Games, Games, Games, Vol. 7

In this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner shares five "in case you missed it" classics and then moves through a curated list of 12 games, arranged from lightest to heaviest. Expect quick, joyful picks like Wavelength and Dorfromantik, followed by deeper journeys into titles such as Dune Imperium: Uprising and SETI. There's something here for every level of gamer, gift-giver, and holiday gathering.

Whether you're choosing a reliable crowd-pleaser or hunting for a challenge for your most seasoned gaming friends, this seventh edition of David's holiday games guide is here to spark joy around the table.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Dec.03, 2025.

David Gardner: Few people may love games more than I do. Some people don't even like games at all, and if that's you, I suggest you skip this week's podcast. Come back later this month when we'll be playing a different game that you may like, because it involves the stock market. That is, of course, the Market Cap Game Show coming in a few weeks. That's a game we all can play. It's coming back for the 2025 closeout. Anyway, if you don't like games, take this week off. Hey, wait. You're still listening. Excellent. In that case, thank you for suffering. I'll fool gladly, as I endeavor this week to share with you my top recommendations from the world of tabletop games, card game and board game recommendations, strategically timed, as I do every year as early as possible this December. You might have time to put one of these under someone else's tree to spice up your family's, even your own life. It's my annual games, games, games podcast, Volume 7 only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to this week's Rule Breaker Investing arguably a misnomer today because, well, there isn't much investing going on. In this episode, longtime listeners know we spend a third of our time on investing, a third on business, and a third on life. Since the Motley Fools purpose is to make the world smarter, happier and richer, well, you can map those three aims, investing business and life neatly to those three zones. That last third life. That's where we try to spark joy, because if you're getting smarter and richer but not happier, something's off. One of the best antidotes I know is gathering around a game table. This week, as we do every December, we try to spark joy for you and your family with games, games, games. I started doing this in 2017, tucked inside a gift giving special. The next year, I interviewed Richard Garfield, the designer of Magic The Gathering, and snuck in a games list at the end. Then in 2019, I finally came out of the gaming closet and titled the episode game games, games, and this year is Volume 7. It's my annual holiday guide to some of my favorite recent board games and card game. In past years, I've also opened up with longer explanations about my enjoyment of the website, BoardGameGeek or of the fantastic app for your smartphone BG Stats. If you want all of that, you can just check out the first 15 minutes of Volume 4 games, games, games from the year 2022. I'll simply say for now, both of those tools, BoardGameGeek and the BG Stats app are wonderful tools for serious gamers. Yes, this is the seventh in this series. All previous episodes, by the way, are distinct with entirely different recommendations if you do want to go deeper with me. Here's our format. We're going to start with ICYMI, which I'll explain shortly. Then we're going to move through 12 games arranged from lightest to heaviest. We'll begin with family games, kids games. I don't really play games, and then gradually head into longer, richer, more complex experiences. If you love tabletop games, I hope you will enjoy the whole ride. If you're just here for some gift ideas, feel free to hop off the train whenever I start running out of steam for you. Yes, this functions as a buying guide. Every game on my list this year, I have personally double checked for availability. I don't want to get you excited about something you sign on to Amazon and find out it's out of stock everywhere. Every single game I'll be sharing is one click away, and I'll even be including the average price or so for each of these games. With all that said, the past is prologue. Let's get started Bart. Appropriate music, please. I see.

I first want to represent a short list of classics. This is especially for new listeners and new gamers. I think each of these is a classic and deserves a look. I've talked about them before. In fact, I tend to mention this same group every year because we always have new listeners and people who are new to games. I would just say, if you're not a gamer, but you like games, and you want to give a gift or have good times with family over the holidays, this list is for you. Five games. I'll present them alphabetically. The first is Crokinole. This is a dexterity game where you flick disks into the middle of a circular wooden board that has little pegs that you can ricochet off of. There are some simple Crokinole boards and some more elaborate ones. You can see a real mix online almost wherever you look. The game originated in Canada, I think, more than a century ago. It's just a really fun, somewhat mathy, somewhat dexterity based game that I recommend for all ages. Crokinole that's spelled C-R-O-K-I-N-O-L-E. Second, in case you missed it, I-C-Y-M-I classic is just one. This is the simplest, maybe the simplest, best word game of all. The person whose turn it is doesn't know the clue word, but everybody else does, and so we try to give that person a clue to help them guess their word. The trick is that your clue to help them cannot be the same as anyone else's clue to help them. Else, you cancel each other out, and your poor friend, who's guessing, is going to have to make the guess with fewer clues given. This is a simple game. It is a cooperative game, and it is extremely fun and memorable. It's perfect for holiday gatherings, especially with people lots of different ages and perspectives, just one. My third, in case you missed a classic is phrase party. Now, there was once a game called catchphrase, which was sold in stores. It used cards or later a gadget that you would purchase. You would spit out words. But now these days, we all have smartphones. You really don't need catchphrase or that old gadget anymore. You just need a smartphone and the app phrase party. You're going to be given a word, and as quickly as possible, you need to convey to your partner. Maybe you're teamed with one other person, or maybe you've got a little group you're speaking to. There's a number of different teams, and you just like the old game of password, you're trying to give as many clues as quickly as possible to get your team to say back the word that you're staring at on your smartphone.

As soon as they do it's like hot potato. You pan your smartphone on to the next person clockwise, the next team, and they go about the same task, and eventually, the beeping speeds up. Again, it's hot potato, so there's a timer going on here. And at a certain point, you're going to hear the buzzer, and whoever's holding the smartphone at that point, that team loses a point. That is the game phrase party. We have a saying in our family, phrase party always delivers. It almost doesn't matter how many people are playing. You can play with 30 people, six people, 12 people. It is a fantastic party game, and it's already right there in your pocket. You just need to pay maybe a couple of bucks on the app store. It's probably a free version, as well, of phrase party to enjoy. Game Number 4, in case you missed it, classic. So Clover. This is another word game. This is probably my favorite word game in recent years. It's a bit more complex than just one, which I just explained for you here you're linking two words because here the challenge is to link two words together two unrelated words, and you're going to do it four times on your little personal board in front of you. You're going to need to figure out the right clue for your friends. For example, let's pretend you have two cards staring at you that say football and fire. You sit there for a quiet minute or two, and you think about, What is a single word clue? Could be a proper noun, even that would help my friends realize that football and fire are the two words I'm thinking of. Just to go with it here, I'm going to go with fan because, of course, football, there are a lot of fans, and I'm also thinking of fanning the flames. That might be a good example of a clue that unites football and fire, two otherwise unrelated words. You're going to do that four times staring at the board in front of you, and then you're going to remove all the cards and shuffle them up and add in a couple of red herrings, and the rest of the people around the table. This is a cooperative game are just going to see your four clue words, for example, fan, and they're going to try to piece together what words you were connecting with your clue. I can't explain the whole game here, but I did a pretty good job explaining in three minutes what takes maybe just five or six minutes to explain, even to new people who haven't gamed much before.

Each of these in case you missed classics is, again, geared toward people who say they don't like games. That's why a number of these are cooperative or they're more about words than other gaming tactics. Clover is just a fantastic game. I recommend my final in case you missed it classic, again, sticking with our theme here of fun in large groups with words, in this case, also pictures. I think we all know the telephone game, the idea that you whisper something in somebody's ear next to you, and then they whisper it, the person to their left, and it goes around and comes back to you and you see how the thing you whisper it has changed. It might have been a sentence or a story. You'll just hear really the lack of fealty to the original thing that you said. That's the fun of a game like telephone. Well, Telestrations does that but with pictures. You draw a picture of a clue word that you're given, you draw it as a picture, and you hand that on to the next person, and they have to figure out what the word was, the clue word that you just depicted. They write that down, and then they pass it on to the next person, and that person has to look at the word they've been given and draw a picture. It goes from picture to clue word to picture right around and eventually gets back to you and you get to see what your original drawing has become. Telestrations is really great in the party pack version, which plays up to 12 players at once. This game is not really so much about scoring or competition, although you can score, and it can be competitive, but Telestrations is really, most of all, about utter hilarity. I'm not sure there's any game that has my friends and family laugh more consistently and dependably than the game of Telestrations. So there you have it. Before we get into our 12 games of 2025, the in case you missed it classics Crokinole just one, phrase party, Clover, and Telestrations. I would bet that almost any holiday gathering would indeed be confidently enriched by any one of those five games. You could just play it all through December and have a great time. Onto my 12 games. Now, I've organized these as I did last year. We're going to start with simpler games and go to the more and more complex games. We're going to end. Game Number 12 is going to be a game that probably takes about an hour to learn and three or more hours to play.

That's at the far end of where we're starting from. We're starting with simplicity. The number that I use to judge games wit comes from BoardGameGeek the website, my second favorite website. I think you can guess what my favorite website is. My second favorite website, where every single game ever created in history has a page on BoardGameGeek. It's like a gigantic database of all games. One of the statistics that you'll find for every single game is the weight of that game. In other words, is it a light and easy to learn and play or is it a deep and complex game? The weight on BoardGameGeek goes from one, which is the lightest of all, up to 5.00, which would be the most complex of all. There is no game that rates five. All of these are, of course, just fan ratings, and they tend to average out somewhere, well, from the low ones to sometimes the very high threes. There are very few games that are weighted much above that. I think when you think about it, it kind of makes sense. In the end, we don't really want to spend time if it's going to be that complicated and that deep. Most people aren't going to even call that a game. I think most of us prefer to have fun as we play our games. I think weight helps guide us toward what would be fun for you and for me. Now, of course, I'm speaking to a broadly diverse audience this week. If you're still with me, that means you have at least some interest in games. But as I mentioned at the top, as I keep going, if you find yourself, your eyes start to cross, you're falling asleep, then you probably have reached the limit of games the weight of games that you would personally enjoy.

It's going to be Choose your own adventure here, but let's start now with game number one. Game number one is wavelength. Its weight is 1.12. This is about as quick and easy a game as just one or any of the others I just mentioned, all lighter games themselves. Wavelength came out in 2019, and if you purchase it online this month, you'll find it costs about $35. This is a game that plays a large number of players. Wavelength can handle four to 12 players. You don't really want to play with fewer than four. Wavelength is a game about trying to think the way your teammates Think. You're basically playing mind reader. Each round, the games going to give you a spectrum with two opposite ideas. For example, hot and on the other side, cold, or maybe underrated and then on the other side overrated. Only one player, the clue giver gets to see exactly where the hidden correct point is on that line. Everyone else is going to be guessing blind. If you see the hidden dial, I'm not going to fully explain this, but there's a hidden dial and a hidden gauge underneath that spectrum. Let's just go with underrated and overrated right now. If you're the clue giver, only you know that the target is way over toward underrated. And you can't say that directly. You're going to have to give a clue that points your team in that direction. maybe you say, I don't know, Rogue One. Popular movie. Many people consider it the best Star Wars movie ever made, but it's really not talked about that much. I would say that's a fairly natural way to convey to your teammates underrated.

Then once you give your clue, your team's going to talk it through and decide where to place that dial along the spectrum. When they lock in their answer, you reveal the hidden target, and see how closely they matched it. If they got very close to where the actual dial was located, you're going to get four points for a perfect score, or three or two if they were close. The other team, by the way, gets to observe all this, and gets a simple, higher or lower guess, pointing to one side or the other that keeps everybody involved, they can score a point on your turn. Because the spectrums range from clear and factual, with some cards to wildly subjective, every round is going to spark conversation, sometimes surprising insights, and plenty of laughs. I think what makes wavelength especially fun is how it turns simple communication into a dramatic, funny, sometimes shockingly accurate team challenge. The big physical dial at the center of the table adds some suspense. It makes the game instantly understandable. I would say it's perfect for families, for mixed groups, anyone who enjoys lively conversation and shared aha moments without needing to learn complicated rules.

Again, game Number 1 is wavelength. On to game Number 2, and it is Dorfromantik. Dorfromantik, which is spelled D-O-R-F Dorf, and then keep going little r, romantic, but with a k on the end because it comes from Germany, Dorfromantik started as a popular video game, and then got ported over into board game form. I would say it delivers one of the most soothing and satisfying cooperative puzzles in modern board gaming. It pairs a gentle legacy style progression, which I'll explain in a sec with the simple joy of just building a beautiful countryside together. Dorfromantik places players in a serene pastoral countryside.Your group collaborates, you're growing villages, forests, rivers, and fields, you're drawing and placing hex tiles to expand a shared landscape. You're trying to match terrain types to complete little quests, little goals, like, let's get five forest ones together and score five points. It works like that. You're managing a limited tile supply, so every placement matters, and it's very puzzly. It's not very different from just doing a jigsaw puzzle together in some ways, although, of course, you are scoring it. Again, it is cooperative, but there is a campaign style progression because as you continue playing one game after another, you're going to be unlocking new modules. You're going to unlock new objectives, new tiles. There are some surprises in store for you as you play through the game. There's a quiet joy that comes first of all, just from the cooperative spatial puzzle. Just any given round or session of Dorfromantik gives you a spatial puzzle to solve together. It feels meaningful. But then it keeps feeling fresh because there is an expansion system in place, which just gradually, as I mentioned, introduces new tiles, and new challenges without really adding much of a rules burden. If you're a fan of other games, I would say Cascadia and Azul. These are games I've talked about in past games, games, games, podcast. Or just anyone seeking a relaxing, collaborative strategy experience. Dorfromantik has my highest recommendation.

This is a game, by the way, which won the Spiel des Jahres, which basically in German, means game of the year. Germany is the country that has the closest thing to the Oscars for tabletop gaming. It's awarded every summer, and Dorfromantik won this global recognition a few years ago. We're talking about a highly esteemed game, game Number 2, Dorfromantik. On to game Number 3, I mentioned the game designer Richard Garfield joining me years and years ago on this podcast. He designed a fantastic collectible card game, really the first card game of its kind called Magic: The Gathering a few decades ago. Some of you are deeply steeped and know exactly what I mean when I say Magic: The Gathering, and others are wondering what the heck I'm talking about. But Richard Garfield is the mind behind Magic: The Gathering. Now much imitated many other games, including the Pokémon card game. A lot of copycats, a lot of people using his innovation in a nice way to create better games ever since. Dungeons, Dice & Danger is game Number 3. I'm mentioning Richard Garfield because he designed this game just a few years ago, 2022. If you wanted to buy this online today, it's about $55, and the weight of this game continues to be under 2.0. This one is 1.88. Dungeons, Dice & Danger plays 1-4 players, and it brings the thrill if you ever play Dungeons & Dragons, or enjoy Dungeon crawls in any way, shape, or form, as a video game or a board game, it has that thrill to it, but it's an easy, fast playing roll and write, which I'm going to explain in a sec, that gives you a nice splash of tactical choices, and a little bit of fantasy chaos. What do I mean when I say roll and write, well, Yahtzee was in some ways, the first roll and write game. You'd roll some dice, and then on your pad with a pencil, you'd write down how you wanted to score those dice, and you'd keep maintaining throughout the play session that pad of paper, and be scoring yourself all the way through. Hence, was born the first roll and write game decades ago. In the last 10 years or so, the concept of roll and write has spilled out into many other games.

You'll see a popular game come out, and then there will be a roll and write version. For example, Terraforming Mars, one of my favorite strategy games in the last 10 years. I've talked about it a lot in this podcast series in past years, there's now a roll and write version for Terraforming Mars. You can take the Yahtzee concept, and just throw dice in and use the themes of lots of other games, and create new roll and write, which is what many designers have done. In the case of Dungeons, Dice & Danger, Richard Garfield has an original idea in mind. He's not taking somebody else's brand. You're rolling four dice each turn, and all players are pairing them into two different sums. You just look at the dice and decide, which two do you want to pair into a sum, and then you're going to take your sheet of paper, which is actually a dungeon map with connected spaces, and you're going to start filling them out like you're progressing through the dungeon map. You're going to be navigating branching quarters, unlocking treasures. You're going to open up access to new areas, and there are monsters, of course, in Dungeons, Dice & Danger. They're going to require multiple hits to defeat, so you're going to want to use those dice to combo to hit and defeat the monsters as you go through this dice puzzle pushing your luck as you go. To me, this is a classic example of a solid roll and write. The game stands out. It just transforms I would say a simple roll and write framework into a surprisingly thematic adventure, gives each sheet the feel of a mini role playing game, but without much rules overhead at all. It is, of course, a light fantasy theme. Some people love that. Some people avoid that. It is solo friendly, as well. This game plays 1-4 players as I mentioned. I think it's really best with four done as a group. I prefer most games to play with others, although I also do solo a fair number of games myself. Dungeons, Dice & Danger takes about an hour to play.

It is game Number 3. On to game Number 4. I think we've played this one in the last year or two, as much as any other game in my collection. Game Number 4 is called Faraway. All one word, spelled as you'd imagine, Faraway. Faraway offers a wonderfully clever twist on exploration card games, because you're going to be using a backward scoring mechanism, and simple tableau building, which means you're just laying cards out in a sequence in front of you. You're laying them out left to right, playing one each round as you go. But at the end of the game, you score it backwards. The most recent card you played right at the end, the far right, that's going to score first. This creates a surprising amount of depth, I would say, in a tiny package. A big reason we've played this so much is because it plays so quickly. It says 15-30 minutes on the box. It's a very crunchy, chewy, thinky experience for such a modest game. This game costs only $25. I forgot to mention. It's weight 1.91. It is worth pointing out we're at a stage now well past a game like wavelength or even Dorfromantik because this is a game you're going to need to read the rules a little bit and teach maybe for 15-20 minutes. What's fun about Faraway is it's so replayable and it is a very quick game, again, scoring your journey in reverse. It shines for those factors. It's cheap, it plays fast, and it's quite rewarding. It turns a very small ruleset into a nice, thinky puzzle. There's also a very small expansion. You can add a few more cards. If you're really enjoying the game, you can expand it a little bit further. Anyone who loves getting a lot of game out of a small box, that's really, I think the Number 1 benefit of game Number 4, Faraway. Let's move on to game Number 5. Its weight is 1.94, so right about the same level as Faraway.

Game Number 5 is Bomb Busters. It came out just last year. It retails for about $40 online these days. It plays 2-5 players. Now, I have to pause for a sec before explaining more about Bomb Busters to apologize to you, my listener, because the truth is, I said I've looked up all these games, and they're all available a click away but there are a couple of games on this year's list that are a little harder to find. As I oh and ah a little bit about Bomb Busters, you should know that if you find yourself inspired to get this game, you might not be able to get it by Hanukkah or Christmas or the day that you're celebrating, you will discover that it is in some game shops, but not others. I don't really see it on Amazon, for example, and this is in part because of its popularity. I think they just didn't print enough of these when this game itself won the Spiel des Jahres, earlier this year, Germany's global Game of the Year was won by Bomb Busters. The popularity of this game has made it a little bit less accessible. I will mention two things. First of all, if you find yourself excited by this game, hey, just buy it when it does appear in January or February. When I looked it up on Amazon, it said it would deliver between December 20th and January 15th.

There is too wide a latitude in that date range for me to feel good about recommending it as a holiday gift. But you can always, and you should pick it up when it is available. I also want to give tip Number 2, which is where I go when I can't find a game easily on my go-to site, Amazon. Of course, there are other places people find games as well. You might have a friendly local game store. We have a wonderful one here in Washington, DC called Labyrinth, for example. There are also some other popular online sites. A site like Miniature Market often has these games. But my hot tip here is boardgameoracle.com. boardgameoracle.com is an aggregator. It goes out and sniffs the internet, and looks at all gaming e-commerce sites and sees which e-commerce sites might have a game like Bomb Busters available. If, in fact, you do go to boardgameoracle.com, looking for this game, you might well find it closer by, and in time for your holiday gathering. With all that said, now let me just share a little bit about what makes Bomb Busters great. Despite the name, this is not a frantic timer blaring party game. It's actually a clever, thoughtful puzzle game, where you and your friends take on the role of a bomb disposal team. More brainy detectives than action heroes. Each bomb is really a bundle of small logic puzzles that the group works through together. It's a cooperative deduction game wearing a playful cartoon action theme, and it's far calmer and more thinky than you might expect. The box packs 66 different missions in it. They start simply Mission 1, teaching you how the game works.

Then Mission 2, Mission 10, Mission 20, you can keep going. You're going to be matching shapes. You're going to be matching symbols, there's hidden information. You might be required to put numbers or icons in the right order. On your turn, you're looking over your own hand of cards. They're actually tiles, but they call them cards, and you only know really what you see in your own hand, but you're guessing what other people have, and you're trying to match what you have in your hand. It's almost like going fish, and asking if somebody has a seven in their hand. It goes back to the old game, Go Fish, but it's a lot more interesting. There are scenarios later in the campaign that bring a light real time element. There's a little bit of quick race to complete a small puzzle. But for the most part, again, this is a thoughtful conversational experience, and those missions is how it shines because each game resembles the previous one, but they keep changing up the mix and adding, again, like the game Dorfromantik. There are boxes that you unlock at different points that adds some components, or little new rule sets. Anyway, I would say if you enjoy escape room style puzzles, and quiet teamwork, games that deliver great aha moments and let you progress through them a legacy campaign style, Bomb Busters, packs it all. Each game takes around 25 minutes or so. We're talking about a game, again, a weight of 1.94. Once you learn the rules, you can play it over and over with little tweaks, and refreshing changes as you and your friends go. It's generally fun to keep the same group of people playing from one session to the next, but you can also drop a player or add a player anywhere along the line. Bomb Busters is a winner, and I only wish that it were more available. We have had so much fun. I think we're on Mission 29 in our family. We haven't even played half of them, but actually we played more than 29 times, of course, when the bomb blows up, you can't take credit for that mission. You have to replay it, and it's still fun to replay because you're basically being dealt a new hand of cards each time you play Bomb Busters. Let's move on now to game Number 6, Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring trick taking game has a very similar weight, 1.95. It costs $27. It's basically a card game. It came out in 2024. Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring trick taking game plays 1-4 players, and it takes the familiar structure of classic card games. You can think hearts or bridge, where each player lays down a card, and one card wins the round. But this game flips.

Into a cooperative experience. Because instead of trying to beat each other, you're actually all working together using your cards to help The Fellowship survive and move forward through Tolkien's classic story. In this game, you and your friends play as members of The Fellowship, navigating key moments from the early journey. Yes, Book Number 1, Fellowship of the Ring. In fact, there are two planned expansions, one called The Two Towers coming next, and, of course, the last, The Return of the King, the three volumes of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This first game is focused first book, Fellowship of the Ring. Each round, really, each trick, because this is a trick taking card game, represents a scene from the story. You're crossing snowy mountains, you're entering Moria, you're escaping the Nazgul and how you collectively play your cards determines whether things go smoothly or push your group toward danger and failure. Yes, just like Bomb Busters, if you blow it, you can always just replay the mission and it'll feel different each time you keep getting a different hand of cards each time. But when you win a mission, you progress to the next one. You can't openly describe the exact cards in your hand, of course, and that creates a fun and subtle tension. When should you win a trick on purpose or when should you maybe lose a trick and let your friend, your other member of The Fellowship, win that trick on purpose? When should you simply get out of the way? Each chapter gives you a specific objective. It mixes the characters who are playing and each character has a different ability as you play your hand of cards. Every card you play becomes a small meaningful decision. I think what makes this design shine so much is just how neatly that fragile balance maps on the structure of a simple card game. Should I win this trick or should I let somebody else win this trick? Trick taking games are usually competitive, of course. But here, you're cooperating. That's happened in a few other games I've loved like The Crew and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea. These are games I've talked about in the past in this series. The concept of trick taking games as cooperative is not new with this game, but it is done beautifully with this game. Of course, Lord of the Rings fans are going to especially enjoy Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring trick taking game for 1-4 players.

Let's now move on to game Number 7. We're still under 2.00 weight. That's my way of saying I think this year's list tilts a little bit toward light to medium strategy. In past years, I've had some real heavyweights tipping my list toward heavy gamers. I would say this year, we're a little bit more light to medium, and sure enough, game Number 7, Rebirth, continues in that same vein. Game came out last year and it is designed by one of my favorite game designers living today. That's Reiner Knizia. Past guess multiple times on this podcast. Reiner delivered this game last year. It plays 2-4 players, plays each of those ably, 2, 3, or 4 players, and this game costs about $42 if you're looking it up online. Game Number 7 is Rebirth. It's a refreshing spin, I would say, on tile placement. Reiner Knizia has designed a lot of tile placement games. This is Scrabble. If you know, Scrabble is technically a tile placement game. As you lay out the letters, you are dropping tiles down on a board, and depending on where the tile lands, you might be triggering a double word score or a triple letter score. That's the concept of tile laying and Reiner has done this with many different types of games and Rebirth is an excellent example. It's inviting players thematically to restore a post-collapsed world and bring it back from nature, bring some civilization back. That's the theme of this game, very positively presented, a quietly hopeful sense of rebuilding. But what you're really doing is you're drafting and placing terrain tiles. You have a hand of one, so you're just basically picking up a tile, and when it's your turn, you'll be laying that tile down, trying to group it near other tiles that would cause it to chain together and score either individually or toward shared objectives. This is a game that is rewarding sometimes short-term tactics like I'm glad I picked up that tile right now because that goes perfectly there.

Or maybe you have a tile that you're playing setting up a longer term scoring arc in the game. Reiner as the game designer is rewarding both tactical play as well as some strategic thinking, as well. There are some shared objectives. There are different scoring conditions from one game to the next. You're going to be presented a fresh puzzle each time you and your friends play Rebirth. I can't overemphasize enough, perhaps, just how simple turns are. You basically draft. You're going to pick up a tile and then you're just going to place that tile. But there's a rewarding sense of carefully sequencing something that you're going to do on the board as you play through Rebirth. This is, again, ideal for fans of other nature games. If you like games like Cascadia, we're going to be talking about another nature game coming up in a little while. This is another one of those strong sense of theme around nature, in this case, as a thoughtful tile laying game. Game Number 7, Rebirth. You still with me? Gamer let's keep going. We're on now to game Number 8. Yes, we've now tripped over the 2.00 weight parameter. We're now at 2.20 for the game of Forest Shuffle. This game has gotten a lot of play in recent years. I think it first debuted online at Board Game Arena. By the way, if you're a board gamer and you always feel like you could never find enough people to play games with, check out Board Game Arena. Its acronym is BGA. To people who play all the time, they just say BGA. But Forest Shuffle debuted as a playable game on BGA.

At the same time, they started printing cards, so you could play it online or off. By the way, that is true of so many games today. Many of the games I've already mentioned this week on this show, you can play online instead of buying a boxed version and playing with friends and family. Forest Shuffle is a great example of that. This game came out two years ago. By the way, this is one of the cheaper games on my list this year. This game will set you back about $23 when I checked online, which is pretty affordable, considering how much play is in the box. It is a game also that has some mini expansions, each of which I think there are three of them now. I think they've finished expanding it, but each of those expansions is around $12 or $14. All in, you'd pay about $60 for a full copy with all the expansions. But Forest Shuffle plays 2-4 players. The theming sounds a little bit like Rebirth, doesn't it? Because you're creating together, you're building a thriving forest ecosystem. But rather than rebirthing something centuries from now, which was the concept, I think, for Rebirth, this one is very much about the here and now. Every card you're looking at, these are actual flora, actual fauna, trees, mammals, insects, fungi, each with its own needs and costs, but also symbioses. The tone here of this game is earthy and alive. As your forest spreads, it begins to feel like a real habitat as you build out a tableau in front of you. You're playing cards here to grow your forest. It's sort of an economic engine builder of a game. T

he cards empower each other and especially noteworthy is that many of the cards you play in this game are just trees, many different types of trees. But the key concept of Forest Shuffle is that you can play a card on top of the tree or below the tree or to either side. If you think about what creatures are on tops of trees, birds are up there often or butterflies, maybe. Down below, you might find mushrooms or moles, things that dig in the ground. Of course, to the left or to the right, you could play animals, mammals around your trees as you build out your forest. Each tree can support four cards around it and then there's synergy from one card to another or from one tree to another. There's some cool layered combos you can throw down in this game. There are some card costs that you pay. You have to discard cards from your hand in order to play cards each time. That shouts back to a game called Race for the Galaxy, which came out more than 10 years ago, the first really popular game that had playing a card, but having to pay other cards in your own hand to play that card. There's a nice tension about which one do I want to play, but if I play that one, I'm going to have to give away these others. That's satisfying, even if it's somewhat frustrating game after game. Forest Shuffle provides a lot of fun card placement puzzles. Every decision feels consequential. Every forest grows in a uniquely satisfying way. That's game Number 8, Forest Shuffle.

Let's create what I'll call a nature trifecta then as we go on to game Number 9, because we just talked about Rebirth and Forest Shuffle. Game Number 9, sticking with the same theme here is Earth. That's right. That's the full name of the game. Earth. When you search Earth on Amazon, if you're looking for this game, there's a lot of other things that pop up when you type in Earth. You might want to type in Earth Board Game just to find it. It's bold for the designer just to name his game Earth, hoping that it would be found on online searches. Indeed, it has been. This is a game that came out two years ago. Its weight is now 2.90, so we're really bouncing into the areas of four gamers only for this kind of a game. You're going to want to be an experienced player. You're going to be teaching this game to people who are going to need to listen to you speak for 20-30 minutes or more, in some cases, as you teach the game of Earth, which, by the way, retails for $40, which I consider a heck of a deal. Because there's usually some correlation between how complicated a game is and then how much it costs. Often complicated games have a lot of components, a lot of rules or other accessories that are part of that game. Usually, as we start talking about these weightier games, they cost more. This cost just $40, which I consider quite a deal. Game Number 9, yes, Earth. Plays 1-4 players. Yes, that means it plays solo, as well. This is one of the most satisfying build it up strategy games to come out in recent years. Imagine taking the raw materials of the natural world, plants, climates, landscapes, and then slowly weaving them together into your own thriving ecosystem. Forest Shuffle, game Number 8, how you doing this with your own little forest. Here you're now working across the whole of Earth and its ecosystems.

This game looks beautiful on the table, by the way. But more importantly, it feels wonderful as your little corner of the world becomes increasingly vibrant and interconnected. In Earth, every player starts with an empty board and you gradually fill it with cards that represent different parts of the natural world. Think of each card like planting something new. Maybe it's a hardy shrub. Maybe it's a marsh. Maybe it's a rainforest vine and then watch how it interacts with the other things that you've already placed. You're creating a system here where each part is trying to support another part of the tableau in front of you. The clever twist is that on your turn, you're actually going to choose one of four simple actions. You don't always just play a card every turn. There are four different things you can do, but everybody gets to do that action along with you that you chose. You get a stronger version. After all, it's your turn. But a nice innovation here, and it's present in some other games, too, is that everyone is playing each turn. Because as you make your choice to do your stronger version, we all get a weaker version, but we also benefit our own ecosystem, our own tableau with every passing turn. Everyone stays involved. You're growing out a little four by four grid of cards and it's worth pointing out that cards in the same row, for example, can trigger one another. Or cards in the same column, they can chain together. Sometimes when you place a new card, you set off a whole series of small bonuses. It's like a miniature ecological domino effect. You're not just putting down pictures of plants, you're building something that works. This game is, again, highly replayable. It is a delight. It has an excellent new expansion. I think there's a second one on the way. There is enormous replay value in a box of Earth because no two ecosystems end up looking. That's the end of our nature trifecta. Games set in nature have been particularly popular. Think about games like Wingspan in recent years. I think this in some way goes together with a lot of, in some cases, concern or great interest in our planet. I think all of these games are feeding off of an increasing human interest in planet Earth, how we can do our best taking care of it, its beauties, its eccentricities. There are a lot of games these days, if you go to a gaming store. Even Barnes & Noble has a lot of board game. I went and won just over the break. Happy to see my book, Rule Breaker, investing in the Barnes & Noble there in West Hartford, Connecticut.

But anyway, there are a lot of games these days, even in big bookstores, and a lot of those games have nature as a theme. I think that's why I creeped in to my Games Games Games Volume 7 this year. Three left. For these final three, if you're still listening, and if you're hearing me right now, clearly, you still are, this must mean you are an avid gamer because we're about to go heavy. Let's go to game Number 10. The weight now up to 3.20. This is one of my favorite games of all time that just came out in a brand new final edition this year and I was so excited when Innovation Ultimate arrived earlier this year, a 2025 release of a game that first came out years ago, but they kept adding new expansions and then they decided to reprint the whole thing and tweak some of the rules and proved a lot clarity around words on cards. Innovation Ultimate is available. I think I saw it as $67 on Amazon. It plays 2-4 players. This is a big, wild, wonderfully unpredictable card game about the entire sweep of human history. If you've got to know Rule Breaker investing over the years, you know that I love Innovation. Innovation is often for me what I seek in the stocks, industry by industry that I recommend or purchase. I'm always asking, who's the real innovator in that industry? I love Innovation. I love the game Innovation Ultimate. Instead of marching armies or moving pieces on a map, Innovation is a pure card game. It asks what if civilization were just a giant tangle of ideas competing, colliding, and occasionally blowing up in your face? This is a bold game. This is a chaotic game. This is a very tactical game. It's hard to have long-term strategy going on as you play Innovation Ultimate. For some people, that will sound like a lot of fun. For others, they'll think, I like chess. Why would I play this game? I think the reason I love this game is all of the chaining together that happens. There is electricity on a game table with Innovation Ultimate set up on it. The premise is simple enough. You're guiding your civilization. You start at the Stone Age and you're going into the modern world and even beyond. In front of you, you're building out a tableau of cards that represent inventions, breakthroughs, ways of organizing society. Everything from pottery to later democracy to later than that, robotics.

David Gardner: Each card does something unique. Playing one often gives you a new ability or power. Every single card has its own thing going on, but the twist is the same ideas can spill over and help your opponents too. Each person is building out their own tableau with their own innovations, but you start to affect each other. This is a game that definitely has some take that going. You could force an opponent to have to discard their whole tableau if you've nuked them, for example. There are lots of chaotic things that can happen in the game of innovation. The heart of the game, of course, is the way the cards interact. Each card has symbols on it. If you have more of a symbol than your rivals, then your abilities are going to fire off at full strength. If you have fewer, you might actually get swept up in someone else's dominating invention. You're just constantly adjusting as you push into new eras. You're strengthening your symbol counts. You're timing big plays to leap ahead. Every card in the deck is different. Did I mention, I think I did briefly, there are five separate expansions in a box of Innovation Ultimate. Each adds either, let's say, historical figures or historical artifacts or the world's cities. Each of these adds something new to the mix. Innovation Ultimate is incredibly dynamic. One of my favorite game designers, Carl Chudyk, is the genius behind Innovation Ultimate. You might be behind one moment, but the next, you trigger a card and you flip the entire table's fortunes. It's a rare strategy game where brilliant moves, and I would say hilarious disasters can live side by side. If that sounds like fun to you, well, it's a lot of fun for me. It's a card game that feels alive. Fast thinking, surprising twists. The spirit of invention, of course, celebrating innovation as you play. This game truly delivers you a unique ride through all of human history. Innovation Ultimate game Number 10. On to game Number 11, Dune: Imperium Uprising. It came out a couple of years ago. It cost $55, which I consider a pretty great deal. It plays 1-4 players. It plays solo as well. There's also a six-player mode that some people enjoy. I would say it's probably best with three or four. The weight of this game is 3.51. This is about a three-hour game in our experience, and I absolutely enjoy every hour of it. If you enjoy strategy games with real tension, games where every decision feels like it matters, I would say Dune: Imperium Uprising is one of the very best out there today. It takes the original formula from Dune: Imperium. This is a game I've talked about in years past on this series. Really an award winning modern classic, but Dune: Imperium Uprising sharpens it.

More drama, more conflict, more clever decisions packed into every turn. It helped, of course, that the game designer could see what he'd done really well and what could be improved in his first version of the game and then came out with this new stand-alone follow-up sequel to the game and created, I think, something that's even better. They're both, of course, great. Here's the basic idea, as you might expect, you're one of the leaders vying for power on the planet Arrakis that desert world from Frank Herbert's famous novels, the one where spice is everything. Alliances shift constantly, no one stays on top for long. The game blends two concepts in a way that even newcomers, I think, can understand pretty quickly. First, there's a deck building aspect. Again, we're at the point of this podcast where a lot of you still listening already know what deck building is, but I feel some compulsion to briefly explain it for those who don't. Think of it like drafting a small team of cards over time. That within the game itself gives you better and better abilities. Your abilities keep augmenting over the course of the game. You're drafting an ongoing team of cards, but then secondarily, there's also worker placement, which is just a fancy way of saying you choose where to send your little pawns, your agents on the board. It's almost like placing pieces on a map. Based on placing it there, you get to take a certain action or claim a certain opportunity. If you'd place it somewhere else, it would be something different. There's a great interaction between the deck building aspect of this game as you build out your deck of cards, and then the workers that you're placing on the planet Dune itself. Your cards are telling you what spaces you're allowed to visit and what you'll get when you go there. It's just a great dynamic for a board game.

Each round builds to a conflict. It's like a showdown at the end of each round. You're going to decide whether sending troops to fight for valuable rewards is worth it this time, or maybe you hold back for future rounds. Uprising itself, as I'm highlighting this game this year, adds a few new layers to Dune: Imperium, the original. Uprising for players familiar with Dune: Imperium adds giant sandworms that now influence the board, factions stirring rebellion. Bigger, more dynamic conflicts that encourage bold moves. Of course, there are more new types of cards as you refine your deck. That's part of the fun, of course, removing weak cards from your deck, adding powerful new ones, building the combos. There's just a constant process of engine tuning as you play a game of Dune: Imperium Uprising. I think what makes it shine is just how seamlessly it mixes that personal puzzle of planning your actions with that shared drama of what's happening on the planet, on the board. The battle at the end of each round. This is a game just full of interesting decisions. I said it takes three hours. That's usually how long it takes us, but the time really feels like it's flying by. You're deciding when to commit, when to retreat, when to take a risk, when to play a cool. Everyone's competing for key spaces and key battles. There's rich interaction. But I would also say it's not a mean spirited game. If you like strategy games that have depth that have narrative flavor, of course, if you're a Dune fan, well, that too, and those memorable, I can't believe that just worked or that just happened moments, Dune: Imperium Uprising is a standout.

That is game Number 11. Finally, we get to game Number 12. Now, there's a little caveat for this one, because when I went on Amazon, I could not locate this game in part, again, because of its extreme popularity. This is a game over the last year or so that for very serious gamers, people who love to play games that take more than three hours, who love to spend an hour reading a rules booklet or spending that same hour having somebody else explain how the game works for them. If that's you, then with a weight of 3.81 SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Of course, SETI is the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. That is game Number 12. I really love this game and have admired it since I first played it earlier this year. It retails for about $70. Again, I mentioned, I didn't really find it on Amazon. But if you go to Board Game Oracle, you'll see that it is on many sites, and in fact, it's right there on the publisher's site. I think if you fall in love with this game or the idea of this game, you should be able to get it in time for the holidays. Asmodee, which is spelled A-S-M-O-D-E-E, Asmodee. The publisher has it right there available on its website to ship to you. I'm still including it, even though this game isn't conveniently found on Amazon. Let's talk about game Number 12 SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which by the way, plays 1-4 players. If you've ever looked up at the night sky and wondered, what might be out there? This is a game that lets you step into that question in a big and thoughtful way. It's combining real science, every single card in the deck, each of which is unique.

There are dozens and dozens of cards in the deck in the game SETI. There's flavor text on each one that just gives you flat out science that teaches you more about our search for alien life, but it combines that fact finding real science aspect with, of course, satisfying decision making that strategy gamers love. This is a quiet game. This is a methodical game, but it's suspenseful too. When you finally piece together a true signal from the stars, it feels like a breakthrough. Sure enough, you will discover two alien species in every game of SETI. It ships with five different species, each of which pops up in the latter half of the game and presents new rules and new strategies and new ways to score points. In the game of SETI, you're basically running one of several global research agencies trying to be the first to detect that intelligent life beyond our planet. The decisions you make each turn are very thoughtful. You're going to have limited resources. The funding coming in, power needed to power your facilities. You're going to want to have expert advisors, as well. You've got to decide how to use them, and you're always going to want to do more than you have resources to actually be able to do. One path might focus you on scanning for radio signals.

But then again, instead, you might dive deep into astrobiology. There are different research tracts that act like scientific skill trees in this game, which is going to let you customize your approach and chase the breakthroughs that fit your strategy for that particular game. When you play the next game, there might be different aliens. You might have completely different cards and a completely new strategy than necessary to play a game that sometimes has taken us as much as four hours to complete. But again, just like the game of Dune: Imperium Uprising, I don't really ever feel like this game outstays its welcome. If you enjoy science and mystery, if you enjoy worker placement, a concept I mentioned with the previous game. Actually, there are a lot of different game systems interlocking to make SETI as great as it is. I highly recommend this complex strategy game. I probably would play it with two players the first time that you play in order to keep it a little shorter and just learn the rules together. But this is an example of a game that's going to be played years from now. It is, I think, another modern classic, and yes, it already has its first expansion on the way available broadly in the year 2026, and I've already pre-ordered the expansion. This is a fantastic epic strategy game. SETI, game Number 12. Well, there you have it. I'm briefly just going to call out the names of the games in order, and then let's close with a thought or two. The games I just shared with you for Games, Games, Games, Volume 7 in order, wavelength. Dorfromantik, Dungeons, Dice and Danger, Faraway, Bomb Busters, Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, Rebirth, Forest Shuffle.

Of course, it's several expansions. There's a new stand-alone version of that game out, by the way, Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. It's built along the same lines. This is a modern recurring theme where it happened with Dune: Imperium Uprising, where a popular game is designed and sells really well, and then the designer or publisher decides to make a second version that will stand alone, in some cases, correcting problems with the first one in other cases, integrating with that game. Anyway, if you're a huge Forest Shuffle fan, you should know that Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor, which brings sheep and other things to Forest Shuffle is available as well. But am I losing track of my list? That was game Number 8. Let's close out with the final four Earth, Innovation Ultimate, Dune: Imperium Uprising and SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Let me close with this. I think you know this by now. I love games. Longtime listeners know I often talk about losing to win. That's one of my favorite themes in life, one of my favorite sections of my book, Rule Breaker Investing. Losing to win. People assume, and I would say quite rightly so, because I own hundreds of board games. I think at last count, I have 674. I must be really good at them, but I'm actually not. I routinely get beaten by people of all ages. I'll teach someone a game I've played for years, and they'll sometimes beat me the first time that they play. But as I've aged, what I've started to feel is that winning and losing just isn't actually the point for me. I just love the play of the game. Shakespeare once wrote, the play's the thing, and I completely agree.

Cooperative games. Many of us didn't grow up in a world where such things existed, but these days, games like Dorfromantik or a past game I've talked a lot about, Pandemic Legacy, these are all games that now enable us to play together where we win and lose together. But the three games that I love most, the ones I hope we all get better at together are, of course, the games of investing, of business, and of life. Investing has always felt like an amazing game to me, and I love keeping score. We've done that for years now with our five stock samplers on this podcast, for example, business too, so many of you are working in business. In some cases, you're owners of small or large businesses. I feel personally blessed to be an entrepreneur myself to have built something and to be able to invest in the creations of others. That game, the game of business will always fascinate me. Then there's life. When you think of life as a game, one where you can actually keep score, but where the big secret is, it's actually a cooperative game. When you think of life as a game, for me, anyway, it becomes even more joyful. Business isn't dog eat dog. Buyers and sellers work together every day. We actually help each other. That's the real game of life, as well. By the way, not the Milton Bradley version with those plastic, pink and blue pegs and a spinning wheel. But the one we're all playing right now, the game of life. I let off with five ICYMI games. I then gave you my 12 games by weight that I favor here at the end of 2025. But then, of course, there are those three games that I hope you love too, that we love. I hope in some small way I'm helping you get better at each of them. Well, I guess it's not too early to say it, is it? Happy holidays. Fool on, and game on.

David Gardner has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.