Tag Archives: Top Ten

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

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.