We may be well into 2025, but we are finally gearing up on our 2024 Game of the Year award. This year’s finalists are from a slightly longer publishing window (see below for more details), chosen from our GeekDad Approved titles from roughly Q3 2023 to the end of 2024.
Our 10 Favorite Games of 2024
Our finalists for Game of the Year (in alphabetical order) are Adventure Party, Andromeda’s Edge, Apiary, Bosa, Daybreak, Gnome Hollow, Last Light, Let’s Go! To Japan, Seaside, and Stonespine Architects. Each description below includes a link to our original review.
Adventure Party
This cooperative game is a perfect combination of RPG and party game. Roll your d20 in secret and narrate the outcome of your action in a scene, and the rest of your party tries to guess your number to score XP for the team. It’s fun for those who love getting into the storytelling, but it can also be great practice for players to dip their toes into role-playing without worrying so much about all of the rules and systems in a full RPG.
Read the full review.
Andromeda’s Edge
Probably the biggest game on our list in terms of box size, Andromeda’s Edge is the spiritual successor to 2021 GeekDad Game of the Year Finalist Dwellings of Eldervale. On your turn, you’ll do one of two things: either launch one of your starships to explore the galaxy, gather resources, and battle both fellow players and alien raiders, or return all your ships to your station, where you’ll use the modules you’ve collected throughout the game to generate energy, gain resources, and carry out additional actions.
Read the full review.
Apiary
Bees in space! Send your workers to explore planets and seed them with valuable resources, expand your hive, and recruit specialized bees. One unique feature of Apiary is the ways that the workers age each time you use them: their actions become more powerful, but after age 4 they need to hibernate, and you’ll need to start over with some new worker bees.
Read the full review.
Bosa
Build your own idyllic island community in this light but strategic card-based engine building game based on a real city in Sandina. Perhaps one of the last games from the amazing team at Prospero Hall, Bosa is an elegantly designed game that is also environmentally friendly, packaged in a small box with minimal plastic. So you can feel good about playing it while also having a ton of fun.
Read the full review.
Daybreak
Work together to battle climate change, using a mix of technology, legislation, and community activism. Daybreak is a cooperative game from the designer of Pandemic, but with a hopeful outlook: fixing some things is possible, but it requires the nations of the world to look beyond their own needs so they can coordinate their actions.
Read the full review.
Gnome Hollow
This family-friendly tile-laying game has you competing with your fellow gnomes to cultivate mushrooms and collect wildflowers, in order to collectively maintain the enchantment that conceals your village. It’s a lovely game that definitely falls into the “cozy” game category, with its pastoral setting and non-confrontational gameplay. If you’re looking for a fun but relaxed time at the game table, then Gnome Hollow is for you.
Read the full review.
Last Light
This space-based 4X game uses simultaneous action selection to keep the game moving at a quick pace, as players explore a solar system, build up technologies and colonies, and battle over the dwindling light. Planets rotate around the sun, keeping you on your toes as you plot out your course, and unique alien civilizations give everyone a special ability to master.
Read the full review.
Let’s Go! To Japan
Who can make the most of their week in Japan? Plan out your trip, assigning activities to each day and earning bonuses when conditions are best. Match up different types of activities and you’ll experience daily highlights, and keep an eye on the number of times you need to take the train between Tokyo and Kyoto! It’s like a tour guide disguised as a game.
Read the full review.
Seaside
Collect the most disks in this quick press-your-luck game. The simple components — a bag of wooden disks — can go anywhere, including the beach! Each disk gives you a choice of two sides to play, and you’ll have to keep an eye on what the other players are trying to collect, too.
Read the full review.
Stonespine Architects
Craft the most devious dungeon and you’ll be rewarded with the position of Master Architect! Pick and pass cards to fill out your dungeon, trying to connect paths and meet the various requirements on your blueprints and the challenge cards. Fill your dungeon with kobolds and oozes, traps and treasures!
Read the full review.
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 in the previous 12 months (though this year this was extended to account for the calendar change). 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 those previous 12 months and be currently available in wide release. 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
In the past, our award calendar worked on a roughly Q3 to Q3 basis — there’s always a little bit of fuzziness in release dates, particularly for crowdfunded titles that backers might receive first before it hits stores. Our reasoning at the time was that it would allow us to share our list of finalists — and, ideally, our winner — in time for year-end holiday shopping. However, it also meant that anything released in the last quarter of the year got bumped to the following calendar year, as well as the difficulty of organizing our playthrough weekend in the middle of a very busy holiday season.
Last year we made the decision to change up our calendar: eligibility now includes the entire year, and we gave ourselves a little time at the beginning of 2025 to wrap up reviews. This year it also includes some titles released in Q3 2023 because those had been slated for the 2024 list already. Despite that, this year’s GeekDad Approved list is a bit shorter than usual, in part because 2024 was kind of a rough year for many of us and we simply didn’t get to as many of the games as we would have liked to.
Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been wrapping up reviews of a few more GeekDad Approved games from 2024, and discussing which ones might make it into the top 10. In early April, we’ll be meeting up in Portland, Oregon, to play through our ten finalists and decide on a winner, which we’ll announce shortly after.
Our Approved Games for 2023
Here are all of our Approved games for the year:
Adventure Party
Andromeda’s Edge
Apiary
Bosa
Daybreak
Dune: Imperium — Uprising
Gnome Hollow
Last Light
Let’s Go! To Japan
The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth
Mycelia
Seaside
Stonespine Architects
Undaunted 2200: Callisto
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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