I’ve been playing Challengers a ton on BGA. There is a lot more to it than it may seem at first and it’s a very fun game.

Yesterday I was mentioning Azul as an example of a game that’s very easy to teach and a lot of fun when played casually but at the same has great depth at high level play. I think Challengers falls into this space too. The award is well deserved IMO.

The Decision Space podcast has just covered the game if you’d like some more in-depth discussion. They rated it very high too.

Edit: I totally missed that Sea Salt & Paper got a recommendation too! It’s one of my absolute favorite small deck games, very addictive! And I’d highly recommend Next Station: London too if you enjoy flip & writes. It has quickly become one of our comfort games.

I’ve played challengers several times now and absolutely love it. My friends always ask to play it when I host a game night. I just don’t like the art style that much, but the gameplay is great.

I’ve played Akropolis and Planet Unknown.

Akropolis is a competitive city builder where you’re having to make the choice of expanding outward or nullifying previous tiles by building on-top / upward for more points. I really enjoy it, my favorite new one of the year. (I tend to enjoy stylish, colorful, solo puzzley games)

Planet Unknown is a grid-planet that you’re terraforming with tetronimos. There are several tracks of environment types with different bonuses. I enjoyed the gameplay well enough but found it a little slow for my tastes; wife liked it more than I did.
What I did really appreciate is how replayable it seems. There are tons of planet variants, terrain tracks, and challenge cards that seem like you could really build the experience you want