The Year in Board Games 2025: The Golden Age Ends

2025, we hardly knew you, mostly because you were rancid and frankly almost entirely awful from start to finish, a year that felt interminable and yet also light-speed. In the world of board games, 2025 will likely be remembered as the end of the “Golden Age” of modern board games, as tariff panic, company collapse, economic hardships, and consumer exhaustion have more or less left the last ten years of gigantic, deluxe board game experiences and crowdfunding to sink into the ocean while survivors tend to the life boats. If that sounds dramatic, it really is only half as dramatic as it could be, so let’s take a look at the year 2025 in board gaming for all of the highs and lows.

Winter Comes for Board Gaming

2025 started with much of the carry over of 2024, which already saw an industry that was struggling to keep up with market shifts; numerous large projects, particularly those from companies like CMON, Mythic, and more, seemed to constantly over-promise and under-deliver, of they delivered at all, while much of the gaming market had seemingly grown tired of bloated miniature focused games, instead favoring smaller games like 2024’s Spiel winner Sky Team. Board gaming also had been in the midst of market expansion through retailers like Target, whose questionable decisions in the face of the incoming Trump administration would then lead to their continued decline in profits and, by turn, make them a less attractive destination for shoppers to spend their money, while counterfeit games on Amazon continued the render the store unreliable.

But much of that would come later in the year; instead, 2025 started off with the promise of a new edition of -Span in the Wingspan line, Finspan, and talk of CMON bringing about a “once a month” policy to try and fulfill many of their lagging projects and deliveries. But in most cases, the market had seemed to be growing tired of large, overproduced games funded on Kickstarter or Gamefound, with the delivery of projects like ChipTheoryGames Elder Scrolls release going more or less only to people who backed it, and little fanfare anywhere else.

And then, in April, all hell broke loose as Winter officially came to an end, but not for board games; the announcement of Trump’s Tariff plan, or coherent lack thereof, sent immediate chills through the market. What-Ifs and Editorials abounded, such as one from Stonemeier Games's Jamey Stegmaier, who penned a piece he titled “The Darkest Timeline”, with Gloomhaven producer Cephalofair games stating that they would very likely face business closure due to the tariffs razing their finances and uncertainty in the market making it seem all but totally bleak. Although Cephalofair is still amongst the living, other companies are far less fortunate, and tariff uncertainty would remain a pressing topic throughout the entire year on the industry, with some companies halting delivery and production within the United States.

The Fallen

RIP. Credit: CMON Games

The pressure of tariffs would follow through to deal blows to some of the most obvious soft targets in the gaming sphere, particularly CMON games and Mythic; CMON’s money troubles had been well documented for a while, but the pressure and financial stress of the tariffs had seemingly forced the collapse of a brand that used to one dominate the board gaming market as a sign of quality, or bloat, depending on who you asked. We reported back in January about how CMON had hired a new marketing head, and then throughout the year the continued downfall as the company seemed to hit every single branch on the way down to their demise. Later in the year, CMON would be joined by Mythic, who had developed games such as Darkest Dungeon through campaigns on Kickstarter, and both companies had relied more or less on Kickstarters to fund their businesses, with new projects helping to fund problems or costs of old ones; in this case, tariffs seemed like an unexpected way to kill both of them off, but the house was made of paper as it was.

An actual tragedy to lose this game and the publisher behind it.

But CMON and Mythic weren’t the only fatalities of 2025, as Greater Than Games also closed up shop, a somewhat shocking announcement from the publisher/developer of Spirit Island, long hailed as one of the greatest games of this modern generation. Greater Than Games had been one of the first companies to join with Target to sell more “accessible” versions of their games, and they were sadly joined by publishers such as Underdog Games (Trekking), and retailer Boardlandia similarly gave up the ghost following the burden of tariffs. Final Frontier Games also went under in April, citing their unpaid totals from CMON as the majority reason for their folding, less the tariffs themselves but perhaps the effect of them already pressing down on CMON.

2025 was a frankly brutal year for gaming industries in general, with video game studios continuing to issue layoff notice after layoff notice, and the board gaming industry similar has closed the year with many people losing their livelihood as the future of the industry seems to hang uncertain; while the tariffs are still being imposed on American markets, European and Asian markets are mostly operating as normal, and it will remain to be seen how these markets evolve and shift in 2026, and whether the eventual end or permanence of tariffs reshape the industry forever.

AI Slop at Truffoni’s

Meanwhile, AI, the apparent sole pillar of the United States economy by the end of 2025, had found its way into board gaming across the industry that did remain; if anything, Kickstarter has long since stopped being the place to find new and interesting board gaming projects, and instead a place filled with AI “concepts” of games and “art” that more or less underwhelms and also seems to do little to repair the concept of Kickstarter as a platform for developers to reach fans, and instead a rugpull machine to separate people from their money by hoping they’d largely forget about their pledges.

SLOP! SLOP! SLOP! SLOP! Wait why is our industry dying? Credit: Netflix

Kickstarter isn’t the only place to be awash in AI, however, as many games and projects have been notably called out for using AI to replace artists, such as a user on Reddit pointing out that the game “What Do You Meme” filled their holiday pack with uncanny AI “memes”. Much of the discourse about AI is tiresome and frustrating, as any real useful or real-world utilizations for “AI” are often confused with lazy and cheap utilizations of “AI” for illustrations or writing, while also infecting just about any and every industry that exists; board games are fairly ripe for such lazy use cases, and with the continuing spread of “AI” throughout most things until the bubble either bursts or becomes “too big to fail”, 2026 will likely see continued utilization of AI in board gaming as a way to cut corners instead of doing anything creative or useful.

And the Award Goes to…Game You’ve Never Heard Of, Again!

Amidst all of the doom and gloom of the 2025 financial year, there were also people playing board games, and thus awards for board games. Perhaps echoing the continued interesting gap of what gets Influence-d and what gets actually played, the awards season hit with titles that had, for the most part, gone mostly unheard of. This isn’t exactly a surprise, as there is often an oddball choice that comes out to win the title from various award giving entities, but this year’s crop were particularly interesting in the way they didn’t overlap at all. The Spiel der Jahres was awarded to Hisashi Hayashi’s “Bomb Busters”, Kinderspiel to Wolfgang Warsch’s Topp die Torte, and Kennerspiel to Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray’s Endeavor: Die Tiefsee (Deep Sea). Meanwhile, the American Tabletop Awards handed their trophies to Remo Conzadori and Paolo Mori’s Captain Flip, John Cooper and Kory Heath’s The Gang, Josh Wood’s Let’s Go! To Japan, and Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset’s Fromage.

The awards are always slightly confusing because of the differing markets, too; Let’s Go! To Japan, for example, was a game released more widely in 2024, but hit the American market in 2025, while Spiel tends to rank “current” games that are more popular or more spread across the European and Asian markets; in any case, one particularly interesting note about these games is that all of them are quite small, seemingly echoing a shift in the market to smaller products and titles that don’t cost $100 dollars to purchase, and eat up far less space on store shelves.

Bits and Bobs: Hobbits, Reviews, and TCGs

Perhaps one of the more oddball stories of board gaming in 2025 was the seeming flood of Lord of the Rings themed games that released over the course of the year; the property had certainly never been a stranger to board gaming, but 2025 saw the release of Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Trick Taking Game, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth, and even a Spot it! Variant, as well as an expansion for Hunt for the Ring titled Hunt for the Ring: Light and Shadow.

We’ve had a fair share of reviews here on Goonhammer this year, with some of the games mentioned in this very article! But if you’re curious to see them or perhaps missed them during the hectic 2025 timestorm, never fear, as you can find them here. We even took a look at The Hobbit game, amongst many other titles that perhaps you haven’t given a chance yet. One of the nicer aspects of an industry downturn is that you have a ton of games you can catch up on playing!

Another shift in the gaming landscape is the return of TCGs to the industry, with games of all sorts and flavors dotting the landscape to compete with Magic the Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!; franchises like One Piece have had success starting up and finding a place in the market, and titles like Digimon, Cookie Run Kingdom, Union Arena, and even Riot Games League of Legends game Riftbound have started to pop up with increasing interest and playerbases, which is a hopeful sign that card games will continue to thrive even if an industry downturn seems to be the case for most other games. Even brands like Ultraman have found footholds with their own games, and Japanime Games vtuber card game Oshi Push also hit the market this year, and Japan even has a Detective Conan card game from Takara Tomy that has been gaining some level of momentum, while the Disney themed Lorcana game seems to have settled its distribution issues. One of the nicest sides of this trend is that while Pokemon and One Piece are still infested with speculators and “investors”, most of the other games have been able to thrive and find players who wish to actually collect and play their games, which one can only hope continues.

To a New Year of Gaming

As 2025 comes to a close, it can be hard to look at the state of board gaming in 2025 into 2026 as anything but highly negative. Although the industry seems to be keeping its head above water as much as it can, the attitude at trade shows and other places has been wary to negative, with good reason: having an economy ruining infant at the helm of one of the largest economies in the world that can specifically destroy your industry in a moment does very little to make one hopeful. 2026 will likely be a year of continued shifting and possible downsizing, as the economic viability of huge plastic Kickstarters and shelf destroying games continues to dwindle, as does consumer interest in such gigantic, costly products. Hopefully, 2026 will have some time to show what the newest trends in board gaming will be; while things in 2025 weren’t great, it doesn’t seem like the industry is dead in the water, but the golden age of gaming that seemed to dominate the late 10s to 20s is likely a thing of the past.

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Tags: board games | Board Game | cmon | CMON Games