The dragons are adorable. The strategy runs shallower than the studio’s last game.
Monster Couch built the Wingspan video game, which is the digital board game I have sunk the most hours into by a wide margin, so I came to their Flamecraft adaptation already knowing what this team does to a tabletop game when they get their hands on it.
They rebuild it as a tiny, animated, hand-painted world rather than a flat menu of cards, and they score it like a lullaby. Flamecraft, the digital version now out on Steam, PS5, Xbox, and Switch, gets all of that treatment. What it does not get, because the box never had it to begin with, is much depth once you have seen the town a few times.
That is the honest shape of this one. It is the coziest game I have booted up in months, and it is also the one my group is most likely to solve.
What Monster Couch’s Digital Version Gets Right
The town is the star. Every shop is a little 3D diorama, the dragons have more personality than they have any business having at this size, and the soundtrack is the sort of thing you leave running after you have stopped playing. If you liked how the Wingspan app felt to sit inside, this feels the same way, warm and unhurried, built by people who clearly like the source material instead of just licensing it.
It plays fast, too. A full game lands around the hour mark, which makes it the thing you put on when a heavier game has collapsed because someone at the table fell asleep three quarters of the way through Caverna. Cross-play carries across PC, consoles, and Switch, so a group split across devices can still share a table. That flexibility is real, and it is the sort of thing the physical box simply cannot offer.
The rules teach themselves. You draw dragon cards, you place them on the town’s shops, and each dragon and shop hands you an action when you do: draw more dragons, collect goods, cash goods in for the reputation points that decide the winner. A handful of short tutorials and one full game is enough to have the whole loop down. Mastering it takes longer, but nobody is going to bounce off the on-ramp.
There’s a Free Demo, So You Can Actually Try It First
Here is the part the marketing buries and the part I care about most: there is a free demo on every platform, Steam included. It hands you a slice of the town, a few dragons, bot opponents, and local multiplayer for up to five, which is more than enough to know within one sitting whether the game clicks for you.
That matters because Flamecraft is a buy, not a rental, and the demo turns a blind purchase into an informed one. If you have been circling the physical box at forty-odd dollars, an hour with the free digital version tells you whether the cozy dragon shopkeeping loop is your thing before you commit to cardboard. This is the same logic behind trying any board game on a screen before buying it, which I got into at more length when Amazon Luna put King of Tokyo up for free. If that is the way you like to shop for games, the piece on the board games you can try digitally before buying is worth a read alongside this one.
Six Dragons, Six Actions, and Where the Ceiling Shows
Now the catch, and it is a structural one, not a porting complaint. Flamecraft runs on six dragon types tied to six goods: bread, meat, iron, crystal, plant, and potion. Every dragon of a color does the same thing every other dragon of that color does. That is elegant, and it is also a hard limit on how many genuinely different turns the game can hand you.
Compare it to the studio’s own Wingspan, where the deck runs into the hundreds of birds and nearly every one carries its own power, so the range of what you might do on a turn is effectively bottomless. Flamecraft is not trying to be that. It is a lighter, breezier thing, a gateway toward the Agricola and Caverna end of the hobby rather than a resident of it. But you feel the smaller menu.
My group will get good at this and then, I suspect, get to the bottom of it, because there are only so many optimal lines when everyone is drawing from the same six-action pool. The trip to that point will be pleasant. It will also be finite in a way Wingspan never was.
The AI Coasts, and There’s Still No Phone Version
Two smaller marks against it, both carried over faithfully from what this studio ships.
The bot opponents come in three difficulty levels and none of them will scare you. Same story as the Wingspan AI: fine as a warm body when you cannot get a group together, never a real threat once you understand the game. There is a solo story mode too, though if you are here for multiplayer the way I am, you will barely touch it.
And there is no mobile version. The whole thing is cross-play across PC, TV consoles, and Switch, which is genuinely convenient, but the absence of a phone build makes it less grab-anywhere than the Wingspan app, which lives in your pocket. For a game this light and this quick, phone is exactly where a lot of people would want it. That gap will probably close, but it is open right now, and it is the one omission that stings.
Is the Flamecraft Video Game Worth Buying?
Yes, with your eyes open. Monster Couch has made the prettiest, warmest version of Flamecraft that could exist, and if you want a cozy hour that asks little and gives back a lot of charm, this is an easy recommendation. Just know going in that the ceiling is lower than the studio’s last adaptation, the AI is scenery rather than a rival, and it is not on your phone yet. Play the free demo first. It is the whole review, compressed into one sitting, and it costs you nothing but an evening.
Most lists treat “strategy” as one flavor. It isn’t. Brass: Birmingham squeezes you slowly until you’re arguing with yourself over a single barrel of beer. Root makes you stare at the cat player, who hasn’t attacked in two turns, and wonder what she’s building toward.
Spirit Island hands you a clock and dares you to beat it. Same shelf label, completely different ways of making your palms damp.
So instead of ranking these one to sixteen, I sorted them by where the tension comes from, because that’s what decides whether a game becomes a regular at your table or gets played once and shelved.
My bar for what counts here is simple. Your decisions should decide the game more than the dice do, and a good player should beat a new one most of the time. That bar rules out Monopoly and most of Risk (more on those near the end). Everything below clears it, from a 40-minute bird game to a space opera that eats an entire Saturday.
The Sixteen Picks at a Glance
If you already know what kind of game you want, this table gets you there fastest. Everything in it sits in our wider strategy games category too.
Game
Type
Players
Play time
Wingspan
Engine builder
1-5
40-70 min
Ark Nova
Engine builder
1-4
90-150 min
Terraforming Mars
Engine builder
1-5
About 2 hours
Brass: Birmingham
Economic
2-4
60-120 min
Concordia
Economic
2-5
90-120 min
Power Grid
Economic, auction
2-6
About 2 hours
Root
Asymmetric area control
2-4
60-90 min
Dune: Imperium Uprising
Deck building, worker placement
1-4 (6 in teams)
60-120 min
Scythe
Engine builder, area control
1-5
90-115 min
7 Wonders Duel
Two-player
2
30 min
Twilight Struggle
Two-player
2
2-3 hours
War of the Ring
Two-player
2-4
3 hours or more
Spirit Island
Co-op
1-4
90-120 min
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Co-op campaign
2-4
About 1 hour per session
Twilight Imperium 4th Edition
Epic
3-6
4-8 hours
Diplomacy
Negotiation
7 (variants for fewer)
4 hours or more
Engine Builders: Cheap Early Turns, Expensive Late Ones
An engine builder starts you with almost nothing and asks you to invest in things that pay out later. The tension creeps in. For the first half hour everything feels generous, and then you look at the round tracker and realize you have four turns left and an engine that needs six to pay off.
Wingspan
Wingspan has a reputation as the relaxing bird game, and it earns maybe half of it. The art is lovely and nobody attacks anybody.
But you get eight actions in the first round, seven in the second, six in the third and five in the last, while every new bird costs more eggs to play. The engine gets pricier to run exactly as your turns disappear. That squeeze is the whole game.
Is it deep enough to earn a spot here? It’s the lightest game in this section, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What it does better than anything else here is teach new players what “engine” means without scaring them off. I get into the shrinking-clock problem and which expansions to add in my full writeup on Wingspan.
For couples, Wingspan Asia works as a standalone two-player box. If you’ve outgrown the base game, Wyrmspan swaps birds for dragons and adds cave excavation, a layer of planning that makes the whole thing noticeably crunchier.
Ark Nova is where you go when Wingspan starts feeling solved. You’re building a modern zoo: enclosures, animals, sponsors, conservation projects, 255 unique cards. On paper that’s too much. The action system keeps it sane.
You have five action cards in a row, each with a strength from one to five based on its slot. Play a card and it drops back to slot one, pushing everything else up. So the move you want right now is often the weak version of that move, and waiting a turn makes it stronger. Every turn becomes a small bet on patience.
Scoring runs on two tracks heading toward each other, appeal and conservation, and the game ends when yours cross. Expect two-plus hours at four players. I think it’s at its best with two, where turns come back around fast enough that you never lose the thread.
Terraforming Mars
Every player in Terraforming Mars is pushing three shared numbers (temperature, oxygen and ocean tiles), and the game ends once all three hit their maximums. That’s the part people underrate. Every time you raise the temperature, you’re scoring points and also shortening the game for everyone, including the person whose engine is still warming up.
There are 208 project cards, so no two games run alike. Play with the drafting variant from the rulebook. Without it, card luck swings too hard for a two-hour game. The components are functional at best and the first play will run long while everyone reads cards out loud. Neither of those stops it from being one of the most replayed boxes in my collection.
Economic Euros That Squeeze You Dry
Economic games don’t have big dramatic swings. They tighten a little each round, like a belt you keep having to notch. By the end you’re counting coins twice and still getting it wrong.
Brass: Birmingham
If I had to keep one game from this entire list, it would be Brass. You’re an industrialist in the English Midlands across two eras, canals then rail, building coal mines, ironworks, breweries and factories, and connecting them to markets.
The clever part is that you rarely produce everything yourself. Need coal for a factory? You can burn your rival’s coal, which flips their mine and scores them points. Every shortcut you take feeds someone else. Selling goods needs beer, beer comes from breweries, and half the time the nearest brewery belongs to the player you least want to help.
Turn order matters too. Whoever spent the least money in a round goes first in the next one, so being cheap buys you tempo. Toward the end of the rail era you’ll often have no idea who’s winning, and that uncertainty is what makes the last few turns so tense.
The downside is a real one. Players prone to overthinking will stall, and a first game runs close to three hours. The rulebook includes a shortened introductory version, but it strips out most of what makes Brass special.
Concordia
Concordia is the calm one in this section, and I mean that as praise. Everyone starts with the same hand of personality cards. You play one per turn and do what it says: move colonists, build houses, produce goods, buy new cards. When you want your cards back, you play the Tribune.
Scoring happens entirely at the end, through gods printed on the cards you collected, so you can win a game you thought you were losing. People call it luck-free. It isn’t quite. The card market refills from a shuffled deck and the city goods are randomized at setup. Still, luck matters less here than in almost any game on this list, and it plays well at two players.
Power Grid
Power Grid is an auction game wearing a spreadsheet. You bid on power plants, buy coal, oil, garbage and uranium from a shared market, and pay to connect cities. Money is tight enough that a single overbid can haunt you for three rounds.
The rule that makes it work is often explained backwards. Turn order is based on how many cities you’ve connected. The leader goes first in the auction, where going first is a disadvantage. Then the order reverses: the player in last place buys fuel first at the cheapest prices and builds first into the cheapest cities. The leader pays top price for everything. It’s an elegant brake on runaway wins, and it keeps the final round close more often than you’d expect.
Get the Recharged edition if you’re buying new, and budget time for arithmetic.
Area Control Games Where Every Border Is a Threat
Area control games put everyone on one crowded map. The tension is spatial. You can see the attack coming, you just can’t always stop it.
Root
Root looks like a children’s book and plays like a knife fight. Four factions share a woodland map, and each one runs on different rules. The Marquise de Cat builds an industrial empire. The Eyrie Dynasties follow a decree that grows every turn and collapses into turmoil the moment they can’t fulfill it. The Woodland Alliance spreads sympathy and sparks revolts. The Vagabond wanders around making deals and ruining everyone’s plans.
Teaching Root is like teaching four games at once. The first play is a rehearsal, full stop. Plan for it, then play again the same night if people are willing, because the second game is where it clicks. Someone wins at 30 points or by completing a dominance card, and the table has to police the leader, since nobody else will.
A word of warning on the Eyrie. Falling into turmoil twice in a row can wreck a new player’s game, so give that faction to someone who enjoys a puzzle that punishes mistakes.
Like the idea of every player chasing a different goal, but Root sounds like too much? Disney Villainous gives each player a villain with a unique win condition at a far lighter weight, and it handles two to six players.
Dune: Imperium Uprising
Dune: Imperium blends deck building with worker placement. Your cards decide which spaces on the board you can visit, and those spaces improve your deck. Uprising is the version I’d buy. It adds spies, contracts and sandworms that double your rewards in a conflict. More importantly, it pushes you into combat nearly every round, where the original let players sit out and build quietly.
Hidden intrigue cards mean you’re never fully sure you’ve won until the last one is played. It also has a six-player team mode, rare for a game this sharp.
Scythe
No game on this list starts more arguments than Scythe. It’s set in an alternate 1920s Eastern Europe full of giant mechs, it looks spectacular, and depending on who you ask it’s either a tense war game or a solitaire puzzle with plastic robots.
I’ve heard four versions of the case. One camp says it’s a race to execute a memorized opening, and experienced players know their full sequence of moves before turn one. Another insists it’s best at two players, because an opponent with nobody else to worry about will come at you and break that script.
A third points to the star system (the game ends the instant someone places a sixth star) as the thing that makes the final turns tense, since you’re always calculating whether you can grab one more before someone else ends it. The fourth calls it multiplayer solitaire with occasional fights.
They’re all a little right. My take: Scythe is a race dressed up as a war. Combat rarely happens, but the threat of it shapes every move. If you like efficiency puzzles with menace in the background, you’ll love it. If you want armies clashing every round, get Root instead.
Scythe and Wingspan share a publisher, and both land in my ranking of the best Stonemaier games, where I explain which of the two has aged better.
Head-to-Head: Games Built for Exactly Two Players
With just two players there’s nobody else to blame and nobody to gang up on the leader. It’s you, your opponent and every mistake laid bare.
7 Wonders Duel
Treat this as its own game rather than a shrunk-down 7 Wonders, and a better one at this count. Cards are laid out in a pyramid, some face down, and taking a card can reveal a new one for your opponent. You’re always thinking one move ahead of what you want to take.
There are three ways to win: push the military track into your opponent’s capital, collect six different science symbols, or have the most points when all three ages are done. Only one of those has to go right for you, and your opponent has to watch all three. Thirty minutes, and it fits in a coat pocket.
Twilight Struggle
The Cold War in about three hours. One player is the USA, the other the USSR, fighting for influence across the globe with a deck of historical event cards. The cruel twist is that many cards belong to your opponent’s side, and when you play one for its points, their event fires anyway. Every hand is damage control.
Push the DEFCON track to one on your own turn and you’ve started a nuclear war and lost. So you can’t be aggressive everywhere, all the time. It’s heavy, long and best with a regular opponent. If you have one, few games reward repeat play this much.
War of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings as a full war game: one side controls the Free Peoples, the other the Shadow armies of Sauron. The Free Peoples can win militarily, but their real hope is sneaking the Fellowship to Mount Doom while the Shadow player hunts it. The Shadow can win by conquering enough strongholds or by corrupting Frodo.
Two different wars on one board, running at once. It’s the most requested two-player game among people I know who play heavy games, and it deserves the praise. Two cautions. It runs three hours or more, and many experienced players find the base game favors the Shadow. The first two expansions are the usual fix.
Multiplayer Games That Shine With Two
Plenty of games on this list are at their best with two, even though the box says four. Brass, Ark Nova and Concordia all get tighter and faster with just two players. Before buying anything for two, check the player-count poll on BoardGameGeek. If more than roughly a third of votes say “not recommended” at two players, believe them.
Co-op Games That Turn the Board Into Your Opponent
Co-ops replace the rival across the table with a system trying to kill you. The tension comes from watching a clock you can’t stop.
Spirit Island
You’re spirits of an island, defending it from colonizing invaders. The invaders are predictable: they explore, build and ravage on a visible schedule. You can see exactly where the damage is coming next turn. The puzzle is that you can’t stop all of it, and every power card is either fast (it resolves before the invaders act) or slow (after), which decides whether you’re preventing damage or cleaning it up.
It’s the best co-op strategy game I know, with one real flaw. Games sometimes end with a whimper. One player clears the last towns with a fast power, the win triggers, and the final turn everyone planned for never happens. That doesn’t happen often, but it’s frustrating when it does.
If you want co-op for two in under 20 minutes, Sky Team has you landing a plane with a partner using dice and almost no talking. It’s far lighter than anything else in this section and one of the best-rated games on this site.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 1
Base Pandemic is a fine game with a known problem: one experienced player can end up making everyone’s decisions for them. The Legacy version is still vulnerable to that, but the campaign gives the table so much to argue about that nobody stays quiet for long.
You play through a year of months, 12 to 24 sessions depending on how often you fail, and the game changes permanently each time. Cities fall, rules are added, stickers go on the board forever. It’s one playthrough and done, and the story it builds is worth every cent of that trade.
Twilight Imperium and Diplomacy Take the Whole Day
Some games aren’t an evening, they’re an event. The tension here comes from investment: after six hours of building an empire, every vote and every betrayal feels enormous.
Twilight Imperium 4th Edition
Three to six players, a galaxy built from hex tiles, and a realistic playtime of six to eight hours for a first game. Each round you pick a strategy card that shapes your role, then expand, trade, fight and vote on galactic laws. First to ten victory points wins.
The rules aren’t the hard part. The table is. Treaties get broken, trades get renegotiated in the hallway, and the whole group will still be arguing about round four’s vote days later. Only buy it if you have a group that will commit a full day, more than once.
Diplomacy
No dice, no cards, no luck at all. Seven players negotiate, then write secret orders for their armies at the same moment. Everything rides on trust, and the moment of the game is the backstab you didn’t see coming. It will damage friendships, and that’s the point.
Catan, Ticket to Ride, Monopoly and Risk: Where the Classics Land
These four show up on every list, so here’s where each one falls against the bar I set at the top.
Catan is a strategy game with a dice problem. Opening placement and trading take real skill, and the robber punishes whoever’s leading. But a bad run of rolls can sink a good player. It’s still a great first step. I go through what separates good Catan players from lucky ones in my Catan strategy guide.
Ticket to Ride is lighter than anything in the main list and a brilliant gateway game. The destination tickets add real risk, since an unfinished route costs you its points. It gets thin at two players, when the board opens up and nobody gets blocked.
Monopoly fails the bar. Once the properties are bought, the game plays itself. Most families also skip the official rule that unbought property goes to auction, and add a Free Parking jackpot that isn’t in the rules. Together, those two changes are why Monopoly lasts forever.
Risk has more decisions than Monopoly, but dice decide every battle and turtling is usually the best play. If your group loves Risk, Small World or Root will feel like the game Risk was reaching for.
If you’re bringing new players up from these, start with my guide to strategy board games for beginners, which picks games that each teach one real skill.
Quick Answers: Best, Hardest and What Counts as Strategy
What is the best strategy board game right now?
For competitive play, Brass: Birmingham. It combines economic depth, player interaction and a tense finish better than anything else I’ve played. For co-op, Spirit Island. For two players, 7 Wonders Duel if you have half an hour, Twilight Struggle if you have an evening.
What is the hardest strategy board game ever made?
The Campaign for North Africa, a 1979 wargame with an estimated playtime of around 1,500 hours. It’s famous for a rule that makes Italian troops use extra water to cook pasta. Among games people still play regularly, Twilight Imperium 4 and Twilight Struggle are about as demanding as it gets.
What makes a board game a strategy game?
Your choices, not luck, decide the result, and a skilled player beats a new one most of the time. Almost every game has some strategy in it, but this label is for the ones where it outweighs everything else.
Are strategy board games good for two players?
Many are better at two. Dedicated duels like 7 Wonders Duel, Twilight Struggle and War of the Ring are built for it, and bigger games like Brass, Ark Nova and Concordia tighten up nicely with two.
Pick Your Pressure
Don’t choose by rating. Choose by the kind of sweat you want. A slow build you can plan around? Engine builders. A tightening budget? Brass or Power Grid. A rival you can see coming? Root. A clock ticking down? Spirit Island. Match the pressure to your group and the game will earn its spot at your table.
King of Tokyo’s free Amazon Luna launch got me sitting down and playing it, and it also got me digging into how many other board games let you try before you buy.
The honest answer on that second question is: fewer than the marketing around them suggests. A lot of “digital board game” coverage treats every app in the category as a free demo, and that’s just not true. Some really are. Some are a $20 purchase wearing a trial’s clothing.
I Spent an Evening With King of Tokyo’s Free Amazon Luna Video Game
It took about ten minutes to get an answer to the only question that mattered: do I still like this game with the table stripped away. I did. Getting there came with a few caveats worth knowing before you treat a ten-minute session the way I did.
The dice-rolling loop moves faster on a screen than it does at a table. No fumbling for the sixth die that rolled under the couch, no re-counting a monster’s health by hand, no forgetting that healing doesn’t work while you’re standing in Tokyo, because the game just won’t let you make that mistake.
If you’ve ever had a rules argument at a physical table over whether energy carries between turns or whether you can refuse to leave Tokyo, this version settles it instantly by enforcing the rules for you. That’s a real, underrated use case for a “trial” that has nothing to do with buying decisions at all: it’s a fast way to confirm a rule you’re fuzzy on.
Where it loses ground is exactly where you’d expect a cloud-streamed version of a physical game to lose ground. Amazon Luna runs everything on a remote server and streams the video back to your device, so there’s a beat of input lag between locking a die and seeing it register, small, but noticeable if your connection has any hiccups at all.
And touching a screen to “roll” six virtual dice just doesn’t hit the same as physically slamming a fistful of oversized claw-and-heart dice down in front of your friends. That gap isn’t a bug, it’s just what happens when you strip the table out of a tabletop game.
The bigger limitation is content, not presentation: this is the base game only. No unique monster powers, since those live in the Power Up expansion, which isn’t part of the free Luna version. Every monster plays identically, which is a real, already well-documented complaint about King of Tokyo’s base box, and the video game inherits it faithfully rather than fixing it.
So don’t mistake a flat ten minutes with six identical monsters for a fair read on where the game goes once someone at your table owns Power Up.
Getting a lobby together mattered too, since this is a party game, not something you play solo. That part was painless: no account needed beyond an existing Prime login, and the interface walks each player through their own options every turn instead of assuming everyone already knows what the icons mean.
Whether three or four people of mixed experience could actually start playing within a few minutes of deciding to try it, they could, and that matters more than whether the dice loop holds up alone.
The push-your-luck tension, stay in Tokyo and bank points or bail out and heal, held up even with the tactile stuff gone. That was the only question a free trial needed to answer, and it did. I won’t be going back to the video game itself now that I’ve made up my mind, but that was never the job it was built for.
Other Board Games You Can Try on Your Phone Before Buying
King of Tokyo isn’t the only board game with a digital option worth checking before you spend on cardboard, it’s just the only one on this list that’s free with no catch. Here’s how Catan, Wingspan, and Exploding Kittens compare.
Game
Free to try?
Pros
Cons
King of Tokyo
Free (Amazon Luna, Prime members)
Full ruleset, no download, no in-app purchase waiting behind it
Only the digital adaptation, and King of Tokyo’s last digital outing didn’t hold attention long
Catan
Free base game, expansions cost money
Real tutorial, real base game, cheap way to sample Seafarers or Cities & Knights before buying cardboard
Expansions unlock with in-app “Catan Gold,” so it’s cheap sampling, not a free trial of the full game
Wingspan
Not free ($19.99, no demo)
Full card pool including expansions for a fraction of the physical collection’s price
No way to try before paying, expansions are separate $9.99-$11.99 DLC on top
Exploding Kittens
Branded app isn’t free, real free routes exist elsewhere
Board Game Arena and Netflix both offer it at no added cost
Official app costs money, the free routes depend on already having Netflix or being fine playing on a third-party site
Catan: Free Base Game, Paid Everything Else
Catan Universe is a real free download, base game included, with a built-in tutorial. Where it stops being free is the expansion library: Seafarers, Cities & Knights, Rise of the Inkas, and Rivals for Catan all sit behind an in-app currency purchase. Still useful if you’re deciding whether Seafarers is worth $30 in cardboard, a few dollars to test it digitally first is a lower-risk way to find out. Just don’t expect trading with strangers or bots to feel anything like haggling with your friends across a table, that part of Catan doesn’t survive the translation.
Wingspan: Not a Trial, a $20 Bet
I want to correct the record on this one, since I’d have assumed the same thing before checking. The official Wingspan digital version from Monster Couch is a $19.99 purchase on every platform it’s on, no free demo exists anywhere I could find. The European, Oceania, and Asia expansions are separate DLC on top of that. What you get for the $20 is a well-reviewed adaptation that lets you sample the whole card pool, including expansions, for a fraction of what the physical collection costs. Legitimate reason to buy it. Just not the same pitch as “try before you buy,” and a site telling you otherwise hasn’t checked.
Exploding Kittens: Free, Just Not the App With Its Name on It
The official Exploding Kittens app itself costs money, and it bundles in real expansion content (Streaking Kittens, Barking Kittens, plus digital-exclusive Betrayal and Party decks) rather than gating them all separately. But if free is the requirement, Board Game Arena has it playable at no cost, and Netflix subscribers get a version included with their membership already. Neither of those is a reason to sign up for something you don’t already have, but if you’ve got Netflix anyway, that’s a free way to see if the card game clicks with your group before buying a $20 box.
So Which One Answers “Will I Like This?”
King of Tokyo, honestly. Zero cost, zero conditions, the cleanest test case of the four. Catan’s free base game is a close second. Wingspan and Exploding Kittens have real value in their digital versions, they’re just not free, budget for them like the purchase they are, not the trial they’re sometimes sold as.
Here’s a fact that made me feel a little better about my own impatience: when Stonemaier Games asked its newsletter subscribers to vote on Wingspan’s next expansion after Americas, the result was an exact 50/50 split between Africa and the Arctic. Not close. Tied.
Co-founder Jamey Stegmaier confirmed it himself in the comments of the studio’s 2026 lineup announcement, and as of that announcement, neither one had a release date attached.
So somewhere out there is a spreadsheet with a coin sitting on it, and an entire continent’s worth of hornbills, rollers, and one deeply unfair flightless bird is stuck in limbo because a newsletter audience couldn’t commit.
I wasn’t going to just sit around. Wingspan’s card design is more formulaic than people give it credit for, once you’ve actually pulled apart what a hundred and seventy real cards do. Food cost tracks roughly with point value. Egg capacity tracks with nest type and body size. Power color tells you when in the turn structure a bird is supposed to matter. Once you know the pattern, you can build a card that would slot into the real deck without anyone flagging it as fan-made from the stats alone.
So that’s what I did. Four birds, four habitats, calibrated against real cards already in the box. Not concept art, not vague “wouldn’t it be cool if.” Actual stat blocks.
The Secretary Bird Walks Its Prey to Death
Most raptors in Wingspan hunt the way you’d expect a raptor to: from the air, from a perch, with talons. The Secretary Bird doesn’t. It’s a four-foot-tall grassland predator that hunts almost entirely on foot, and it kills snakes by stomping them, repeatedly, with enough force to break a spine. It looks like someone crossed an eagle with a heron and then gave it the temperament of a bouncer.
Points
Nest
Egg cap
Wingspan
Habitat
Predator
7
Platform
1
210 cm
Grassland
Yes
Cost: Rodent, Rodent, Invertebrate Brown, When Activated: Roll all dice not in the birdfeeder. Gain 1 food for each one showing invertebrate or rodent.
I built this one off Golden Eagle, which is an 8-point platform predator with a heavy rodent cost and a card-tuck power. The Secretary Bird trades that gamble for a flatter, more reliable dice payout, which is why it sits a point lower. It’s not the flashiest bird in this set. It’s just honest about what it does, which is more than I can say for half the raptors already in the base game.
The Shoebill Is Built Like a Nightmare and Hunts Like One
The Shoebill stands stock-still in a swamp for hours, sometimes most of a day, waiting. Then it strikes fast enough to take down lungfish, eels, and on occasion a baby crocodile. It has a beak shaped like a Dutch clog and eyes that don’t blink so much as judge you. If any bird deserved to headline a wetland-heavy expansion, it’s this one.
Points
Nest
Egg cap
Wingspan
Habitat
Predator
8
Platform
2
230 cm
Wetland
Yes
Cost: Fish, Fish, Rodent Brown, When Activated: Gain 1 fish from the supply. If you do, tuck a card from the deck behind this bird.
Bald Eagle is the obvious comparison here: 9 points, platform nest, a fish-and-rodent cost, one flat gain-all-the-fish power.
The Shoebill’s power does two things at once, food and card advantage in a single activation, so it costs a point to keep it from just being a strictly better eagle. That’s the part people miss when they design fan cards. A cool animal doesn’t automatically earn a cool power. Sometimes the honest move is docking a point so the math still works.
The Ostrich Is Just Really, Really Good at Laying Eggs
The Ostrich is the largest living bird, it can’t fly, and it lays the biggest egg of any bird on the planet, sometimes over three pounds. Females also share communal nests, dumping their eggs into one dominant hen’s clutch until a single nest holds dozens of eggs from multiple mothers. It’s less a bird and more an entire egg-laying operation with legs.
Points
Nest
Egg cap
Wingspan
Habitat
Predator
9
Ground
6
200 cm
Grassland
No
Cost: Seed, Seed, Fruit Pink, When another player takes the lay eggs action: This bird lays 1 additional egg on itself, if it has room.
An egg capacity of 6 would be the highest number in the base game, and I did that on purpose. This card isn’t clever. It doesn’t need to be.
The joke is baked into the stat line: everyone else’s birds lay eggs on their turn, this one lays eggs on everyone’s turn, because that’s genuinely what the species does in the wild. Wild Turkey is the closest existing comparison at 8 points and an egg cap of 5, and the Ostrich edges past it for the same reason it edges past every other ground nester in real life. It’s just built different.
The Lilac-Breasted Roller Is Almost Too Colorful to Be Real
Kenya’s national bird gets its name from the tumbling, rolling display flight males perform to show off, and once you’ve seen the actual color combination, blue, green, lilac, and rust in stripes across one small body, you understand why. It’s the bird nobody believes is real until they’ve seen a photo.
Points
Nest
Egg cap
Wingspan
Habitat
Predator
4
Cavity
3
54 cm
Forest, Grassland
No
Cost: Invertebrate Brown, When Activated: Roll all dice not in the birdfeeder. Gain 1 invertebrate for each one showing invertebrate.
This is the filler card of the set, and I mean that as a compliment. Every real Wingspan deck needs cheap, low-commitment birds that keep a turn moving without demanding a strategy built around them.
Anhinga runs a similar dice mechanic in the actual game, just scaled up for a bigger bird with a bigger nest. The Roller is what that mechanic looks like shrunk down to a one-cost forest bird nobody’s going to build a whole engine around, and every good deck needs a few of those.
Where This Actually Goes
None of this is official, and Stonemaier hasn’t said a word about which continent wins the coin flip that never happened. But the fan community has been trading wish lists for years now, and the appetite for African species specifically, not just “more birds,” is loud enough that it’s clearly not going away.
If the real expansion ever ships, I’d bet money at least one of these four species makes the cut. The Secretary Bird and the Ostrich in particular feel less like predictions and more like inevitabilities. Until then, these four live here.
Just in case, we also created the box, consider it a little push to make this happen.
Stonemaier Games has released more than a dozen titles since 2015, and five of them account for most of the search interest, shelf space, and BoardGameGeek discussion the publisher gets: Wingspan, Scythe, Vantage, Tokaido, and Red Rising.
This ranking orders those five by how often people actually search for and play them, then breaks down what each one plays like, how long it takes, and who it fits best.
Stonemaier Games is an independent tabletop publisher founded by Jamey Stegmaier in 2015, known for high-production-value strategy games with strong solo modes and a design philosophy the company calls “player-first.” It publishes both in-house designs (Scythe, Wingspan, Vantage, Red Rising) and licensed or acquired titles from other studios (Tokaido).
How These Stonemaier Games Are Ranked
The order below is based on US search volume for each game’s core keyword, cross-checked against release date, player count, and playtime to explain why each one sits where it does. It is not a pure “best game” opinion ranking; a lower spot here can still mean a better game for a specific group size or complexity level, which the individual write-ups call out.
Wingspan is Stonemaier’s highest-volume search term by a wide margin and its best-known release. Designed by Elizabeth Hargrave and published in 2019, it is an engine-building card game where players attract birds to habitats on a personal player board, each with a unique power that chains into the next. It plays 1 to 5 (up to 7 with the Oceania expansion) in 40 to 70 minutes.
Wingspan won the 2019 Kennerspiel des Jahres, the 2020 American Tabletop Award for Strategy Game of the Year, and a long list of other international awards, and has sold more than 2.6 million copies worldwide as of early 2026.
Its complexity sits at medium-light, which is why it works equally well as a first “real” strategy game and as a low-friction choice for experienced groups. Three expansions (European, Oceania, and Asia) and a companion Wyrmspan spin-off have extended the line well past the base game.
Wingspan fits groups that want a game with genuine strategic depth but no combat, negotiation, or player elimination. It is a weaker choice for players who specifically want direct interaction between opponents, since turns mostly happen in parallel.
2. Scythe
Scythe is Jamey Stegmaier’s 2016 design and was Stonemaier’s flagship title until Wingspan overtook it in search volume and sales. It is an area-control and economic-engine game set in an alternate-history 1920s Eastern Europa, where five factions build up territory, resources, and mechs while largely avoiding direct combat until it becomes necessary.
It plays 1 to 5 out of the box, expandable to 7 with Invaders from Afar and Fenris expansions, in roughly 90 to 115 minutes.
The game won four Golden Geek Awards in 2016, including Board Game of the Year, and its two campaign expansions (The Wind Gambit and The Rise of Fenris) each won Best Game Expansion in their respective years.
Scythe sold over 382,000 copies by 2021 and remained Stonemaier’s top seller until Wingspan’s release. Its weight sits at medium-heavy: multiple resource tracks, asymmetric faction powers, and a tight turn-order system mean new players benefit from a rules teach before diving in.
Scythe suits groups that already enjoy strategy games and want a longer, more tactical session with meaningful player interaction, but it is a poor pick for a table that wants something explainable in five minutes.
3. Vantage
Vantage is Stonemaier’s newest major release, launched on the company’s webstore in July 2025 with wide retail availability the following month. Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, it is an open-world cooperative exploration game set on an alien planet after a ship crash, built around nearly 800 interconnected location cards and over 900 additional discoverable cards. Players explore from a first-person perspective, choosing their own path through the world rather than following a fixed narrative track, and can win through mission completion, reaching a personal “destiny,” or self-defined goals.
It supports 1 to 6 players in sessions of 120 to 180 minutes and sits at medium weight, more approachable than Scythe despite the longer runtime, because the complexity comes from exploration and choice rather than overlapping economic systems. Stonemaier has stated Vantage is self-contained with no expansions planned, unusual for a publisher whose other big titles (Scythe, Wingspan) built extensive expansion lines.
Vantage is the right pick for groups that want a long, story-driven cooperative session and don’t mind a bigger time commitment; it is not built for competitive players or anyone wanting a sub-hour game night.
4. Tokaido
Tokaido is the one game on this list Stonemaier didn’t design in-house. It was created by Antoine Bauza and originally published by Funforge; Stonemaier Games acquired the publishing rights to the brand and released an updated edition, revealed in March 2025, manufactured by Panda Game Manufacturing with refreshed components, revised rulebook text, and an added Automa solo mode.
Tokaido is a light, non-confrontational travel game where 1 to 5 players journey along Japan’s historic Tōkaidō road, stopping to collect souvenirs, eat local food, visit temples, and take in scenic views, all in about 45 minutes. There’s no direct conflict between players; the only tension comes from move order, since whoever is furthest behind on the road always goes next.
Tokaido works well for mixed-experience groups, family game night, and anyone who wants a genuinely relaxing game rather than a competitive one. It’s a weak fit for players looking for strategic depth or replayable variance, since the path and milestones stay largely the same each game.
5. Red Rising
Red Rising, designed by Jamey Stegmaier and Alexander Schmidt and released in 2021, adapts Pierce Brown’s dystopian novel series into a hand-management, combo-building card game. Players lead one of several great Houses, recruiting characters from the books’ 14-caste society and building card combinations toward victory through either dismantling the existing social order or embracing Gold dominance.
It plays 1 to 6 in 45 to 60 minutes, with a 5-minute setup, and sits at medium weight, more accessible than Scythe but with more combo interaction than Tokaido. Because it’s built directly on the novels’ setting and factions, familiarity with the books adds flavor but isn’t required to play.
Red Rising is the clearest pick for existing fans of the book series, and it also holds up as a stand-alone hand-management game for players who like deck-building-adjacent mechanics without needing a full deckbuilder’s ramp-up time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Stonemaier game to start with?
Wingspan is the most common starting point. It has the widest player range (1-5, up to 7 with an expansion), a shorter 40-70 minute playtime, and medium-light complexity, making it easier to teach than Scythe or Vantage while still offering real strategic depth.
Is Scythe or Wingspan better for a first-time strategy gamer?
Wingspan is the gentler entry point. Scythe’s medium-heavy weight, asymmetric factions, and multiple interacting resource systems reward players who already have some strategy-game experience, while Wingspan’s engine-building is more linear and easier to explain in one sitting.
Did Stonemaier Games design Tokaido?
No. Tokaido was designed by Antoine Bauza and originally published by Funforge. Stonemaier Games acquired the publishing rights to the brand and released a refreshed edition in 2025 with new components and an Automa solo mode, but the original design and credit belong to Bauza and Funforge.
How long does Vantage take to play?
A full session of Vantage runs 120 to 180 minutes. It’s the longest game on this list by a wide margin, since it’s built around open-world exploration across nearly 800 location cards rather than a fixed turn structure.
Do I need to read the Red Rising books to play the board game?
No. Red Rising the board game is a stand-alone hand-management and combo-building game. Familiarity with Pierce Brown’s novels adds thematic context, but the rules and victory conditions don’t require prior knowledge of the story.
Conclusion
By search demand, Wingspan and Scythe remain Stonemaier’s two most-searched and most-played games, with Vantage closing the gap fast as the publisher’s newest major release. Tokaido and Red Rising serve narrower audiences (casual travel-game fans and book-series readers, respectively) but hold their own within those niches.
For a first Stonemaier game, start with Wingspan (see our beginner-friendly board game picks for more like it); for a longer, more tactical session, move to Scythe or Vantage once the group is ready for it.
