​Tabletop gamers will argue about almost anything. Is luck part of the fun or the enemy of good strategy? Should a rulebook take five minutes to read or come with its own syllabus? And is it really okay to buy a new game when three unopened boxes are already sitting on the shelf, silently judging you?

In June 2026, LTN put those debates to the test with a Discord bracket for the Love Thy Nerd community. Games went head to head, votes came in, favorites got knocked out, and one title came out on top.

Here’s how it shook out, from a quiet hike in the mountains all the way to a very crowded zoo.

We start with a game about hiking, collecting memories, and never once needing bug spray. In PARKS, players guide hikers down a trail that changes every game, gathering resources so they can visit national parks and snap photos along the way.

Don’t let the calm vibe fool you though. Underneath all that scenic beauty is a real puzzle. You’re constantly weighing whether to push ahead or hang back for more resources, and it’s amazing how tense a hiking game can get the moment someone else grabs the exact spot you needed.

PARKS also just looks incredible, with artwork straight out of those classic national park posters. Landing at #10 proves you don’t need dragons or spaceships to build a devoted fanbase. Sometimes all you need is a good trail and one friend who hoards every single forest token.

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Fate of the Fellowship lets you find out if you could’ve handled the War of the Ring better than Frodo and company. Spoiler: your confidence probably won’t survive the first Nazgûl encounter.

This cooperative game has you protecting Frodo, fighting off enemies, completing objectives, and keeping Sauron from ever finding the Ring-bearer. Different characters, events, and objectives mean no two playthroughs feel quite the same.

What really stands out is the sense of shared crisis. Threats pop up all over the map, resources run thin, and your table has to figure out, fast, which fire actually needs putting out first.

For a fairly recent release, landing at #9 is a big deal. Fate of the Fellowship gives Tolkien fans a meaty cooperative challenge worth returning to.

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The Castles of Burgundy has you developing prosperous estates in medieval France. In practice, that means staring at dice with real intensity and somehow getting emotionally attached to cardboard livestock.

You’ll fill out your estate with castles, mines, ships, animals, and settlements. Dice decide what’s available on a given turn, but workers let you nudge the results. The real skill is squeezing value out of a roll that didn’t go your way, and chaining together bonuses that make your whole board hum.

A turn can look simple until you actually think through every ripple effect. This tile completes a region. That one gives you goods. A third sets off a chain reaction so satisfying you’ll try to explain to the table why your beige cardboard estate is secretly brilliant.

At #8, Castles of Burgundy represents old-school strategy gaming at its best. Nothing hits quite like realizing the pasture tile you’d been planning around doesn’t fit anymore.

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Deliverance takes this list somewhere completely different. You’re playing angelic warriors fighting demonic forces and protecting people caught in the middle of a spiritual war.

It’s a cooperative tactical game with distinct heroes, unique abilities, dangerous enemies, and a story built entirely around spiritual warfare. You can work through a full narrative campaign or jump straight into standalone combat scenarios.

The Christian fantasy setting isn’t just flavor text here, it’s the whole point. These aren’t generic adventurers who happen to have wings. They’re part of a story about protection, temptation, courage, and the fight between good and evil.

A #7 finish says a lot about how deeply Deliverance has connected with this community. It’s bold, it knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and there’s really nothing else on the shelf quite like it.

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After a run of hefty strategy games, Flip 7 shows up with nothing but a deck of cards and one simple question: are you feeling lucky?

You flip numbered cards, trying to collect as many different values as possible. Stop whenever you want and bank your points, or keep going and risk it all. Flip a duplicate and you lose everything you’d earned that round.

The rules take about thirty seconds to learn. All the drama comes from everyone at the table insisting, with zero evidence, that the next card will probably be fine.

Stop too early and people will mock you for playing it safe. Keep going and bust, and they’ll mock you for that too. Either way, Flip 7 keeps everyone leaning forward.

A #6 finish shows just how much a great filler game can punch above its weight. It’s suspenseful, it’s funny, and it convinces you every single time that one more card is a good idea.

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Dice Throne answers a question nobody asked but everyone secretly wanted: what if Yahtzee had fantasy heroes punching each other?

You pick a unique character, each with their own dice, abilities, status effects, and upgrade cards. Rolling activates attacks and powers, while cards let you tweak results or mess with your opponent’s plans.

Every hero plays completely differently. Some grind out steady damage, others build toward one huge combo. Learning a character usually means figuring out which abilities you can count on, and which ultimate attack you’ll loudly announce right before rolling nothing but garbage.

Dice Throne lands nicely between casual fun and real competitive depth. It’s easy to pick up, but there’s plenty of room for sharp players to win through smart card timing and probability reads.

A #5 finish feels right. This one’s built for anyone who loves dice games, card battlers, fantasy combat, or boxes that seem to multiply on the shelf when nobody’s watching.

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Scythe drops you into an alternate-history Europe full of farms, factories, political tension, and towering mechanical war machines. A farmer might be peacefully harvesting grain while a mech looms nearby, which somehow makes the harvest a lot more stressful than it sounds.

Each player controls an asymmetric faction and builds out an economic engine, producing resources, sending out workers, constructing buildings, and upgrading abilities. The board looks like it’s begging for war, but combat is honestly just one piece of the larger fight for territory, popularity, and wealth.

A lot of the tension comes from what might happen rather than what does. Is that mech near the border about to attack, or is it just there to make you sweat?

Scythe also does a great job of making progress feel real. Early turns don’t produce much, but each upgrade slowly turns a clunky player board into a well-oiled machine, ideally before your neighbor’s forces cross the river and ruin your afternoon.

A #4 finish confirms what a lot of us already knew: Scythe is still one of the heavyweights of modern strategy gaming.

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Codenames proves that a grid of ordinary words can wreck a friendship almost as fast as full-scale war.

Two teams try to identify their secret agents on the board. Each spymaster gives a one-word clue and a number, hoping to connect several words at once without pointing teammates toward the other team’s agents or, worse, the assassin.

The genius of the game lives in the gap between what the clue giver means and what everyone else actually hears. A spymaster might think “Ocean, three” is crystal clear. Their team hears wave, ship, moon, and somehow, lawyer.

Every round becomes a weird little test of shared knowledge and inside jokes. A clue that lands perfectly with one group of friends might mean absolutely nothing to another.

A #3 finish shows how far a dead-simple idea can go when it reliably produces cleverness, chaos, and a lot of laughing at each other.

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Wingspan turned birdwatching into one of the most recognizable strategy games in modern tabletop gaming, and honestly, it deserves it.

You’re attracting birds to forest, grassland, and wetland habitats. Those birds bring food, lay eggs, draw cards, and start chaining together increasingly powerful combos.

The fun is watching your habitat come alive. One bird might do something small on its own, but stack a few smart picks together and suddenly you’ve got a real engine running. By the later rounds, a single action can set off an entire row of abilities at once.

Every card also comes with real facts about the bird featured on it, which somehow makes the whole thing feel educational without ever feeling like homework. You might start the game picking birds purely for strategy and end it debating whether the scissor-tailed flycatcher is the most beautiful animal on earth.

Wingspan came agonizingly close to taking the whole bracket, and landing at #2 makes total sense once you’ve played it. It’s gorgeous, approachable, and deep enough to keep bringing you back.

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Topping the bracket is Ark Nova, a big, ambitious strategy game about building a modern zoo while actually funding conservation work.

You’re constructing enclosures, acquiring animals, forming partnerships, and upgrading your zoo through a clever action-card system where every action gets stronger the longer you leave it alone. That forces a constant tug-of-war between what you need right now and what you’re setting up for later.

The animals themselves are only part of the puzzle. Cards might demand specific habitats, continents, science symbols, or partnerships, and over time your zoo starts to develop its own personality, whether that’s primates, reptiles, predators, or whatever the deck happens to hand you.

Ark Nova is a lot, in the best way. There’s always more you want to do than you have turns for. Building an enclosure sets back your conservation project. Playing an animal costs money you don’t quite have. Drawing more cards eats up time. Meanwhile someone else has already released three animals back into the wild while you’re still arguing about where to put the snack kiosk.

With two separate scoring tracks for popularity and conservation, the flashiest zoo isn’t automatically the winning one. You have to balance crowd appeal against doing real environmental good, and that tension is what makes the whole thing click.

That mix of planning, variety, engine-building, and honest-to-goodness conservation strategy is exactly why Ark Nova took first place. It’s dense, it’s rewarding, and it will leave you exactly one coin short of the thing you actually wanted to do, every single time.

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Final Thoughts

This month’s top ten covers a lot of ground. There are peaceful hikes, medieval estates, spiritual battles, one-word clues, fantasy duels, bird sanctuaries, and one wildly ambitious zoo.

No single style ran the table. Cooperative adventures sat right next to cutthroat strategy games. Quick, chaotic card games shared the bracket with sprawling economic puzzles.

Ark Nova walked away with the crown, but honestly, every game on this list gives you a different reason to pull up a chair. Sometimes it’s to solve a crisis together. Sometimes it’s to build the perfect engine. And sometimes it’s just to watch a friend draw one more card after everyone at the table told them not to.

Congrats to Ark Nova, and huge thanks to MDB and the whole Love Thy Nerd community for putting together a list that’s guaranteed to spark good arguments, a few new purchases, and several completely reasonable objections.

What do you think is missing from this list?

Make your voice heard in the latest LTN Bracket by joining the LTN Discord!