The cat’s out of the bag and the winners have been announced!
After two year of complaining how the ceremonies went on for too long, it appears the jury finally listened to me and made it snappier, while still retaining the sections highlighting all the various facets of the hobby. Kudos! I don’t know if the presenters gained more experience in hosting the show, or if their non-polished charm is simply growing on me, but I definitely found the whole thing more enjoyable. (Don’t forget the Empfehlungsliste really had me cracking up…)
Enough about the show though, let’s look at the actual stars of the evening! 🤩
Spiel des Jahres 2025
Bomb Busters
2–5 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0)
Players defuse bombs by deducing and cutting unseen wires of different values.
I think it’s fair to say that Bomb Busters has been everybody’s favourite for a ling time, and in the end the jury followed the crowd’s wisdom. I’m just happy I didn’t have to fall out of love with the jury for picking Flip 7, a game whose appeal I’m yet to find. Instead, we can indeed celebrate the first win for a Japanese, or indeed any Asian, designer, a truly remarkable testimony of the ongoing internationalisation of the hobby.
Finally, it’s worth noticing that before 2019, there were only two co-operative Spiel des Jahres winners: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (1985) and Hanabi (2013). But since then five out of seven winners were co-operative: Just One (2019), MicroMacro (2021), Dorfromantik (2023), Sky Team (2024) and Bomb Busters this year. Let’s see if this trend continues in the next years – I’d be all for it. 🥰
Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025
Endeavor: Deep Sea
1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.9)
Lead your research institute to explore ocean depths and publish your findings!
I clearly should’ve trusted my own courage and picked Endeavor as my prediction for Kennerspiel des Jahres, but I got deterred by the jury’s own remarks that this game is on the heavy side of what they’d consider a Kennerspiel. (Incidentally, we’ve been spared the discussion that would have followed if Faraway had won and hence the Kennerspiel would’ve had a lower complexity rating than the Spiel winner.) Despite this ruining my statistics (which are probably statistically indistinguishable from randomly guessing by now), I’m still very happy about the jury’s selection since I’ve already expressed how meh I was on the other two nominees.
An interesting fact about this winner is that to my knowledge it’s only the second time a re-implementation won one of the two “adult” awards, the first one being Alhambra in 2003. (By my count there’s three Kinderspiel des Jahres winners which re-implemented a grown up game, with plenty more of those having been nominated.)
Conclusion
While I don’t make predictions for the Kinderspiel des Jahres (simply because I have zero expertise), there’s two things I’d like to mention here: First, my daughters watched the live stream with me and asked with every kids’ game flashing on the screen what’s the age limit and if they can play it (I think I’ll solicit their advice next year to pick the winner from the nominees). Second, by winning Kinderspiel des Jahres with Topp die Torte!, Wolfgang Warsch became the eighth designer to win two out the three different awards (tenth if you include the predecessor Sonderpreis winners). He already announced he’s going to put his focus on being the first to complete the hat-trick now!
I’ll leave you with the remark that this was the second year in a row where both winners are on the high end of complexity for their respective awards. The jury keeps emphasising, and I hope the ‘geek crowd will finally accept, that really all eligible games are considered for Spiel des Jahres and the jury picks in the end the games which resonated best with the target audience. This could be a party game, a simple card game or a challenging deduction game. By and large, the hobby is alive and well, and the sixteen games on the longlist reflect its wide variety.
As always, I’m already excited what the next year of games have in store for us. 🤓