Tag Archives: Daybreak

Spiel des Jahres Winners – 2025

Last weekend, this year’s Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year) winner was announced as Bomb Busters, by Hisashi Hayashi, the designer of Trains, MetroX (aka Voll Verplant), String Railway and Yokohama.  Based on the earlier Bomb Squad by the same designer, this is a cooperative, card driven game, where players work together to try to defuse a bomb before it explodes.  Players begin with a hand of numbered Wire cards (four each, numbered one to twelve) and then take turns pointing at each others’ wires and guessing their values.  Correct guesses lead to wires being cut, incorrect guesses and the detonator advances…

Bomb Busters
– Adapted from image by BGG contributor spiritraw

The winners of the Kinderspiel des Jahres (Children’s Game) and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (“Expert” or “Connoisseur’s” Game) were announced at the same time. The Kinderspiel des Jahres went to Topp die Torte!, which is a tile laying game by Wolfgang Warsch—a previous winner of the Kennerspiel de Jahres in 2018 with Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg (aka The Quacks of Quedlinburg) and designer of The Mind, Ganz Schön Clever and Quacks & Co., all of which have received recognition from the jury in recent years.  This year, the Kennerspiel des Jahres award went to Endeavor: Deep Sea by New Zealand designers Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray, a game where players explore the deep sea using the action mechanism from Endeavour: Age of Sail (and its predecessor Endeavor).

Endeavor: Deep Sea
– Image from kickstarter.com

Endeavor: Deep Sea can be played competitively or cooperatively with up to five players (using the Deluxe edition). This means that as last year, both the “senior awards” have gone to cooperative games.  Indeed, the last four Spiel des Jahres awards (Sky Team, Dorfromantic, MicroMacro and Just One) and three of the last five Kennerspiel awards (Paleo and The Crew as well as e-Mission/Daybreak) have gone to cooperative games.  This style of game is clearly very popular with families (where arguments are often best avoided), but can be less so with more traditional gamers who prefer a bit of competition.  As such, cooperative games very much have the “Marmite Factor”, but in such cases, the nominees and recommended lists cater for every taste, with games like Looot, Castle Combo, Faraway and Flip 7.

Bomb Busters
– Image from spiel-des-jahres.de

Spiel des Jahres Nominations 2025

The nominations for the 2025 Spiel des Jahres Awards have just been announced.  Although there are now other lots of other awards (including the recently announced Golden Geek Awards), this is still the most prestigious award in board gaming and certainly the one that carries the most weight when it comes to casual gamers.  There are three categories, the Kinderspiel (children’s game) , the Kennerspiel (“expert’s” game) and the most desirable of all, the family award, the Spiel des Jahres or “Red Poppel”.  The nominees for this year’s awards have been announced as:

  • Kennerspiel des Jahres
    Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025 - Nominees    Endeavor: Die Tiefsee (aka Endeavor: Deep Sea) by Carl de Vissser
    & Laurent Escoffier
    Faraway by Johannes Goupy & Corentin Lebrat
    Neuland (aka Looot) by Charles Chevalier & Laurent Escoffier

 

In recent years, there has been a shift in both the family and expert awards, away from traditional Euro-style board to lighter, more innovative games.  Gone are the days of El Grande, Tikal and The Settlers of Catan (all winners from the 1990s) with recent winners including MicroMacro: Crime City (from 2021) Pictures (from 2020), Challengers! (from 2023).  It may be that there has been a concerted effort to “freshen” the brand and subvert the conventional idea of what a board game is.  Last year’s winners, were Sky Team and Daybreak which were unusual in that both are cooperative games with Sky Team also being a two-player game (unusual for a “family game”).

– Image by BGG Contributor JuiceNeutron

In addition to the nominees, there are always a number of recommendations, which in this year include Castle Combo and Cities.  The Spiel des Jahres Awards are still the industry’s headline award and therefore are of great significance; it will be interesting to see which direction the awards go in this year when they are announced on Sunday 13th July in Berlin.

The Spiel des Jahres Awards
– Image from spiel-des-jahres.de

Deutscher Spiele Preis – 2024

The 2024 Deutscher Spiele Preis awards have been announced at the International Spieltage in Essen.  These are the results of an open vote by games clubs, gamers and people in the industry and recognise the “Best Children’s Game” and a top ten list of the “Best Family and Adult Games”.  The games named in the Deutscher Spiele Pris lists often intersect with the winners and nominees of the annual Spiel des Jahres Award, but the Spiel des Jahres winners are chosen by a committee with a list of strict criteria, whereas the Deutscher Spiele Preis is more a list of the most popular games of the preceding year.

Deutscher Spielepries 2024 Logo
– Image from
spiel-essen.com

As is often the case, the top ten list includes the both the winners and some of the nominees of the Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres awards, but the top spot went to a game from the Recommended List, Forest Shuffle (aka Mischwald).  Second place went to Sky Team (winner of the Spiel de Jahres) with The White Castle (aka Die weiße Burg) taking third, and Harmonies, also from the Recommended List featuring as well.  Unusually, the winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres,  Daybreak (aka e-Mission), did not make the top ten. The winner of the best children’s games was Magic Keys (aka Die magischen Schlüssel), which also won the Kinderspiel des Jahres earlier this year. Congratulations to all the award winners.

Forest Shuffle
– Image by boardGOATS

Spiel des Jahres Winners – 2024

This afternoon, the 2024 Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year) winner was announced as the cooperative two-player game, Sky Team.  In this game, the players are the pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner working together as a team to land the airplane in different airports around the world.  Cooperative games can operate in different ways, but this is a limited communication game that runs over a fixed number of turns as the plane descends.  Before the descent, the pilot and copilot discuss the strategy.  Once the players have agreed their plan, they are on their own until the end of the turn, throwing their own dice and carrying out their own actions.

Sky Team
– Image by BGG contributor JuiceNeutron

There has been some precedent for cooperative games over the years, with Hanabi, Paleo and last year’s winner Dorfromantic, receiving prizes as well as Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 which was given a special award.  What makes Sky Team unusual as a Spiel des Jahres winner, however, is the fact is is a two player game.  Although there have been a number of games that play particularly well with two (Scotland Yard or Lord of the Rings for example) and there has been a special awards for Seti (which is a two player game), this is the first time the Spiel des Jahres (or indeed the Kennerspiel des jahres) Award, traditionally a family prize, has gone to a two player game.

Sky Team
– Image by BGG contributor The Innocent

The winner of the Kinderspiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres, the “Children’s” and “Expert” (or “Connoisseur’s”) games were announced at the same time.  The first of these went to Die Magischen Schlüssel (aka Magic Keys), which is a simple and beautiful push-your-luck game of collecting gems.  The winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres Award was e-Mission (aka Daybreak), which, like Sky Team, is also a cooperative game, but with elements of the mechanisms inspired by card games like Wingspan and Terraforming Mars.

Daybreak
– Image by BGG contributor The Innocent

In Daybreak, one to four players work together to battle climate change with each player controlling a World Power.  If too many people from any World Power are in crisis, everyone loses, but if if by working together global emissions are reduced to net-zero, everyone wins.  This concept has been used previously in a game, in particular CO2, but Daybreak is far more accessible.  Daybreak also focuses on the the human cost of climate change and the benefits to humans that the solutions might bring, as such, as well as a good game in its own right, it also delivers an important message.

Spiel des Jahres Nominations 2024

The 2024 nominations for the three Spiel des Jahres categories have just been announced.  Although there are now other awards, this is arguably still the most prestigious award in board gaming and, certainly the one that carries the most weight when it comes to casual gamers.  There are three categories, the Kinderspiel (children’s game) , the Kennerspiel (“expert’s” game) and the most desirable of all, the family award, the Spiel des Jahres.  The nominees for this year’s awards have been announced as:

In recent years, there has been a shift to light or innovative games.  Although the complexity of this year’s offering is not in the same league as some of the 1990s winners (e.g. El Grande, Tikal and The Settlers of Catan, all of which won the “Red Pöppel” as they preceded the inception of the Kennerspiel award), there is a marked shift away from the novel, internet or app based games of MicroMacro: Crime City (from 2021) and Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game (from 2019) and the party games like Just One (from 2019), Pictures (from 2020), Top Ten (from 2022) and Challengers! and Fun Facts (both from 2023).

Forest Shuffle
– Image by boardGOATS

In addition to the nominees, there are a number of recommended, including Harmonies and Forest Shuffle (aka Mischwald) both of which have peaked interest in the group, with the latter having been enjoyed on a Tuesday evening shortly after its release at Essen.  As always, the Deutscher Spielepreis is likely to be a better fit for more dedicated gamers, but we will no-doubt play many more of the nominations and recommendations over the coming weeks.  The Spiel des Jahres Awards are still the industry’s headline award and therefore are of great significance; it will be interesting to see what the winners are when they are announced on Sunday 21st July in Berlin.

The Spiel des Jahres Awards
– Image from spiel-des-jahres.de

Boardgames in the News: Role-playing Climate Resilience

It was nearly ten years ago that Stuart West, a Professor of Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Zoology, Oxford, used playing board games as a teaching tool to understand evolution and published his results in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.1 Now, Matt Leacock‘s new game, Daybreak has been reviewed in the journal Science.2

Daybreak
– Image from amazon.com

Matt Leacock is best known for the cooperative game, Pandemic.  However, while thirty of his forty-seven published games are cooperative (including the well popular Forbidden Games series), he has also been instrumental in the innovation of legacy games, co-designing both the Pandemic Legacy series of games and the recent Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West.

Daybreak
– Image from amazon.com

Daybreak is cooperative game about climate action where players controls a world power, Europe, the United States, China, and the Majority World, each of which has different energy demand and sources, emissions, resilience, and vulnerable populations.  The idea is that players deploy policies and technologies to deal with the engine of global heating and to try to build resilient societies that protect people from life-threatening crises.

Daybreak
– Image from amazon.com

The author of the article is Science‘s books and culture editor, Valerie Thompson who concludes that the trade-offs in the game reflect those seen in real life.  Most importantly, however, where climate change is concerned, we only stand a chance if we work together.

1 West, S., Nat. (2015), 528, 192; doi:10.1038/528192a.
2 Thompson, V., Science. (2023), 382(6673), 890; doi:10.1126/science.adl4244.