Tag Archives: Dune: Imperium

Deutscher Spiele Preis – 2022

The Deutscher Spiele Preis awards recognise the “Best Children’s Game” and a top ten list of the “Best Family and Adult Games”, the results of an open vote by games clubs, gamers and people in the industry.  They are awarded annually at the Internationale Spieltage in Essen and the winners are announced in advance.  As annual awards, the games named in the Deutscher Spiele Pris lists often intersect with the winners and nominees of Spiel des Jahres Award, but in many other ways, the awards differ.

Deutscher Spiele Pries 2022
– Image from
spiel-messe.com

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.  As such, games that are not eligible for the any of the Spiel des Jahres Awards often feature in the top ten list of “Best Family and Adult Games”.  For example, games that were considered at the time to be too complex or aggressive for the Spiel des Jahres awards have ranked number one in the Deutscher Spiele Preis list.  These include Tigris & Euphrates (1998), Puerto Rico (2002), Louis XIV (2005), Caylus (2006), The Pillars of the Earth (2007), Agricola (2008), Terra Mystica (2013), Russian Railroads (2014), Voyages of Marco Polo (2015), Mombasa (2016) and Terraforming Mars (2017).

Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium
– Image by boardGOATS

Of all these great games, only Terraforming Mars even received a nomination for the Kennerpiel des Jahres award (though Agricola did receive a special “Complex Game Award”).  In contrast, over the last few years, there has been much more overlap with games like Azul (2018), Wingspan (2019) and The Crew (2020) all ranking highest in the Deutscher Spiele Preis list and winning either the Spiel or Kennerspiel des Jahres award.  Further, all the other winners of both awards including MicroMacro, Cartographers, Paleo, Lost Ruins of Arnak have featured high on the Deutscher Spiele Preis list and/or received Spiel/Kennerspiel des Jahres nominations.

Ark Nova
– Image by boardGOATS

This year, while there is still a lot of overlap between the lists, the top ranked game on the Deutscher Spiele Preis list is a bit of a throwback, being too complex even for the Connoisseur or Kennerspiel des Jahres award.  The Deutscher Spiele Preis winner, Ark Nova has been extremely popular amongst gamers creating a lot of “buzz”, so it is no surprise that it did well.  The strategy revolves round building card combinations and the theme, zoo building is very appealing—everyone loves animals.

The full Deutscher Spiele Preis list is:

  1. Ark Nova
  2. Cascadia (Spiel des Jahres Award Winner)
  3. Dune: Imperium (Kennerspiel des Jahres Award Nomination)
  4. Living Forest (Kennerspiel des Jahres Award Winner)
  5. The Red Cathedral
  6. Witchstone
  7. Beyond the Sun
  8. SCOUT (Spiel des Jahres Award Nomination)
  9. Golem
  10. Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition
Ark Nova
– Image by boardGOATS

Spiel des Jahres Nominations 2022

The nominations for the three categories of Spiel des Jahres have been announced.  This is arguably the main award in board gaming and is the one everyone wants to win.  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 an increasing tendency by the committee to reward games that challenge the conventional idea of a game.  This was certainly true with Last year’s winner, MicroMacro: Crime City, which is very different to traditional games and arguably is more a cooperative crime-solving activity using the medium of “Where’s Wally?“.  The “game” is played on a large monochrome map, with a deck of cards. The cards ask questions with the answers to the questions on the map. In turn, these lead the players to the solution to each of the sixteen cases.

– Image by BGG contributor Hipopotam

The Kennerspiel des Jahres award which honours slightly more challenging games, went to Paleo and the Kinderspiel des Jahres award winner was Dragomino, a children’s version of Kingdomino (which won the main prize in 2017).  Paleo is a co-operative campaign game, where players try to keep the human beings in their care alive while completing challenges.  With the games honoured by the main award becoming lighter over the years, we have found the Kennerpiel des Jahres is generally a better fit to our tastes.  However, campaign and legacy games are not well suited to groups where the people playing games are different from week to week, and many people don’t like cooperative games too, so it will be interesting how this award changes in coming years.

– Image from spiel-des-jahres.de

The judges will be meeting 17-19th June in Hamburg, with the Kinderspiel award announced on 20th June.  The Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres announcements are a month later on 16th July in Berlin.