It’s May, so it’s time for the nominations for the annual Spiel des Jahres Awards.  There are now many other awards (including the recently announced Golden Geek Awards), many of which are more suited to gamers.  However, the Spiel des Jahres and its sister awards the Kennerspiel (“expert’s” game) and Kinderspiel des Jahres (children’s game) are still the most prestigious and sought-after awards in board gaming and certainly the ones that carry the most weight with more casual gamers.  Of the three categories the most desirable is the family award, the Spiel des Jahres or “Red Poppel”, however, the Kennerspiel is typically of more interest to gamers.  The nominees for this year’s awards have been announced as:

• Kinderspiel des Jahres
  Buh Party (aka Boo Party) by Florian Sirieix & Benoit Turpin
  Die Insel der Mookies (aka Mooki Island) by Florian Sirieix
  Verflixt Verzaubert (aka Mimose & Sam et le Voleur de Fruits) by Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

• Kennerspiel des Jahres
  Boss Fighters QR by Michael Palm & Lukas Zach
  Moon Colony Bloodbath by Donald X. Vaccarino
  Rebirth by Reiner Knizia

• Spiel des Jahres
  Cozy Stickerville by Corey Konieczka
  Ditto! (aka JinxO) by Martin Ang
  Morty Sorty Magic Shop by Markus Slawitscheck

One of themost noticable features of this list is the presence of two of the biggest, names in board game designe—Reiner Knizia, one of the most prolific games designers and Donald X. Vaccarino who designed the first deck-building game.  These are great names from the past, who have been shaping sales for the last thirty years, but are still producing great designs.  In contrast, the third game in the list requires and app and is based on QR codes.  It will be interesting to see which of these games receives the final award.

– Image from spiel-des-jahres.de