BoardGameGeek reveals 25 inaugural entries in the newly announced Hall of Fame

Corey Hardt, 28 January 2025

BoardGameGeek has long been a hobbyist hub for all things tabletop. It's the biggest and most detailed user-maintained database of games out there, people play and discuss games via the forums, track their entire collections on their profile, network and organize trades, and now the site will also host the BGG Hall of Fame: a newly created honor bestowed upon a small number of games that "have made meaningful contributions to the board game hobby in the areas of innovation, artistry, and impact".

The plan is to introduce 25 new games to the Hall of Fame each year with the goal of "preserving the history and evolution of board gaming." 2025's initial batch of games have now all been revealed, releases spanning from 1959 all the way up to 2013. To me, the list feels like a great new resource to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of the hobby and its many subcategories.

Here are the 25 inaugural entries in the BGG Hall of Fame, in order of the years they were released:

1. Diplomacy - the famous game of politics and betrayals in World War I Europe that counts many past world leaders among its fans.
2. Acquire - a relatively simple yet brutal game of buying and selling businesses from legendary designer (and collector) Sid Sackson.
3. Cosmic Encounter - an extremely social game of alien conflict and game-breaking powers where the negotiation looks different every time you play.
4. Civilization - a game of growing and advancing an ancient-world culture, credited with being one of the first to feature a tiered tech tree.
5. 1830: Railways & Robber Barons - it seems this was the buying-shares-of-railroad-companies game that spawned the entire 18XX genre. I don't have much experience with them, but I do know they are very thinky.
6. Magic: The Gathering - does this need an introduction? The biggest trading card game in the world with the staying power to have an active community and new releases continuously for almost 30 years now.
7. The Settlers of Catan - I doubt I need to brief you on this one either. The entry point to the tabletop hobby for millions of people. Sheep for wood, anyone?
8. El Grande - an elegant and fascinating area-control game of caballeros vying for territory in medieval Spain.
9. Tigris & Euphrates - a tight, abstract wargame, and the first entry on the list from the famous Reiner Knizia: almost certainly the most prolific designer of great boardgames.
10. Ra - another beloved Knizia game, this one often touted as "the best auction boardgame." Bid on tiles in ancient egypt, hoping and praying to get the ones you need in the limited time you have before the sun sets.
11. Carcassonne - the poster child of tile-laying games, another very accessible entry point for families and friends. Build out a shared landscape of cities and fields, while aggressively vying for space with your "meeples".
12. Power Grid - a famously brain-burning and crunchy economic game of building power plants and supplying energy to a vast network of cities.
13. Ticket to Ride - this completes the holy trinity of "mega-popular intro games." Ticket to Ride is among the best selling boardgames of all time, and has dozens of iterations and maps to choose from at this point.
14. Caylus - one that's still on my list to play at some point, Caylus helped popularize the concept of a "worker placement game," a format that would come to define much of the heavier end of the hobby spectrum.
15. Twilight Struggle - considered one of the best 2-player games out there, putting you in the roles of the US and USSR locked in deep and complex Cold War political conflict.
16. Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization - boardgames have a bit of an obsession with this "building a culture from the ground up" kind of stuff. This is from Vlaada Chvátil, who you may know as the designer of the indubitably Hall-of-Fame-worthy Codenames.
17. Agricola - Uwe Rosenberg is another name familiar to many tabletop gamers, and this may be his best known work. A worker-placement game of subsistence farming in a vaguely European, peasant-filled setting, it's extremely boardgames.
18. Brass - compete with other British industrial capitalist moguls in the logistics of supply chains, iron works, shipyards, and everything in between.
19. Race for the Galaxy - this thinky action-selecting card game full of cryptic iconography didn't click with me when I first played, but I've come back recently to understand and appreciate the depth and subtle interactivity.
20. Dominion - perhaps more relevant to the thinky videogame sphere than any other game on this list, Dominion basically created the deckbuilding genre, the ripple effects of which are still bouncing around the indie games world to this day.
21. Pandemic - the archetypal co-operative game, where you play a team of CDC operatives trying to keep spreading infections at bay across the globe.
22. 7 Wonders - a fast-playing drafting game of selecting cards to add to your growing civilization and competing with neighbors to erect wonders of the ancient world.
23. The Castles of Burgundy - a game of building out your French estate using dice rolls, clever tile drafting, and making the best use of all the various actions available to you.
24. Terra Mystica - one of the bigger/heavier games on this list, TM lets you choose from 14 distinct and unique fantasy races each trying to carve out a home in the limited shared landscape you inhabit.
25. Concordia - trade and profit across the Mediterranean in Roman times, using elegant and simple action cards to outmaneuver your competitors.

Image credit: BGG users Filip Miłuński & Henk Rolleman

I hope my little overview and my thoughts on the newly inducted games gives you some context or piques your interest to explore some of these games further. There's so much fascinating design work happening in the world of tabletop games, and it's been going on for decades. I think this new curated selection will be a great starting point for anyone who desires to dive deeper and learn more about the world of physical games.