The best tabletop RPGs we played in 2023

polygon.com:

After more than a decade of going on and on about the “board gaming renaissance,” it’s safe to say that tabletop role-play is finally having its moment in the spotlight. But while Dungeons & Dragons’ OGL fiasco has clearly lit a fire under many players eager to make a change, the fact of the matter is that a sizeable cohort of writers and designers have been toiling away at excellent games for years now. Their tireless efforts have yielded a bumper crop of excellent, some might say genre-defining, TTRPGs. Just like board games, a few modern classics have also cropped up: Look no further than The Quiet Year and The One Ring, both making their second appearance on this list.

Just as before, Polygon asked nearly two dozen writers, designers, presenters, actors, and personalities from around the world of tabletop gaming to share with our readers the TTRPGs that made an impact on them and their players this year. Here’s what we found.

My friends and I still talk about the weekend we spent playing City of Winter. With lightweight rules but a heavy emphasis on the kind of ephemera usually reserved for much crunchier games, creating space for this game is almost as important as who you chose to play it with. Characters travel along a cloth map that illustrates a landscape with only barest indications of topography; the focus instead relies on themes of assimilation, diaspora, and — most importantly to the narrative — baggage. As a family of immigrants (bound by blood or by choice), players describe their home, their traditions, and then, as a darkness comes from the west side of the map, they leave it all behind, choosing what traditions and rituals they pick up from the places they visit and what they hold on to from their