Board gaming is determined to make a complete mockery of both my free time and whatever remains of my shelf space.
The next wave of tabletop releases includes everything from cooperative pirate campaigns and zombie-infested superhero battles to enormous economic games capable of swallowing an entire afternoon.
There are clever two-player adventures, new versions of beloved favourites and enough sprawling campaign games to keep a dedicated group occupied for months.
Some of these games build on systems I already know and love. Others are taking familiar ideas in completely unexpected directions. All of them have found their way onto my increasingly unreasonable board game wishlist.
Whether you enjoy complicated economic strategy, cooperative trick-taking, character-driven adventures or simply arranging tiny animals into a pleasing woodland, these are ten of the most anticipated board games of 2026 and beyond that I cannot wait to get onto the table.
The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth
Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 20 Minutes
Check It Out Here
The Crew has already proven that a cooperative trick-taking game can somehow generate more tension than many games involving actual monsters, murder and the imminent destruction of the universe. Journey to the Ends of the Earth is now taking that wonderfully stressful formula on a globe-trotting treasure hunt.
Players will work together across a 25-stage journey while following clues connected to the lost treasure of Charlemagne. The adventure will send the group through locations including Mount Everest and the Amazon Rainforest, with the decisions made along the way influencing how the story concludes.
The essential Crew formula remains intact: everyone must complete specific objectives by carefully managing their cards, reading the table and somehow understanding what their teammates are attempting without simply explaining the entire plan.
I’m excited because The Crew produces those magical tabletop moments where everyone sits in absolute silence, communicates through increasingly desperate facial expressions and then celebrates a successful trick as though they have personally conquered Everest. Adding a larger adventure and branching narrative should give every small victory even more meaning.
Unmatched: Stars and Stripes
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 20-40 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Unmatched has always treated history, mythology and popular culture like one enormous toy box, so Stars and Stripes bringing together a selection of figures from American history and folklore feels perfectly at home.
The set introduces four playable fighters. Rosie the Riveter marches into battle wearing a World War II-inspired mech suit, John Henry arrives with his legendary hammer, Wyatt Earp fights alongside Doc Holliday, and George Washington commands the Culper Spy Ring while apparently taking a brief break from building a nation.
Each fighter has a unique deck and playstyle, allowing them to be used against characters from throughout the wider Unmatched series. The box also includes a double-sided board featuring the White House and the Alamo as its two battlefields.
At this point, one of the greatest joys of Unmatched is seeing just how strange its confrontations can become. Historical accuracy may have several questions about Rosie the Riveter piloting a mech into battle against Dracula, but I certainly do not. The unusual fighters, compact playing time and mix-and-match potential make this an easy addition to my wishlist.
Cascadia: Alpine Lakes
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 30-45 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is a standalone follow-up to Cascadia, the peaceful tile-laying game that quietly asks you to build a beautiful natural environment before revealing that you have placed every fox incorrectly and ruined everything.
Players once again draft habitat tiles and wildlife tokens to construct a Pacific Northwest ecosystem. This time, however, the habitat tiles contain two connected hexagons and can be stacked, transforming the familiar landscape into a three-dimensional spatial puzzle.
Scoring objectives change between games and consider the placement of five wildlife species across three alpine habitats. Players must also think about the elevation and surroundings of their lakes, introducing new adjacency puzzles without abandoning the accessible turn structure of the original.
I love board games that are relaxing right until I begin calculating my final score, and Alpine Lakes looks ready to deliver exactly that experience. The original Cascadia is approachable, beautiful and dangerously easy to replay. Adding height, larger tiles and new ways to score should give returning players more to consider while preserving the satisfying puzzle at its heart.
DCeased: A Zombicide Game
Players: 1-6
Playing Time: 60 Minutes
Check It Out Here
DCeased: A Zombicide Game combines two things comics have repeatedly taught me are extremely compatible: superheroes and the complete collapse of civilisation.
The Anti-Life Equation has spread across the world’s digital networks as a techno-organic virus, infecting civilians and some of DC’s most powerful heroes. Players control the remaining uninfected characters as they attempt to complete missions, rescue bystanders and survive hordes of zombies controlled by the game.
Defeating enemies earns experience and allows each hero to become more powerful. Unfortunately, Zombicide has never believed in rewarding players without immediately making their lives worse, so stronger heroes also attract larger and more dangerous waves of infected enemies.
I’m particularly excited by the prospect of facing zombified versions of characters who would already be terrifying without an uncontrollable desire to eat everyone. Zombicide works best when the board is buried beneath miniatures, the plan has collapsed, and every player is forced to attempt something profoundly irresponsible. Adding DC’s heroes and villains to that chaos sounds like an excellent way to spend an evening.
Oath: New Foundations
Players: 1-6
Playing Time: 45-150 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Oath is already a board game about creating history rather than simply winning a single isolated match. New Foundations intends to make that evolving history even richer, stranger and more personal.
The expansion introduces hundreds of cards alongside new systems involving family lineages, quests, intrigues and the foundations governing the world itself. Players will be able to develop their families across multiple games, construct lasting empires and influence the rules and structures inherited by future generations.
New Foundations is also designed to offer additional options for different player counts, including revised solo, cooperative and automated-opponent systems. The larger goal is to give groups more influence over how their shared chronicle develops from one game to the next.
Oath is fascinating because victory is only part of its story. Every betrayal, unlikely alliance and catastrophic political decision becomes part of the world that the group must inherit later. New Foundations appears ready to strengthen that long-term storytelling, which means my friends and I will have even more opportunities to make terrible choices and blame one another for them several sessions later.
Root: The Homeland Expansion
Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 60-90 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Just when the Woodland looked as though it could not support another political crisis, Root: The Homeland Expansion arrives with three new factions and two additional maps.
The Lilypad Diaspora is attempting to establish a home while balancing its desire for peace against the growing temptation to answer every misunderstanding with overwhelming force. The Twilight Council takes a more political approach, holding assemblies and issuing edicts intended to push the Woodland away from open warfare and towards furious debate.
Then there are the Knaves of the Deepwood, a group of woodland criminals who kidnap warriors, demand ransoms and may or may not be redistributing their profits to the needy. Their methods are questionable, but their parties apparently sound excellent.
These factions are joined by the Marsh and Gorge maps, giving established groups new environments and strategic complications to explore.
Root remains one of the most fascinating asymmetric games because every faction appears to be playing according to its own private rulebook. The Homeland Expansion does not merely add three different armies; it introduces three new political philosophies, each capable of disrupting the Woodland in its own ridiculous way. I desperately want to see how negotiations, ransom demands and heavily armed frogs interact with Root’s already unstable ecosystem.
Sail Legacy
Players: 2
Playing Time: 45 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Sail Legacy takes the clever cooperative trick-taking of Sail and stretches it into a 30-mission pirate campaign filled with branching decisions, ship upgrades and consequences that follow the crew throughout its voyage.
Two players work together by playing cards into tricks and resolving the combination of symbols they create. Depending on those symbols, the ship might move, charge forward or fire its cannons at the threats lurking across the ocean.
As the campaign progresses, players will improve their ship, customise their characters and modify the deck itself. Decisions can alter the direction of the adventure, while each pirate’s asymmetric abilities can be developed to create either a balanced crew or two highly specialised sailors who are incredible at one particular job and presumably useless at everything else.
I’m a complete sucker for legacy games because I love watching an ordinary collection of cards and components slowly become our collection of cards and components. Sail was already a remarkably tense two-player experience. Giving its decisions permanent consequences while adding sea monsters, upgrades and a full pirate adventure could turn it into something very special.
The Great Library
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 100-180 Minutes
Check It Out Here
The Great Library places players in charge of developing the legendary Library of Alexandria during the third century B.C., when the collection and preservation of knowledge was a monumental undertaking rather than something I claimed to be doing whenever I bought another book.
Playing as librarians within the Mouseion, players research Great Works, produce crafts, train scribes and translate manuscripts before contributing their discoveries to the growing library. These contributions generate Renown, unlock improvements and attract influential scholars.
Time is one of the game’s most important resources. Scholars continue their work as generations pass, events unfold, and the available spaces within the library gradually disappear. The end of the game is triggered when the second major event occurs or when the library is nearly full, after which the librarian with the most Renown is declared the winner.
This is a heavy strategy game from Vital Lacerda, so I fully expect every apparently harmless action to affect six different systems and leave me questioning a decision I made an hour earlier. But the theme is irresistible. Building a centre of human knowledge, recruiting scholars and racing against the passage of time sounds like the exact kind of enormous, interconnected puzzle I want to lose an entire afternoon inside.
Brass: Pittsburgh
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 120 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Brass: Pittsburgh transports the celebrated economic system behind Brass: Lancashire and Brass: Birmingham to America’s late-19th-century industrial boom.
Players become ambitious industrial titans building railways, pipelines, steel mills, oil refineries and interconnected commercial networks across the country’s northeastern Steel Belt. Every business must fit into a larger economic system, meaning one player’s infrastructure can create opportunities for everyone else while still advancing that player’s long-term plans.
The standalone game is based on Martin Wallace’s original Brass framework and is being developed by Roxley with Gavan Brown, co-designer of Brass: Birmingham. It promises new industries and mechanisms while retaining the economic competition and deeply interconnected decisions that made the previous games so highly regarded.
Brass: Birmingham has the rare ability to make laying a railway tile feel like both a personal triumph and an act of economic warfare. I’m excited to see how oil, steel and the Gilded Age reshape that system. I am considerably less excited about the moment someone uses the network I built to make twice as much money as I do, but that is simply the Brass experience. Current listings place Brass: Pittsburgh’s release in 2027.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 120-320 Minutes
Check It Out Here
Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game is an ambitious tabletop adaptation of Warhorse Studios’ historical role-playing game, combining an open-world adventure with deck-building and Euro-style strategy.
Set in Bohemia in 1403, the game begins with players as ordinary commoners attempting to make their mark during a period of political instability. Rather than following a rigid character class, players develop their abilities through the decisions they make.
Experience can be exchanged for skill cards, allowing characters to improve at activities such as fighting, stealing, hunting, persuasion, and even gathering herbs. Equipment also matters, so armour, weapons and clothing can influence what players are capable of achieving and how the world responds to them.
At the beginning of a game, the group chooses three major storylines associated with different cities. Players can become involved in these developing narratives, tackle smaller side quests, help local villagers or wander off in pursuit of their own goals. Inns offer food, rest, gossip and possible work, while merchants, guards, churches and bathhouses help make the world feel like a functioning place rather than a series of disconnected objectives.
Although players compete through their individual achievements, the game does not appear to focus on directly attacking one another. Instead, everyone is free to pursue their own version of success within the same evolving world.
This is easily the board game on this list I’m most curious to play. Kingdom Come: Deliverance works because it makes ordinary life feel like an adventure. You are not immediately handed legendary armour and told to save the universe. Sometimes you are hungry, covered in mud, unable to impress anyone and considering whether stealing a horse might solve several of your current problems.
Translating that freedom into an open-world board game is extremely ambitious. The involvement of designers Tomáš Holek and Vlaada Chvátil makes it even more exciting. Should all its quests, systems and character-building options come together, this could be the kind of tabletop adventure that keeps generating stories long after the box has been packed away. The newly announced adaptation is currently listed as a 2026 title.
Honourable Mention: The Resort
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 45-180 Minutes
Check It Out Here
The Resort transforms a remote Pacific island into a competitive tourism market where several ambitious developers are attempting to build the most successful luxury destination.
Players construct accommodation, services and guest experiences while managing costs, limited space and shared infrastructure. Different visitors have different preferences, so making money is not simply a matter of building the largest possible hotel and hoping everyone turns up.
Every decision affects the island’s economy. Building in a valuable location might restrict a rival, while investing in infrastructure could accidentally create opportunities for everyone else. Players must balance short-term income against long-term development while extracting as much value as possible from every guest.
The Resort immediately appeals to the part of me that wants to create a gorgeous island paradise and the much darker part that wants to charge everyone staying there an unreasonable amount for breakfast. Its emphasis on interconnected infrastructure and competitive development sounds wonderfully cutthroat, even if everything on the table looks like a holiday brochure.
The game currently appears to be targeting a later release than most of the main list, with BoardGameGeek listing it for 2027, which is why it has taken the honourable-mention spot for now.
The next few years of board gaming appear determined to keep us busy.
The Crew: Journey to the Ends of the Earth and Sail Legacy are finding new ways to expand cooperative trick-taking. Root and Oath are growing worlds already shaped by years of conflict, politics and player-generated stories. Meanwhile, games such as Brass: Pittsburgh, The Great Library and Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game are promising the kind of enormous tabletop experiences that require planning, commitment and possibly a table nobody needs to use for dinner.
Naturally, anticipation and reality do not always arrive in the same box. Some of these games could be delayed, redesigned or changed significantly before reaching players. That will not stop me from staring at my shelves, identifying spaces that do not exist and convincing myself that I can absolutely fit several more enormous board game boxes into this house.
Now comes the important question: which upcoming board game are you most excited to play?
