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Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominations are just around the corner (watch this space for our annual predictions), but I wanted to take this opportunity for a look back over the history of the award. Specifically, I wanted to see which designers have been most successful at the Spiel, Kennerspiel and Kinderspiel des Jahres awards.

What is a good recommendation?

Collaborative filtering is the workhorse powering the recommendations by Recommend.Games. Over the years, I’ve been asked every now and then how it works. So, I thought it’s high time I outlined the basic ideas behind our recommendation engine.

Let’s first take a step back and talk about recommendations in general. What is it we’re trying to achieve? The answer to this question is far from trivial, and it gets harder when you want to formalise its goals. Maybe a somewhat naïve approach would be to say that we want to recommend items that the user will like. But recommendations are as much about predicting what the user wants as what they didn’t even know they wanted. Sometimes the most “correct” answer is also the least useful: maybe our #1 recommendation is Wingspan and the user indeed would love to play it - but if they already knew about it, why recommend it in the first place?

BoardGameGeek (BGG) users can select their country of residence in their profile. The main purpose is to find other users in your region to play face to face or maybe trade games, but but over here at Recommend.Games we obviously cannot help ourselves but to use this information for some interesting statistics. 🤓

Let’s start with the usual disclaimer: We will have to rely on whatever information BGG provides. In particular, users can freely choose their country. As mentioned, this is meant to be the country of residence, but some users might rather choose their country of origin – or some outright nonsense. There are 19 BGG users who claim to be from 🇦🇶 Antarctica, for example. While I’m sure that the long polar nights on lonely research stations are perfect for playing board games, I’m not sure if they have a lot of time to rate them on BGG. 🐧 (If they actually did, Antarctica would have 6,880 ratings per 100 thousand residents, which would make them the second biggest board game enthusiasts in the world – only behind the 🇻🇦 Vatican’s 6 reported users, resulting in almost 20,000 ratings per 100 thousand residents. 🙏)

The number of ratings per game

Perhaps one of the most controversial choices of the Shut Up & Sit Down Effect article was using the number of ratings¹ on BoardGameGeek (BGG) as proxy for “attention” to a game. So let’s double down on that! 😈

If lots of ratings mean a lots of eyes on a game, we can ask questions like: What games get most of the attention? Do few games steal the spotlight? Or is the attention spread out evenly?

Shut Up & Sit Down

Shut Up & Sit Down (SU&SD) is arguably the largest (at over 400k subscribers) and most influential YouTube channel in board gaming. A video with a glowing recommendation by them can lead to a game sell out overnight. Or at least that’s how the anecdotes go. There’s been previous attempts at quantifying the effect, but over here at Recommend.Games is where board games and data science meet, so obviously, we have to dig a little deeper.

High Society is a classic bidding game by classic designer Dr Reiner Knizia, most recently released by Osprey Games with a wonderfully classic look:

The general concept is quite simple: the players are members of said “high society” and are trying to outdo each other in showing off their wealth. The game is played over a series of rounds, and in each round, a card is revealed from a deck of 16 cards. The players then take turns bidding on the card, and the player who wins the bid gets the card. The cards are worth points, and the player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Orchard is a beloved children’s game classic which is so old – it’s as old as myself. 👴 As one might expect from a children’s game, it’s really simple: roll a die, pick a fruit of the corresponding color, and put it in the basket. If you roll the raven, the raven moves one step closer to the orchard. If you manage to pick all the fruit before the raven reaches the orchard, you win together. If the raven reaches the orchard first, you lose.

The hiatus is over! Already since April 2023 the recommendation engine at Recommend.Games has been back online, albeit with reduced functionality. In order to cut down serving costs, I made the recommendation model much more lightweight (this deserves its own article) and removed rarely used features as well as a bunch of bloat from the database.

Most of the database was filled with users’ collection items, i.e., games they rated, owned, have played etc. So all this information had to go. As a consequence, the recommendations would be cluttered with all those games the user is already familiar with, making them much less useful. That’s the reason we didn’t make a big announcement when we came back online in April.

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

This year’s show was… long… On the one hand, it’s nice to have all three awards (including the Kinderspiel) back together in one announcement, but on the other hand, once you add special awards, the review of the 1983 awards, interviews etc, even die hard fans (and obviously I’m one of them) have a hard time keeping their attention up. The jury is clearly actively trying to improve the award ceremony, so hopefully next year everything will be a bit snappier.

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 16, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023. We’re blessed with another year of very strong games and I’m certainly very excited to learn what games will win the two awards.