We may be well into 2026, but we are finally gearing up on our 2025 Game of the Year award. Here are this year’s finalists, selected from our GeekDad Approved titles from throughout 2025.
Our 10 Favorite Games of 2025
Our finalists for Game of the Year (in alphabetical order) are Alibis, Emerald Skulls, Galactic Cruise, Hot Streak, Ito, Kinfire Council, Light Speed: Arena, Lightning Train, Please Don’t Burn My Village and Spooktacular. Each description below includes a link to our original review.
Alibis
This cooperative word-association game feels a little bit like some of the other titles that have come before it—Codenames, So Clover!—but then adds a twist that has quickly made it one of our favorite games in the genre. Everyone gets to come up with a clue at the same time, and you’re building a word puzzle collectively that everyone gets to solve. The fantastic supervillain artwork is just the icing on the cake.
Emerald Skulls
Roll them bones! Emerald Skulls is a press-your-luck dice game, but what makes it a stand-up-and-cheer game is the fact that you can bet on other players on their turns. Do you chicken out if it means somebody else will profit? Place your bets!
Galactic Cruise
Arguably the heaviest game in our top ten (both in gameplay and physical heft), Galactic Cruise isn’t weighed down by overly complex rules. This highly thematic Euro game is deep in strategy, but very accessible with great components and a wonderfully integrated theme of galactic tourism.
Hot Streak
What happens when four off-brand mascots attempt to run a race across the field? Pure chaos: they run into each other, get turned around, and sometimes leave the field entirely. But if you can predict their actions, you can cash out on your bets.
Ito
This tiny box party game is great for sparking conversations about which superpower is the best or what everyone considers scary. The trick is figuring out where each clue fits on a scale from 1 to 100, and the real trick is that it’s less about rating things objectively but more about figuring out everyone’s intentions.
Kinfire Council
In the other Kinfire games you play as the Seekers, the dungeon-crawling heroes sent out on missions. Here, you play as the city council, in charge of managing a city with too many competing needs (and a bit of a cultist problem), and the Seekers are just one of the workers that you have at your disposal. Government bureaucracy has never been so compelling!
Light Speed: Arena
This remake of James Ernest’s fast-paced space laser battle is one of the best examples we’ve seen of an app-assisted game: the gameplay is still fully analog, and the app handles the tedious scoring (and also allows for some much more complex options).
Lightning Train
The latest game from previous Game of the Year winner and mutli-nominee Paul Dennen lives up to his reputation. Combining the age-old game of building train lines with an interesting new bag building mechanic, this game is sure to please railfans and strategy gamers alike.
Please Don’t Burn My Village
Bribe the dragon to protect your village. But be careful–the dragon only wants the latest shiny thing, so your valuable bribe today might be worthless tomorrow. Set collection and market manipulation combine in this fast, easy-to-learn game that nonetheless surprises with multiple layers of strategy.
Spooktacular
In most horror games you’re trying to run away from or defeat the monster…but in Spooktacular you are the monster! You’ll play as one of 20 different B-movie monsters, vying against your components to gobble up the most humans. This tongue-in-cheek game is quick and easy to learn, and with each monster having different abilities, there’s a ton of replayability.
How We Pick Our Finalists
The GeekDad Game of the Year is an award given annually to the game we have enjoyed the most in the previous year. Qualification is dependent on a number of factors: first (and probably the biggest filter), the game must have been reviewed on our site. Additionally, we must have recognized the quality of the game in the review and noted the game as a “GeekDad Approved” game, worthy of our big, shiny metal thumbs-up.
Second, the game must be accessible to most families—a bit of a nebulous identification to be sure, but roughly a game should be one that most families would be likely to play on a weekend afternoon. This would typically rule out very heavy strategy games and very light fare. That’s not to say we’re not heavily enamored with some of those games, we just have to be more selective as we narrow games down. We usually do include at least one heavier game for the strategy fans, and it’s fun to have a lighter party game, but that’s generally what we’re looking for.
Third, we also keep an eye on content, and games that have themes, language, or art that we deem inappropriate aren’t going to make the cut. The family game category, as you traditionally think about it, is a good place to start, but it’s not absolute. We recognize that families might consist of adult children or older teenagers, as well as very young children. As a result, our sweet spot covers a very large area. That said, we’re more likely to go with PG content than something that would be R-rated.
Fourth, in the past, a game we select as a finalist must have come out in the prior year and be currently available in wide release in the US. There are some really great games that you just can’t get your hands on, and we’d rather give you a list you can use, not just one that gives you FOMO.
It’s worth noting that occasionally we put a GeekDad Approved seal on a game we enjoyed even though it wasn’t published in the 12-month window—these do not have the year designation on them and are not eligible for Game of the Year.
Fifth and finally, we love games that have fresh takes on old mechanics, offer great components, or otherwise have a special something that will get everyone to the table. As we narrow down our list of GeekDad Approved games to just 10 finalists, we try to include a mix of genres, game weight, game length, and themes, though it’s always hard to fit everything!
Our Timeline
As noted earlier, any game that was widely released in the US in the prior calendar year was eligible, although we give ourselves a little time at the beginning of the year to wrap up reviews.
Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been wrapping up reviews of a few more GeekDad Approved games from last year, and discussing which ones might make it into the top 10. In early-to-mid April, we’ll be meeting up to play through our ten finalists and decide on a winner, which we’ll announce shortly after.
Our Approved Games for 2026
Here are all of our Approved games for the year:
Alibis
Emerald Skulls
Flip 7
Fliptoons
Galactic Cruise
Hot Streak
Ito
Kinfire Council
Light Speed: Arena
Lightning Train
Magical Athlete
Memoir ’44 Refresh
Metal Gear Solid
Mezen
Please Don’t Burn My Village
Shards of Infinity: Saga Collection
Spooktacular
Vantage
The Fine Print
We realize that we can’t get to every game that is released each year. For that, we apologize. There are only a handful of us and we have day jobs. But we are trying hard to review as many games as we can.
To be completely transparent, when we identify a game as GeekDad Approved, the publisher is notified and we provide a logo noting the approved designation that they are free to use without any obligation. However, for any game that we select as a finalist or as the winner of our Game of the Year, we request a small fee for the use of that logo and designation; again, there is no obligation to participate, nor do we consider the likelihood of a publisher paying when we narrow down our list.
We ask for this fee since we believe the award provides a benefit to the publishers who decide to use it, but also to offset administrative costs of running a big website and travel costs involved with a number of us getting together to play the finalists games and make a decision on the overall winner. We’re bloggers. Financially, it’s a losing proposition—in a big way. We’re just trying to offset that a little.
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