Analysis Paralysis

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️!

Did the ceremony get snappier again? No lengthy flashbacks to previous winners (only an epitaph for Reinhold Wittig 🗄️), no detailed lectures on the jury’s work, no dragging out the announcements. The show definitely had its entertaining moments, like when Donald X. Vaccarino subverted the jury’s narrative about his game’s critical commentary (“just a bit of fun”), or when chairman Harald Schrapers forgot what year it is (“The Spiel des Jahres 2024 is…”).

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 12, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2026. As always, there are six games hoping to win one of the two most important awards in gaming – and one hopeless geek trying to predict which will be the lucky ones. 🤓

The group stage is over, the Round of 32 is set — and the model has changed its mind. ⚽️

When I ran the numbers before kickoff the model had a bold, market-contrarian opinion: 🇪🇸 Spain to win it at 35.3%, 🇦🇷 Argentina second at 23.0% and both dramatically underpriced by the bookies — Spain’s +19.3pp edge over Polymarket was the strongest disagreement between maths and money I’d ever put on this blog. I promised I’d come back on the other side of the trophy ceremony to find out whether the model deserved its confidence.

FIFA is a mafia. Now let’s watch football.

Let’s not beat about the bush: FIFA is a mafia, their Peace Prize a disgrace and a host country so hostile towards the expected guests from all over the world not worthy of that honour. But as soon as the whistle sounds later today and the first ball is kicked, none of this matters anymore and football (or soccer in freedom units) rules everything. ⚽️

Nominations are out 🗄️! The jury selected a total of sixteen games for their longlists, nine for Spiel des Jahres and seven for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Out of these games, three games each are nominated for the two awards and can hope to get the coveted meeple added to their covers on July 12.

Spiel des Jahres 2026 is around the corner! As with the previous six years, I’ll try to predict what games have the best shot at ending up on the longlist (aka recommendations) and the shortlist (aka nominations) when the jury announces their picks on May 19th.

As every year, I’ll let the algorithms speak, and I’m once again using the methodology established last year: 50% of the weight goes on the individual recommendations for the 14 jury members, and 50% on the “recommendations to the jury”. This way, I was able to calculate a score for all eligible¹ games using our recommendation algorithm to fill in gaps where jury members haven’t rated a game. Our very own Kennerspiel score is then used to sort those into the respective top 10 lists for each award. As always, you can find the complete code on GitLab and the complete results here.

A year in the making

The 2026 World Snooker Championship is under way at the Crucible in Sheffield — a natural point to rerun the forecast from last April, when we put Elo on five decades of results and ran ten million tournament simulations. John Higgins led our list at 13.14%; Zhao Xintong was fourth at 10.58% but took the 2025 title and has stayed at or near the top of the ratings since.

W. Eric Martin (WEM) ran the BoardGameGeek (BGG) news section for 15 years. Earlier this year, he launched his own outlet¹ called Board Game Beat. In between his signature game release updates, he writes entertaining and insightful analyses of the broader hobby. In one of his recent articles 🗄️, he proposed the Rules Ratio. The title invites us to geek out about it, so geek out we shall! 🤓

What is the Rules Ratio?

The basic idea behind the Rules Ratio is to look at how many rules questions a game generates. It stands to reason that a game with clear concepts and well-written instructions will leave players less confused than a poorly written rulebook. BGG offers a direct proxy for number of rules questions via its forums. Every game listing has a variety of such forums attached, including one titled Rules. Depending on the game, this particular forum might be the busiest, or completely void of any traffic. WEM proposes defining the Rules Ratio² (RR) as the share of Rules threads³ among all forum threads:

At some point this year, I let my laptop run flat-out for almost two weeks just to answer one question: how much of a four-player board game is “skill” and how much is “luck”? That sounds excessive, but there was a catch: before I could even start those simulations, I had to fix a basic problem. Elo – the rating system we’ve been happily using so far – only really knows how to handle one-on-one duels.

Whether a game counts as “skill” or “chance” isn’t just a pub argument — in many countries it’s a legal distinction. Roulette and blackjack live on the “chance” side; tennis and chess are filed under “skill”. Different rules, different taxes, different ways for people to lose money.

The trouble is that this line is usually drawn by tradition and gut feeling. Is poker really “more skill” than backgammon? Is snooker closer to roulette or closer to chess? A group of economists tried to answer that question more systematically: instead of arguing, measure how “skill-heavy” a game is in practice by looking at the Elo ratings of all its players. We’ll meet their work properly in a bit.