Stefano Castelli, Andrea Crespi, & Lorenzo Silva, CMON, 2-4 players, 30-60 minutes, age 8+ ($40 on Amazon, other options) Although it technically debuted at last year's Spieltage convention in Germany, Potion Explosion didn't make it to North American store shelves until this year's Gen Con. Now that it's widely available, you need to buy it. The game won our top recommendation for newbie gamers in  because of its instant accessibility and puzzle-y fun. Potion Explosion is in many ways a board game version of Bejeweled or Candy Crush, and it uses a component that's sadly underused in modern board gaming: the humble marble. Players take on the role of novice alchemists plucking ingredients from a shelf in order to brew up fantastical potions. The "ingredients" here are colored marbles, and the "shelf" is a cardboard rack with five tracks where the marbles descend. Remove a single marble and the stack above rolls down; if your removal causes two marbles of the same color to collide, you get to take all contiguous marbles of that color as well.

You fill up potion bottles that require certain combinations of colors, and when they're completed, you can drink the potions for special effects. It's incredibly easy to teach, and the chain reaction combos you can set up will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played a puzzle game on their phone. This is anything but a dumb match-3 knockoff brought to the physical space, though—it's a surprisingly thinky and satisfying experience that pretty much anyone can enjoy. Phil Walker-Harding, Kosmos, 2-4 players, 40 minutes, age 10+ ($29 on Amazon, other options) Do I put my giant rock on the rickety boat, or do I sail the boat to shore? This is your dilemma in Imhotep, where the goal is building tombs and temples along the Nile. Stones are represented by wooden cubes—some of the largest cubes we've ever seen, too—and on every turn you can either place a stone on a boat, sail a boat to shore, or replenish your stock of stones. You sail the boats to one of the game's building spots, which reward building high, long, or in the right spot.

Sounds easy, except all players share the use of the boats and can ship their opponents' blocks to any open building site; much of the fun comes from managing the chaos that ensues as boats are sent where you didn't plan for them to go. Much more about tactics than long-term strategy, this game scratches the same puzzle-y itch as Quadropolis, though with more opportunity for screwage. And sometimes, that's exactly what you want while trying to build your legacy in stone. Forrest-Pruzan Creative & Andrew Wolf, USAopoly, 2-4 players, 30-60 minutes, age 11+ ($56 on Amazon, other options) Can a deckbuilder set in a licensed universe be any good? Hogwarts Battle proves that it can. Demo slots for the game were filled up at Gen Con 2016 in less than five minutes every day, and we're pleased to say that the game delivers on the hype—while providing a fine entry point into gaming for younger players and a meatier challenge for seasoned gamers. It does this through a system of "years," mirroring those covered in the novels.

Each year adds new villains, new rules, new hero powers, and new allies and items to buy. Using the cards from their deck, heroes generate attacks, health, and the money needed to buy new and more powerful cards. Complexity ramps up gradually but consistently until the year seven showdown with Voldemort and his many minions—and dispatching He Who Must Not Be Named never felt so good. As noted in our review, some initial game states lend themselves to one-sided player beatdowns, but the campaign as a whole proved to be a terrific experience. sushi rush online gameHighly recommended for family gaming with Harry Potter fans.jiro dreams of sushi movie stream Eric Lang, CMON Limited, 2-5 players, 30-45 minutes, age 14+buy rice paper for sushi

($28 on Amazon, other options) You should always approach tabletop games based on video games with an abundance of caution. But you should also be open to surprises. This year, a card game based on the beloved PS4 third-person action-RPG Bloodborne hit the scene—and it's actually pretty great. Bloodborne: The Card Game, by prolific designer Eric Lang, drops three to five players into one of the video game's procedurally generated Chalice Dungeons, where they'll use cards to fight through a series of monsters and bosses. sushi no suki onlineEven though players work together to take down the baddies, they're also working against each other to collect the most "blood echo" tokens by the game's end.jiro dreams of sushi update We've called the game something akin to a bloody, Lovecraftian Poker in spirit—you have to bluff, read your opponents, and know when it's time to go all-in. sushi garden menu brighton

The game is even simple enough for tabletop newbies, but since you're mostly playing your opponents, it retains decent strategic depth. While the game might feel less like “Bloodborne: The Card Game” and more like “a fun, interactive card game set in the Bloodborne world,” it has been a completely satisfying experience for this Soulsborne fan. And yes, you'll die. Santa Ragione, Osprey games, 2-8 players, 20-45 minutes, age 12+ (Current print run is sold out; pre-order for around $30)menu sushi club buenos aires Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space (EFTAIOS) has been out for years, but this year's new "Ultimate Edition" feels like a new (and definitive) take on a tough, tense game of "Predator in a space station." If you like hidden movement and, err, eating humans—well, this is the game for you. In EFTAIOS, players trapped on an orbiting station become either aliens or humans.

The aliens want to find and devour the humans; the humans want to find—and use—the escape pods. The catch is that no one knows anyone else's role, nor where they are on the station. Each player tracks their own movements in their personal player book, using a dry erase marker and one of the game's numerous included maps. Depending on where they end their moves, players may be forced to reveal their true location—or they may be able to lie about their location or say nothing at all. The result is a tight, tense hunt in the darkness, working out where other players might be and who they are through deduction. Throw in some item cards and (optional) variable role cards and you have one sweat-inducing game. Though it features possible player elimination, rounds aren't usually long. Finally, a few quick-fire shout-outs to some good games that didn't quite make our list but are well worth a look for fans of their respective genres. Sci-fi area-control battle game Cry Havoc has what's probably the most interesting battle system we saw all year.