Tag Archives: Mit Quacks & Co. nach Quedlinburg

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 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.