Top 5 New and Upcoming Board Games March 2023

We continue in what feels to be a quickly passing year to bring another round of new, upcoming, recent, and general FOMO games! Always fun to find, see, and discuss, let me know what you've found recently!

Ever growing and expanding, I'm always looking for new board games to hit the market and (hopefully) play and own one day. Some I love for the theme, others the mechanics, others the concepts, or generally a combination of them all! Regardless, there's always going to be FOMO present :D

As always, let me know what game(s) you've recently gotten or are excited about in the comments!

[Haldurson]

I have one game I supported on Kickstarter that was scheduled for delivery in March (and amazingly, according to the last update, it's still on schedule... how often does that happen???). That game is "Shake that City". I've discovered that city building is a niche that appeals both to me and some people in my gaming group. And I'm a sucker for clever mechanisms. So maybe (if I'm lucky) I'll have a chance to actually play it in a month or so. And actually, the devs have been doing a fun thing, where they've been having forum games of it, where they do the shaking of the cubes and publish it, and you can kind of play against everyone else.

I missed the Kickstarter for Ragnarocks. I'm a huge fan of a previous game by the same designer, "Santorini", and Ragnarocks is another abstract game with the same principle, of having a bunch of God powers that allows each player to break the rules. Because I loved Santorini so much, I decided to order it from The Game Steward. But apparently, the Kickstarter ran into some problems with their distributor, so about half of the American customers have not had their games delivered, and that is the case with The Game Steward. I may end up canceling the order. It did cost a little more than it would have to participate in the kickstarter. But the advantage is that I can always cancel. But I'm going to keep an eye on it for a bit more before I give up.

There's a few games that I really would love to try, but I probably will not purchase (whenever they come out). Earth looks interesting, but I'm not sure enough about it that it's even on a wish list yet. Another one that I'm fascinated by (again, because of the unusual mechanism, in this case, the disassembling of a cube) is Tesseract. The Kickstarter (which I did not back) is supposed to be completed in July, and it looks like they may actually make it. I've become more cautious about what I spend my money on, so this falls into the category of wait and see.

BTW, I'm going to be trying to get an oldie but goodie to the table tomorrow -- "Tales of the Arabian Nights". I haven't played it since the 1980s I believe. We'll see how it goes. I told my group about the game and there seems to be some interest. But I also have a real newbie showing up, and I think this will be a good, less competitive game to introduce her to.