Headline : The Best New Board Games and Tabletop Games of 2023 (So Far)

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The holiday-shopping season is upon us, and I apologize if that sent a shiver up your spine, but in the board-game world it means a whole slew of new and upcoming releases as publishers try to get their newest titles into the channel in time for gift-buyers to splurge. This summer saw a big bump in releases and general interest in games; Gen Con, the largest tabletop convention in the western hemisphere, brought in a record 70,000 attendees who took over downtown Indianapolis for four days of gaming, with publishers selling out of many of their hottest titles.

Here are a few more of the best new titles from the summer, with many more on their way to retail as we speak, so even a month from now this list would probably look a bit different. Three of the four new entries are lighter family games, which adds some balance to a list from earlier this year that skewed toward the heavier or more complex titles.

Splito is a card game that plays like a party game, allowing for up to eight players at once without the intelligence-insulting aspects of most party games (yes, I’m looking at you, Cards Against Humanity). In Splito, you’re working with the players to your left and your right, but only in service of racking up the most points for yourself before the game is out. On each turn, you can play a card from your hand to either side, and at the end of the game, you and your neighbor will look at all of the cards between you — scoring cards and numbered cards — to see how many of those scoring cards you completed, with both of you getting the full point total shown if you did so. Those scoring cards might say you have to have a set of all six numerical values, or exactly two cards with the value of four, or no teal cards at all, referring just to the cards between you and that neighbor (not the other side). When the game ends, you take the product of your score from your left and the score from your right. It takes about 15-20 minutes to play and just a few minutes to learn; I played with eight people, ranging in age from 7 to 77, and everyone understood it while the player I would say is the least inclined to like board games ended up cleaning all of our clocks. (Hi, Mom.)

Regular gamers might know the work of Applejack designer Uwe Rosenberg, most of whose games are either lighter works involving Tetris-shaped tiles (Patchwork, Cottage Garden) or heavier worker-placement games where you have to gather 8 billion different resources while making sure you have enough food (Agricola, A Feast for Odin). This tile-laying game is something entirely different, and it plays light until the rather intense scoring burst at the very end. One to four players compete to build the best apple orchard, building up different varieties of apples and placing valuable beehives between the trees. To do this, they place hexagonal tiles that show apples and/or flowers, with the apples coming in seven colors, trying to build chains of tiles that show apples in the same color to gain points. Where you place the tiles also matters for your honey (that’s the currency you use to buy tiles), and you get it by lining up tiles with numbered beehives on their edges. There are two small scoring rounds during the game, but most of the points come in a big flourish at the end. You score double points for the final harvest, taking home two points for every apple in each chain that has more than three apples of its color, and can then get another bonus if you garnered points from at least four different colors. It’s a game that rewards balance while also introducing a puzzle element, and the turn counter keeps the game moving so that it can run as little as 30 minutes.

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