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Update: The hiatus is over! Recommend.Games is back, albeit with some reduced functionality.

The very first commit to the project ludoj¹, as I called it back then, was on December 5th, 2016. I registered the domain Recommend.Games on November 22nd, 2018. On May 15th, 2020, I published the first post on this blog. Over the years, this site attracted more than 50,000 users, which is a huge number, if you think about it.

Today, I’d like to inform you that the board game recommendation engine at Recommend.Games will take a hiatus from mid August 2022.

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️! As mentioned before, this year was the first time the ceremony was held on a Saturday evening and I had the immense pleasure of attending it in person. In case you missed my very profesional live coverage on Twitter, here’s a summary of the event.

But without further ado, here are the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022!

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Saturday, July 16, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022. 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.

Nominations are out 🗄️! The jury selected a total of fifteen games for their longlist, nine for Spiel des Jahres and six 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 16.

Spiel des Jahres 2022 is around the corner! (Has it really been a year already since we last spoke with each other? 😅) We’re blessed with another strong year full of wonderful games that all compete for the most prestigious awards in board gaming. As in the previous 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 23rd.

We have some pretty exciting news! 🤩 Since 2022-02-22, we’ve been using a new and improved ranking as the default sorting for our front page at Recommend.Games.

… What do you mean, you haven’t noticed there’s a R.G ranking? You know, that thing that’s referenced in the statistics? … You haven’t ever opened that view?!? 😱

OK, let’s back up for a second. R.G’s primary purpose is a recommendation engine, that is, finding personalised game recommendations based on a user’s preferences (in this case as expressed through their BoardGameGeek ratings). But we want to show some games to the users immediately when they load the start page, before entering their user name. Think of these games as recommendations for… anyone. What games would you recommend to a person if you didn’t know anything about their taste? This is the implicit purpose of any “Top X entities” list. Since this is a recommendation site, we’d like to make this claim explicit, so the R.G ranking has always been those “recommendations for everyone”. What’s changed is the way those recommendations are calculated.

The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced 🗄️! This article is more than a week overdue, but I’ve been on my first trip¹ abroad since, you know… (In a sense that was the first time in a year and a half I wasn’t abroad. 🤷) So without further delays, here are the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021!

It’s time! On Monday, July 19, we will finally know which games won Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021. I really think this is an exciting year with six very strong nominees that all have a lot of arguments going for themselves (and a few against). Even after following the whole year releases very closely, I’m still torn as to who’d be the favourites to win. Algorithms won’t be much help here either – the sample is just too small. So I’ll have to go with my instincts instead… 🤷

Nominations are out 🗄️! The jury selected a total of fifteen games for their longlist, eight for Spiel des Jahres and seven for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Out of these games, three games each are nominated for both awards and can hope to get the coveted meeple added to their covers on July 19.

It’s our favourite time of the year again: time for Spiel des Jahres nominations! On Monday, May 17th, the jury will once again announce their longlist (aka recommendations) and shortlist (aka nominations) for Spiel des Jahres, Kennerspiel des Jahres and Kinderspiel des Jahres 2021. Just like last year, I’ll try to produce a list of the most promising games to land on the longlist for Spiel and Kennerspiel. (I’ll promise to get around to Kinderspiel predictions in a couple of years.)