World Cup of Board Games Round of 64

The short version: The group stage is done. 64 games have qualified for the World Cup of Board Games Round of 64. They’ve been seeded 1 to 64 by BGG rank and drawn into a four-quarter knockout bracket. Brass: Birmingham is the top seed. Earth scraped through as the lowest-ranked qualifier at BGG #198. Final Girl and Iberia just missed out on the last four best fourth-place spots. The full bracket is below.

The group stage of the World Cup of Board Games 2026 is over, and I have to say: you lot took this seriously. The votes came in across all 20 groups and now we have our 64 qualifiers. This is the World Cup of Board Games Round of 64, and it’s time to sort out the bracket.

Before we get to the draw, let me quickly explain how we got here, because the qualification process threw up a few interesting moments.

How the Group Stage Worked

If you missed the group stage post,here’s the short version. 200 of BGG’s highest-ranked standalone board games were drawn into 20 groups of 10. Each group had one game from each ranking band of 20, so every group was a genuine spread from the very top of the BGG charts down to games in the 181-200 range. You could vote for up to three games per group.

The rules for qualification were straightforward. The three games with the most votes in each group went through automatically. That gave us 60 qualifiers straight away.

The remaining four spots went to the best fourth-placed finishers across all 20 groups. Where votes were tied for third and fourth place within a group, the tiebreaker was BGG rank: the higher-ranked game took the automatic qualification spot, and the tied lower-ranked game went onto the fourth-place list instead. That fourth-place list was then ranked by BGG position, and the top four from that list took the final spots.

The Ones That Just Missed Out

Two games came agonisingly close to making it through the fourth-place route and didn’t quite get there.

Final Girl (BGG #96) and Iberia (BGG #154) both finished fourth in their groups and made the fourth-place list, but when that list was sorted by BGG rank the cut landed just above them. Four games with higher BGG positions took the spots. It’s a tough way to go out, but that’s the tiebreaker system we agreed on at the start.

No complaints from me. The rules were the rules.

High-Ranked Games That Didn’t Make It

The group stage was always going to produce some surprises, and the casualty list from some of the higher BGG-ranked games is worth a moment’s attention.

Gloomhaven (BGG #4) and Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition (BGG #7) are both games that require a serious time commitment and a committed group to get to the table. It’s possible that commitment doesn’t translate as well into a quick online vote. Both are brilliant games. Neither made it through.

Spirit Island (BGG #11), Gaia Project (BGG #13), and Twilight Struggle (BGG #14) all fell at the group stage too. Tough groups will do that.

On the lighter end, Patchwork made it through at seed 49, which I think is a reasonable result for a two-player game going up against heavier competition. Codenames and Just One also snuck through, which tells you something about how widely played those two are.

A Few Things Worth Noting

The Lowest-Ranked Qualifier

Earth qualifies as seed 64, with a BGG rank of 198. It is the lowest-ranked game in our verified top 200 list to make it through. Earth is a tableau-building engine game where you’re essentially growing an ecosystem across your player board, and it clearly has a devoted fanbase who turned out for it. It now gets to face seed 1 in the Round of 64. That is a brutal opening match.

The LotR Situation

Three Lord of the Rings titles made it through the group stage. The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth came through as seed 8, which is genuinely impressive. The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game squeezed in at seed 50, and Journeys in Middle-Earth made it at seed 46. That’s a lot of Tolkien in the bracket, which I am completely fine with.

Personal Favourites

I am genuinely pleased to see Azul through. It came in at seed 37 (BGG #97), which is about right for a game that is deceptively simple to learn and quietly vicious to play well. I have probably played it more than any other game on this entire list. If it gets a favourable draw in the first round it could go a long way.

Sky Team (seed 14) is the other result that made me smile. A cooperative two-player game about landing a plane, where the whole tension comes from not being allowed to talk about your dice. The fact it’s made it this far in a public vote against games like Scythe and Root says a lot about how good it actually is.

How the Bracket Works

The 64 qualifiers have been seeded 1 to 64 by BGG rank from our verified list. Seed 1 is the highest-ranked qualifier, seed 64 is the lowest.

The bracket is divided into four quarters of 16 games. The structure is designed so that:

• Seeds 1 and 2 are at opposite ends of the draw and cannot meet before the Final
• Seeds 3 and 4 cannot meet before the Semi Finals
• Seeds 1 and 4 are in the same half of the draw
• Seeds 2 and 3 are in the same half of the draw

If all four top seeds progress as expected (they won’t all, but hypothetically), the Semi Finals would be Brass: Birmingham vs Terraforming Mars in the Top Half, and War of the Ring vs Ark Nova in the Bottom Half. Then the winners of those two semi finals meet in the Final.

In practice, Scythe is going to upset someone’s quarter. It always does.

The Full Seeded List

All 64 qualifiers, seeded 1-64 by BGG rank.

Seed	Game	Seed	Game
1	Brass: Birmingham	33	Wingspan Asia
2	Ark Nova	34	Race for the Galaxy
3	War of the Ring (Second Edition)	35	Bomb Busters
4	Terraforming Mars	36	Five Tribes
5	The Castles of Burgundy	37	Azul
6	SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence	38	Lords of Waterdeep
7	Slay the Spire: The Board Game	39	SCOUT
8	The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth	40	Splendor Duel
9	7 Wonders Duel	41	Beyond the Sun
10	Scythe	42	Galactic Cruise
11	A Feast for Odin	43	The Search for Planet X
12	Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated	44	7 Wonders
13	Lost Ruins of Arnak	45	Wyrmspan
14	Sky Team	46	The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth
15	Root	47	Mombasa
16	Wingspan	48	Dominion
17	Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory	49	Patchwork
18	Everdell	50	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Trick-Taking Game
19	Viticulture: Essential Edition	51	Forest Shuffle
20	Crokinole	52	Just One
21	Heat: Pedal to the Metal	53	Codenames
22	Clank!: Catacombs	54	The 7th Continent
23	Harmonies	55	Magic: The Gathering
24	Puerto Rico	56	Pandemic
25	Cascadia	57	Star Realms
26	Agricola	58	Ticket to Ride: Europe
27	Blood on the Clocktower	59	PARKS
28	Grand Austria Hotel	60	Stone Age
29	The White Castle	61	The Isle of Cats
30	Endeavor: Deep Sea	62	Jaipur
31	The Quacks of Quedlinburg	63	That’s Pretty Clever!
32	The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship	64	Earth

The Round of 64 Draw

The Full draw is further down this post. Below is the headline matchup from each quarter.

Quarter 1 – Seed 1’s Quarter (Top of Top Half)

The marquee opening match: [1] Brass: Birmingham vs [64] Earth. The number one seed against the lowest-ranked qualifier. On paper it’s a mismatch. In a community vote, anything can happen. Also in this quarter: [16] Wingspan vs [49] Patchwork, and [17] Hegemony vs [48] Dominion, which is a genuinely interesting matchup between a political heavy euro and one of the most played deck builders ever made.

Quarter 2 – Seed 4’s Quarter (Bottom of Top Half)

[4] Terraforming Mars opens against [61] The Isle of Cats. A bit of an odd couple. Also watch out for [13] Lost Ruins of Arnak vs [52] Just One, which is the most extreme contrast in playing weight in the entire bracket. Lost Ruins is a 90-minute worker placement and deck building hybrid. Just One takes about 20 minutes and the whole table plays together. Both qualified. Both deserve to be here.

Quarter 3 – Seed 3’s Quarter (Top of Bottom Half)

[3] War of the Ring vs [62] Jaipur to open. War of the Ring is a two-player epic recreating the entire Lord of the Rings conflict across a massive board with hundreds of figures. Jaipur is a two-player card game you can finish in 20 minutes. The bracket does not play favourites. Also in this quarter: [10] Scythe vs [55] Magic: The Gathering, which I have no idea how to call.

Quarter 4 – Seed 2’s Quarter (Bottom of Bottom Half)

[2] Ark Nova vs [63] That’s Pretty Clever! is the opener here. Ark Nova is probably the best engine builder of the last five years. That’s Pretty Clever is a push-your-luck dice game that plays in 30 minutes. This is the World Cup. Upsets happen. Also: [9] 7 Wonders Duel vs [56] Pandemic, which on another day could easily have been a semi final matchup in any tournament.

How to Vote in the Round of 64

Head to head Match-ups are posted on our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Bluesky channels you can vote for them on there on one or all of the channels

Full Brackets

Although some round of 64 matches may have completed an round of 32 matches be already set none of those will start until all Round of 64 matchups are complete. The Round of 32 will begin on the 2nd July

Full Results of World Cup of Board Games Round 1