“Wow, are you kidding me? The White Castle is on BGA, too?”
The morning chatter in one of my board game groups was already hot. The White Castle, one of my top 10 board games of 2023, had just appeared in the Beta games section of Board Game Arena, the most popular online platform for tabletop games in the world, with more than 11 million registered users and a catalog that crossed the 1,000-game plateau earlier this year.
2025 has been ridiculous on the platform, known as BGA on the site and to its many followers. (I’ve already written about BGA once here at Meeple Mountain.) I’ve been a user since January of 2016, and while I’ve played games on the site every year—both in real-time and “async”, turn-based formats—nothing has beaten the last 12-15 months, when dozens of incredible games have appeared on the platform.
Do you remember all that negative talk when big, (supposedly) bad Asmodee bought BGA in 2021 and we all feared the worst—that only Asmodee games would appear on the platform and the prices for subscribers would spiral out of control? Yeah, me too. None of it happened. Now we have more than 1,000 games that you can play on PC, tablet, mobile, and traditional video game systems like the Xbox and Nintendo Switch using those system web browsers.
Even though this post is hitting our site in early 2025, I already know that BGA will be the best “game” I play this year. Let’s talk about why, even if it is a MAJOR stretch to call BGA a single game.
The Value Proposition is Utterly Insane
For the sake of argument, let’s say you decide to drop $36 a year for a Premium BGA account. (Yeah, I know you could just pay nothing for regular access. I’m not that guy. I want to reward BGA for the service they offer, since I get so much out of the site.)
For just thirty-six US dollars, you can host almost any kind of tabletop game, set up voice chat with your friends, then play incredibly accurate, smooth, accessible implementations of dozens of the most popular games ever made. For those keeping score, that is about $100 less than many of the expensive, crowdfunded handouts you have supported yet NEVER PLAYED BEFORE BUYING THEM, in an online package that will definitely deliver on time, with so many games hitting the site each month that I am struggling to keep up. (And I’m on BGA almost every day!)
BGA’s Premium membership price is so reasonable that I now struggle to justify keeping many physical copies of games on my shelf. This is where we should talk about why it’s good to have both physical copies and the BGA implementations.
I, hopefully like you, would prefer to play games like Pirates of Maracaibo with friends and family, in person. In the case of Pirates, I love the game and I love how fast it plays and I love chucking dice and I love the playmat. But, let’s be honest—are you setting up then playing Pirates on your own, for the solo variant, more than a couple times a year? Ever? With BGA, I can knock out three, maybe four, solo games of Pirates in an hour. AN HOUR!!! And if I’m lucky, I can get a couple friends to join me for a game on my laptop over the lunch hour, and we can do that a few times a year (or, in my case lately, once a week).
Yes, I would prefer to play Beyond the Sun in person. How many times did you play Beyond the Sun in person last year? The last five years, total? While a couple of you might have responded with “I’m playing a game of Beyond the Sun with some friends right now!”, most people I know struggle to table older games consistently. With BGA, I can play an async game of Beyond the Sun every month.
BGA’s $36 annual price tag is important to highlight. Save for my “Dusty Euro” nights in Chicago, BGA completely replaces my need to purchase “older”, harder-to-table games by letting me find strangers in Sweden, North Africa or down the street to join me for a real-time play over the weekend. City of the Big Shoulders is my number-one game of all time. You think I can get people in real life to join me for a three-hour, heavy economic strategy game from 2019 every month? I have five game groups and I still can’t make it happen!
On BGA, I can always find competition. Ditto for, again, “older” games like Troyes (2010), CATAN (1995), Gizmos (2018), and Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan (2019). As much as I love that The White Castle is now on BGA, I just played The White Castle in person with friends the week that I submitted this article for editorial review. It’s still hot, thanks to the recent expansion (The White Castle: Matcha), and will probably remain hot with another title, The White Castle: Duel, hitting shelves later this year.
But in a year or two, when it cools off? BGA is gonna still be my friend and The White Castle will still be on speed dial. (Dear BGA: could you go ahead and develop an app for The Red Cathedral while you are down in the lab? Thanks.)
The Game Variety is Out of Control
Over the last few months, it seems like BGA has put a Justin-focused banger or two on the platform every week:
- Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game (my #1 game of 2024)
- Pirates of Maracaibo (my #10 of 2024)
- Orléans (top 20 all-time)
- Fromage (a 2024 top-10 game for a number of tabletop media members)
- Castle Combo
- Rats of Wistar
- Five Tribes
- Stockpile (another top 20 all-timer that I much prefer playing live…still, I love that it exists now on BGA)
- Middle Ages (a great fast filler)
- Harmonies (the game with the most logged plays on Board Game Geek for February 2024; I know a person that plays both this and Castle Combo on BGA every week!)
- Glass Road
- Shogun
- River of Gold
- Let’s Go to Japan
- Exploding Kittens (for the record, a game I absolutely despise, but there’s no questioning its enduring popularity…my kids still ask to play it every month!)
And that’s before taking into account so many different types of games that keep hitting every week. Old card and dice games. Two-player-only games. Games that aren’t even out yet, like Great Western Trail: El Paso. I really love how many times I have seen brand-new games hitting BGA almost as soon as they hit retail. It has helped to evaluate these games on the platform before deciding if I want to buy a copy for my physical collection. Some of these releases are timed so well that I have been able to get in plays both in person and on BGA, with games like Gigamic’s recent release Slide.
Some of the newer games even feature a tutorial built by the designer of the main BGA app. I wanted to learn High Season: Grand Austria Hotel Roll and Write, so I just dialed up the tutorial (designed specifically for BGA) to learn the game.
The future for games here seems to be going in the right direction: backwards. A friend of mine is a part of the “alpha” testing community on BGA. Right now I’m in the middle of a game of Lorenzo il Magnifico, one of the classics from the “Italian Masters” (Flaminia Brasini, Simone Luciani, and Virginio Gigli). Lorenzo il Magnifico is almost 10 years old but remains a medium-weight Eurogame staple of my collection…and to see it available outside of the (relatively) ancient tabletop gaming platform Yucata is a welcome sight.
If BGA is adding more of these Eurogame classics that are a little older, but play just as well as any game series ever made, count me in. I can never get some of these classics to the table (in a community with gamers who are always pushing the “culture of the new”), so BGA gives the classics a nice boost.
The Setup, the Teardown, and the Rules Reminders
I will say it again: I would rather play games like Ark Nova or Teotihuacan: City of Gods in person. I’d actually love to do that if, well, YOU were the one hosting game night, because that means you probably set the game up before I arrived. Then I can just stroll into your living room, sit down at a fully organized table, and jump right in.
But if that wasn’t the case—and as much as I’ve enjoyed my plays of Teotihuacan, it’s a really hard game to table thanks to the massive rules load and somewhat complicated set up process—I am totally fine playing it on BGA instead.
I was recently working through a game of Lost Ruins of Arnak with friends, and after playing the game in person a few weeks ago, we decided to do a rematch on BGA. Arnak is not a hard game to set up, but it does require a 15-to-20 minute teach with a number of reminders plugged along the way.
In person, it’s mildly annoying (remember, it’s not the teach—it’s the re-teach). On BGA, you’ve got links to the full rulebook, a rules summary under the “How to Play” tab, and my favorite feature: hovering the mouse pointer over a card or area of the main board offers short instructions on what everything does and how it triggers.
Many times during a game, players don’t need a full overview, they just have a clarifying question about the power listed on a card. With BGA, it does the work for the rules teacher of your game night.
I can not emphasize just how vital this is, as a person who teaches games 200+ times a year. Playing games live with players new to a particular game is such a process, and in a strategy game, nothing takes you out of your personal strategic planning like a player that pounds the teacher with a load of questions. Often, I tell friends that I have committed to losing a game before it even begins when I have new players sitting nearby. That’s because it is impossible to concentrate on your own game plan when your adjacent seatmate Sally keeps asking about end-game scoring.
BGA offers a level of accessibility that isn’t even available in real life. While I prefer staring into the eyes of my opponents across my Game Topper, there’s no question that BGA offers a tantalizing alternative, especially in a pinch.
BGA is the Best “Game” of 2025
I’m sure I will play better individual games. I’m sure I will discover new items to add to my permanent collection. And maybe I’ll find a better deal that comes in cheaper than thirty-six dollars. (Maybe.)
But I will absolutely not find a better deal with a deeper experience than I have with the 1,008 different games (and counting!) currently available on BGA. It’s funny that we are even discussing why one would or would not want to pony up the cash to have a premium membership if a person loves board games.
This is a no-brainer. If BGA was running for higher office, I would submit my supporting vote immediately.
The apps on the platform continue to impress. Getting a game played during my limited time windows is a cinch. I can always find people to play. As of this publication, there are 955 games I have not tried, giving me an almost unlimited amount of games to try when I want to learn something new.
Board Game Arena is the best “game” of 2025. Share your favorite BGA app in the comments below. I’m looking forward to your recommendations!
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