, more specifically the Martian revolt and revolution in the 2250, 200 years after Mars was colonized. This setting is quite the departure from previous COIN games, a change that I wholeheartedly can get on board with. Each faction — Martian government, Corporations, Red Dust Movement and Church of the Reclaimer — have their own different win condition, with a fifth non-player faction, the Earth Government, also in play. 

The Marvian government, Corporation and the Earth Government are friends with each other, creating the counter insurgency mechanism of this game. The Reclaimer faction, however, behaves unlike any other faction in any COIN game I’ve played. They can actually discard asset cards to move forward on initiative. Your turn in a COIN has always been at the mercy of initiative on event cards, so this is a neat addition. I love the dusty red look of the board and am amused by the dust storm markers, called haboobs, in the game. In Arizona, we, too, call dust storms haboobs. 

2. Arcs

I’ve been talking a lot about Arcs toward the end of last year and teaching many, many games of it, so it was a tough choice between No. 2 and No. 1. Ultimately, I placed Arcs at No. 2, because the top game edged out Arcs a little bit more for the types of games I most enjoy playing. Arcs is epic, there’s no denying that. It’s a card-driven space opera, a sci-fi strategy game of multi-use cards, initiative and declaring ambitions. 

The board and components are just gorgeous, and each game I’ve played feels fresh and engaging, because for better or worse, you’re at the mercy of the hand of cards you’ve been dealt. With each card that gets played, a menu of actions are available to that player. But that hand of cards forces you to make tough decisions about surpassing the lead card, copying, pivoting or seizing the initiative so that you can play a lead card first in the next round. The game continues for five chapters, or if a player reaches enough points, which can happen as early as Chapter. 3. 

1. Windmill Valley

And my top game of 2024 is Windmill Valley! This crunchy euro is about tulip farming and selling tulip bulbs and enhancing your windmills. What makes this game stand out is that each player has a windmill board, made up of two different sized-wheels that rotate at different speeds, which then determine what actions you’ll be doing on your turn. It’s such a clever mechanism, one that requires you to really plan out your turns!

At the start of your turn, you can choose how to set the floodgate markers, which determines the number of action spaces your wheel turns for your turn. Most of the actions take place on the main board, where you’ll be taking farm enhancement cards, windmill board upgrades, visiting the market, building windmills and conducting foreign trade. Meanwhile, you’ll also be planting tulip bulbs in your personal board to score points, and as you get more windmills off your personal board, different sets and colors of flowers will score. I’m a sucker for beautiful games, as this has lovely wooden windmills and tulip pieces, and it being a crunchy euro as well sold it for me as the top game of 2024. And now I just want to tiptoe through the tulips …

And that’s a wrap for 2024! Thanks for making it all the way down here through this list. What are some of your favorite games you’ve played last year? And even though it’s almost mid-January, I, and my dog, want to wish you a very Happy New Year! May this year be filled with lots of gaming!