Our Top 12 Games of May 2026 | The Game Bard
Monthly Favorites with Lincoln & Page Hoppe | The Game Bard
Every month Page and I sit down and negotiate. Because we play a lot of games together, and we do not always agree on which ones belong on the list. These twelve made the cut.
A quick note on the order: this isn't a strict ranking. We had to find a number we both agreed on for each game, which means number twelve isn't my least favorite — it's just where we landed together. Think of it less as a definitive countdown and more as a snapshot of the games that kept pulling us back to the table this month. And this was a very good month.
#12 — Cats vs Cucumbers
Designer: Ammon Anderson & Melanie Anderson
Don't let the small box fool you. This is one of the most thematically smart push-your-luck games I've played, and it is extremely cute.
You're rolling custom dice that have cats, cucumbers, and balls of yarn on them. Roll enough cats — three, four, or five — and you can move your cat along the scoring track, working up toward the bigger point values. But every cucumber you roll stays locked. You can't reroll it. And if you land on three cucumbers? Bust. You flip a Nine Lives card, which counts down the rounds. The theme is that cats genuinely cannot stand cucumbers. The rivalry is real, apparently.
There are also yarn tokens with variable rewards on the back, so you're weighing whether to cash in your cucumber token for a point or hold out. Really fun choices baked into a really simple game. Page called it adorable. She's not wrong. We're putting it at twelve because it's small and easy to pick up — not because we don't love it.
#11 — Stable Times
Designer: Kristen Mott
I love these people at Lovemore Games. I don't know what it is, but they keep making games that I shouldn't like as much as I do.
Stable Times has you collecting horses for your stable — four beautiful stable boards to fill, and when three of them are full, the game ends. Each horse has a name and a type, the artwork by Megan Galura is genuinely gorgeous, and the scoring is set collection with real strategic depth. Do I play that horse now and score, or discard it to pull from the field? And if I cover a card to take the one underneath, my opponent might swoop in on the one I just uncovered. Yeah. That's this game.
Quick too. The box says 20 to 30 minutes and that feels right. It's also one of those games where you keep forgetting it's a puzzle because the horses are so pretty. Then you lose and remember it's absolutely a puzzle.
#10 — Jewel Box
Designer: Zac Loveless
Same artist as Stable Times — Megan Galura — and you can feel it immediately. Also from Lovemore Games, also completely different game.
Jewel Box is a tile placement game where you're collecting and placing beetles — five different beetle families, each with their own way of scoring. The centerpiece is a log, and you're rolling dice to choose which beetle you get to add to your tableau. It's beautiful, it's tactile, and every beetle scores differently, which gives the game a lot of interesting decisions.
If you love Cascadia, there's a beetle in here that works almost exactly like Cascadia's fox — scoring based on what's adjacent. Satisfying in exactly the same way. It's a tile game, which I'm deeply into. We already talked about this one in a longer video, but it absolutely deserves a spot here.
#9 — Under Falling Skies
Designer: Tomáš Uhlíř
Page has not been allowed to play this one. Because it's solo only. And I may or may not have played it many, many, many times while she's been at work.
Under Falling Skies from Czech Games Edition gives you a very satisfying Space Invaders feel — the aliens are descending, and you have to shoot them down before they reach you. You're moving an excavator and using dice placement to unlock actions: gain energy here, deal damage to the alien track there. It's a clean, focused puzzle that just feels really, really good to solve.
The box is heavy. There is a lot of cardboard and content in there. There's a campaign I haven't even touched. I haven't flipped the board to the harder side. I've just been playing the base game over and over. Which is probably a good sign.
#8 — A Place for All My Books
Designers: Alex Cutler & Michael Mihealsick
I cannot think of a more cozy game with an actual puzzle going on inside it.
A Place for All My Books is a worker placement game where you're stacking beautiful little book tiles in different rooms of your home, completing goal cards that score based on how your books are arranged. But before you can even go to town to get more cards, you have to charge your social battery by organizing your books at home. It is, as a concept, extremely funny to me. And yet it's completely on theme and it works.
The goal cards are the real puzzle — have no red books in the kitchen, stack books in all four corners, that kind of thing — and you're constantly juggling which puzzle is worth your action economy. The color palette is genuinely stimulating in an ADHD-friendly way. The solo mode has a rival who is annoyingly popular. Page said it was probably her most thematically favorite game she's played. I think she's right. Published by Smirk & Dagger.
#7 — Personal Demons
Designer: Judson Cohen
This one is coming to Kickstarter and I wish I had my own copy already.
From designer Judson Cohen — who also gave us Deep Regrets and Even Deeper Regrets — Personal Demons has you battling and befriending a set of whimsical, genuinely unhinged monsters that are your personal demons. There's a summoning circle board, sin tracks you move up to unlock actions, and a sealing mechanic where four cards with matching colored corners combine to score points from every card around them. The seals also work as currency for playing other demons. It's honestly unlike anything I've played mechanically.
But here's what I need you to understand about this game: it has tiny cards AND enormous cards. Like, cover-four-standard-cards enormous. The art is bright, fluorescent, and wonderfully unhinged — whimsical Lovecraftian, not dark Lovecraftian. There is a butt cheek demon. And he belongs. This game is brilliant. We want more people to find it.
#6 — FlipToons
Designers: Jordy Adan & Renato Simoes
This is such a genius little box.
FlipToons from Thunderworks Games is a deck builder where the whole twist is that you actually want to cull your deck, not grow it. Because you're playing a spatial puzzle — three cards top row, three cards bottom row — and every card scores differently based on its position in that grid. One card might score four points if it's in the top row. Another scores one point for each card adjacent to it. A third lets you stack more cards on top of it. You want exactly the right six cards to land in exactly the right spots.
The game ends when someone hits 30 fame, then you play one more round — and the person who triggered the end doesn't always win, which is a beautiful touch. Plays great solo (just swap one card out of the deck). Our daughter — who doesn't love board games — will absolutely play this. The cartoon art is incredible. Quick, smart, small box. This is a gem.
#5 — Things on Strings
Designer: Lincoln Hoppe
Okay, I might be biased here. But I'm not wrong.
Things on Strings, published by Allplay, is a cooperative deduction game in the family of Things and Rings — but instead of Venn diagrams, you're building a flowchart. One player is the Knower, who sets the rules for how the flowchart sorts. Everyone else — the Finders — is trying to deduce the rule by watching where things get placed, without ever being told what the rule is.
Here's what I love about it: you don't have to fully figure out the rule to win. You can go on gut, place your card, and when the rule gets revealed at the end it feels like a magic trick. Your subconscious just knew. Five missed tokens and you're done, which keeps the pressure real. Our daughter literally cannot walk past a table where this game is being played without joining in. I described it to my sister, an elementary school teacher, and she immediately wanted a version for her classroom. That says it all.
#4 — Enthrone
Designer: Sawyer West
We already did a full video on Enthrone, so go watch that — but it absolutely belongs on this list.
Two players. Eight gorgeous sculpted figures on a stained-glass board. Hidden identity, hidden movement. You can move any of the eight figures — the game is entirely about masking which one is yours while trying to figure out which one is theirs. Three win conditions: get your pawn to the center, eliminate your three quarry cards, or take out the other player's character. Usually three win conditions would scramble my brain. Here it just works, because every condition feeds the deception layer.
We played it four times in a row the night we filmed the full review. And this is not even the deluxe version. The standard version looks this beautiful. From Smirk & Dagger. It's already in the regular rotation.
#3 — Dominion
Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino
No one's going to be surprised. And I'm not even sorry about it.
Dominion is the game that started the entire deck-building genre — Donald X. Vaccarino's brilliant, deceptively simple design from Rio Grande Games — and every time I come back to it I'm reminded that the other games haven't done it better. They've done different things. And sometimes new things are exciting. But the original holds up in ways I keep underestimating.
The one-action-per-turn limit that so many other deck builders threw out? Coming back to it feels refreshing now. It becomes a strategy. If I want more actions, I have to build for them. Rio Grande also sent us six to eight expansions, and we've been deep in the base game plus Intrigue for so long that the combinations still haven't exhausted themselves. We finally cracked open Empires this month — the metal coins alone are worth it — and discovered there are recipes in the box for how to cross-pollinate different sets. That's a game that respects your time and your brain. Endlessly replayable.
#2 — Magical Athlete
Designer: Takashi Ishida, updated by Richard Garfield
Roll and move is my least favorite mechanic. And yet.
Magical Athlete from CMYK is a remake of Takashi Ishida's original racing game, updated by Richard Garfield, and it has made me a complete hypocrite. Because it is one of the most joyfully unhinged experiences I've had at a table this year. You're drafting characters — close to 30 of them, all with completely different abilities that break the rules in wild ways — and running four races where each racer you control does something different every time you move them.
You might be tripping people. You might be switching places with someone mid-race. The rulebook literally says you may encounter combinations we've never seen before, and that is the honest truth. At two players we each controlled two characters, and one game I had two that both tripped. Nobody was getting past us. It was chaos. It was hilarious. CMYK also published Hot Streak — totally different game, same energy of silly-fun-you-didn't-expect-to-love. We're playing this again today.
#1 — It's a Wonderful World
Designer: Frédéric Guérard
This is our number one game of the month, and the reason is a campaign.
It's a Wonderful World is a card drafting engine builder from Frédéric Guérard, published by Lucky Duck Games in North America. You're passing cards around and deciding: do I scrap this card for the resource cubes it gives me right now, or do I build it into my tableau so it generates resources every turn going forward? Built cards give you production — those colored cubes — and each production phase your engine runs. Supremacy bonuses go to whoever produces the most of a given resource. Multiplier cards, instant-trigger cards, financiers and generals stacking into scoring layers. It's so tight and so fast. Four rounds, 45 minutes, never felt long.
We pulled it off the shelf to play with our son Jack, loved it, played it again with Page, and then discovered the campaign. Six games, a storyline that carries through, rewards for whoever wins, catch-up mechanics for whoever doesn't. We're one game away from finishing. There's an envelope waiting. I have no idea what's in it and I love that. This game sat on my shelf for three years because we were always moving on to the next review. I'm genuinely glad we came back to it. It's still that good.
"Twelve games deep into May, and we're still arguing about which one to play next. That's not a problem. That's the whole point."
by Lincoln & Page Hoppe
Original Music by Lincoln Hoppe: The Game Bard
Some games in this video were sent as review or prototype copies.
My Board Game Geek Page: Lincoln Hoppe
