Kennerspiel on Analysis Paralysis

Spiel des Jahres 2025 winners

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:00:00 +0300

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. 🤓

Spiel des Jahres 2025 predictions – Part 2!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:21:26 +0300

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 13, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025. As always, there’s 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. 🤓

I’ve been doing this for five years now and I’ve called eight out of the ten winners correctly, with the second fail happening last year because I just didn’t want to believe the jury would award Spiel des Jahres to the two player game Sky Team. Let’s hope I’ll do better this year, but it’s again a tough choice!

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2025

Before we dive into the individual games, let’s look at some numbers to see some objective measures for them – as far as this is possible. What we’ve got at our disposal are the jury’s reviews, recommendations to the S_d_J bot, BoardGameGeek’s average rating and the Bayesian rating. Additionally, I’ve created a poll on BGG where the geeks could have their say:

Game	Jury	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Bomb Busters	8.3 (3)	7.8	8.0	7.1	59.8%
Flip 7	7.0 (1)	5.7	7.2	6.7	35.1%
Krakel Orakel	7.0 (1)	7.3	7.4	5.7	5.2%

The numbers tell a clear story: Bomb Busters is considered the high favourite to win Spiel des Jahres 2025. It’s also top of list for most pundits. But is this position justified? Let’s dive into the details!

Bomb Busters

2–5 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), prediction #1

Players defuse bombs by deducing and cutting unseen wires of different values.

As mentioned before: everybody was talking about Bomb Busters and agreed that it’ll be nominated, so the only question was: Spiel or Kennerspiel? The algorithm was very non-committing at 54% and opinions were equally divided. There’s a couple of aspects worth repeating in this question: first of all, the jury coined the term Kennerspiel and hence kind of gets to decide what games fall under this category. More importantly, they don’t do it by just looking at BGG complexity ratings, but rather by observing the target audience playing the game and hence assessing what games pose a higher barrier to entry than others. In the case of Bomb Busters it’s the training missions that make all the difference: they introduce the concepts at a gentle pace, one at a time, and allow groups to go as deep or as shallow in terms of difficulty as they are comfortable. I’d be willing to place a sizable bet (if I was the gambling kind, which I’m not 🤑) that the people who shout about how hard it is to get into Bomb Busters have skipped the training missions entirely.

In the end, what matters is the jury thought this game is approachable enough to be nominated for Spiel des Jahres, and from my own experience, I agree it’s a very clever and fun game. The jury always emphasises that the latter point is what they really care about, not if they’d give the award to another limited communication co-operative game (after Sky Team last year) nor that the inevitable windfall which comes with the award will again hit the major publisher Pegasus Spiele.

Another aspect that the jury reportedly doesn’t care about, but which would be an important milestone in the internationalisation of the board game hobby, is that Hisashi Hayashi could be the first designer from Asia to win any of the three awards. (Someone correct me please if I overlooked any of the previous winners.)

Flip 7

3–99 players, 20 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.1), prediction #21

Score the cards in front of you, or take another card, risking everything you hold?

After the nomination, I’ve read through the rules, and didn’t really get what would be interesting about this game. Then I’ve tried it on Board Game Arena (BGA) – and I still don’t get it. I’ve been told it develops a whole different dynamic at the table, with people cheering for every card flip – but the same is true for UNO. Spiel des Jahres was always meant to be an ambassador for Kulturgut Spiel – games as cultural assets – and I can’t help but think that Flip 7 would be a failure at that. Flip 7 might have been a great winner in the 80s, but if the jury does decide to award it on Sunday, it would feel like denying the progress in game design in the past decades.

Krakel Orakel

2–8 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1), prediction #7

Can you spot and reveal pictures in a tangle of lines?

Something of a wildcard amongst the nominations, still without English edition announced. I’ve mentioned in the previous article that as a drawing game for people who can’t draw it has strong competition from Pictomania. What I overlooked was the fact that this one’s co-operative, reducing the hurdle for people to engage even further. Overall, this sounds like an appealing package to win Spiel des Jahres, somewhat following along the line of winners we’ve had a couple of years ago, e.g., Just One and Pictures.

Who will win?

I’ll have to go with the herd here and say that any winner other than Bomb Busters would be a surprise. I know Flip 7 has its fans, though I don’t see the appeal, and Krakel Orakel sure sounds nice, but I think the jury will continue the streak of favourite wins.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025

Let’s take a look at the same metrics as above, but for the Kennerspiel nominees:

Game	Jury	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Endeavor: Deep Sea	8.0 (5)	5.8	8.2	7.4	43.9%
Faraway	7.6 (5)	7.1	7.6	7.2	41.8%
Looot	6.8 (4)	5.0	7.1	6.2	14.3%

Those numbers look much closer than they did for Spiel. Overall, the critical and geek response to Endeavor is stronger, but Faraway might be more up the jury’s alley. Let’s take a closer look at each nominee!

Endeavor: Deep Sea

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.9), prediction #8

Lead your research institute to explore ocean depths and publish your findings!

It’s another game I haven’t played yet, though its predecessor has been sitting on my shelf of shame for ages now. It’s quite interesting that the jury themselves pointed out when revealing the longlist that this game is very much on the heavy side of Kennerspiel, but then proceeded to nominate it anyways. It’s even more curious when you consider that last year’s winner Daybreak has almost the same complexity rating on BGG.

In the end, no matter how enthusiastic the critical response to this game is, this big box with its myriad of icons might just be a tad too intimidating for the target audience of Kennerspiel.

Faraway

2–6 players, 15–30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9), prediction #3

Explore a mysterious land and fulfill quests on your way back.

Faraway already appeared on some prediction lists last year because it took a while for the German edition to be released, so the international buzz has pretty much eased up by now. Overall, this is a pretty standard engine builder – with the twist of the “reverse” scoring of the cards.

I’ve only played this game on BGA, so take my impression with a grain of salt, but I’m not blown away by Faraway. I guess I’m generally not too much into engine builders and that twist isn’t particularly exciting after the first game or two, when it’s novelty and surprise implications have become familiar. At that point working out the best card to play becomes mostly tedious.

That said, it does play quickly and has some interesting decisions to offer, so there’s that.

Or I’m just a little grumpy at this title for giving me an Ohrwurm of the best worst song of all times… 🤷

Looot

2–4 players, 35 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.1), prediction #30

Gather resources and capture buildings to develop your fjord.

Another game I’ve only played on BGA and another one which I think is just fine. I’ve read somewhere someone comparing it to games Reiner Knizia used to design, which is back-handed but fitting compliment. Choosing and laying the tiles sure offer a lot of choices, and I can see how they might be appealing to some people, but once you’ve understood how the different criteria interact, optimising your point booty becomes another tedious exercise.

I probably sound more negative towards the game than I actually am – the game really seems to be fine – but the nomination did come as a bit of a surprise given that even the jury members seemed to be rather lukewarm on it.

Who will win?

This is a really tough one. From the overall reviews, it seems Endeavor would have the edge, but it also appears to be just outside what a Kennerspiel usually demands of the players, so I’ll put my money on Faraway. Seeing Looot win would be a huge surprise.

Alright, that’s it for the predictions, we’ll see each other again in a couple of days to discuss the results. I know I’ll be glued to the livestream. 🤩

Spiel des Jahres 2025 nominations

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:00:00 +0200

Nominations are out! The jury selected a total of sixteen games for their longlist, 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 13.

Let’s dive straight into the nominations and recommendations, before we discuss how good (or bad) my predictions were and if the agreed with our Kennerspiel score.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2025

Bomb Busters

2–5 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 54% Kennerspiel, prediction #1

Players defuse bombs by deducing and cutting unseen wires of different values.

Bomb Busters was probably the top favourite pretty much on everybody’s list, and the jury agreed. It did not agree with the algorithm’s prediction that this is a Kennerspiel (more on that below).

Flip 7

3–99 players, 20 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.1), 99% Spiel, prediction #21

Score the cards in front of you, or take another card, risking everything you hold?

By their own claim “the greatest card game of all time”, by some other folks’ opinions dull and random.

Krakel Orakel

2–8 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1), 100% Spiel, prediction #7

Can you spot and reveal pictures in a tangle of lines?

Reportedly a drawing game which is still fun for people who cannot draw. With Pictomania, there’s some strong competition in that genre.

Spiel des Jahres recommendations

Agent Avenue (prediction #8)
Castle Combo (#4)
Cities (#29)
Foxy (no prediction): The inevitable “game that got away” and wasn’t on my prediction list at all.
Perfect Words (#43)
The Animals of Baker Street (#19): One of those late arrivals which is probably already forgotten internationally. I think it’s quite charming and I’m happy it got some recongition by the jury.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025

Endeavor: Deep Sea

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.9), 100% Kennerspiel, #8

Lead your research institute to explore ocean depths and publish your findings!

Interestingly, this is a re-re-implementation of Endeavor, which was recommended back in 2010. The jury has a bit of an inconsistent attitude towards remakes.

Faraway

2–6 players, 15–30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9), 67% Kennerspiel, #3

Explore a mysterious land and fulfill quests on your way back.

The nomination that allows you to tick off the “that’s supposed to be a Kennerspiel?” on your bingo card.

Looot

2–4 players, 35 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.1), 92% Spiel, #30

Gather resources and capture buildings to develop your fjord.

Not going to lie: Looot’s description sounds like the most generic Eurogame imaginable.

Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendations

The Gang (#1 Spiel prediction): I hadn’t played this one when I made my predictions, but did so in the meantime, and really had a blast. It also made me realise that the algorithm probably got its Kennerspiel score wrong, and had to post about it lest my insights go without receipts… 🤓😉
Kauri (#45)
Medical Mysteries: Miami Flatline (#27)
Zenith (#99)

How good were the predictions?

This really is a drama in three acts: the decision of Kennerspiel or not, the algorithm picking the longlist, and finally my guts picking the shortlist.

Kennerspiel score

The algorithm classified thirteen out of sixteen games on the longlists correctly (Foxy was completely absent from the predictions, but its Kennerspiel score in the database is 1%), with Bomb Busters actually on the red list (as predicted in the last article), and Looot and The Gang on the anthracite list (as predicted on social media). 81% accurate isn’t bad for a simple model classifying a vague concept.

Longlist

This was a pretty poor year for the algorithm (again). It caught correctly three out of nine games on the Spiel longlist (plus one from the other list) and two out of seven on the Kennerspiel longlist (again plus one from the other list). Just 31% accurate is really bad, and even 44% accurate when counting the games from the wrong lists isn’t great. I thought the changes to the algorithm were working great, but clearly there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

I actually thought this year, I’ll also calculate some “proper” performance metric, which is one of the standard tool to evaluate how good a given ranking is: the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG). I won’t get into the details here, but the general idea is to rank item (as we did with our predictions), then score them according to their relevance (in this case we give all games on the longlists a relevance of 1, with all other games getting 0). The higher our ranking sorts the recommended games, the higher the nDCG, and the better we consider the ranking. So, here are the results of the past years:

2021: 0.655
2022: 0.795
2023: 0.669
2024: 0.803
2025: 0.718

So, in that respect this year was a pretty average year for the predictions. It got somewhat redeemed by the misses being overall still pretty high on the full prediction lists.

Shortlist

Again, a poor performance: I’ve only predicted two out of six nominations correctly (one on the wrong list), matching the (bottom) performance from last year. Have I lost my edge? Well, I know it won’t stop me from coming back next year with more predictions.

That’s it for now, we’ll be back soon with a little more in-depth analyses on the six nominees and their chances of winning an award.

Spiel des Jahres 2025 predictions

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sat, 17 May 2025 00:05:57 +0300

Spiel des Jahres 2025 is around the corner! As with the previous five 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 20th.

As every year, I’ll let the algorithms speak, and I’ve doubled down on the path I’ve started last year when I put more focus on jury members’ reviews. Back then, I simply averaged all available reviews to obtain a proxy for the “jury review”. The major problem with this are of course the gaps in the data for missing reviews. Luckily, we have a method to fill those gaps in the form of our recommendation algorithm. So this year, I’ve put 50% of the weight on the individual recommendations for the 14 jury members and 50% on the “recommendendations to the jury”. This way, I was able to calculated a score for all eligible¹ games. Our very own Kennerspiel score is then used to sort those into their respective list of the top 10 contenders for either award. As always, you can find the complete code on GitLab and the complete results here.

We have another year with some strong contenders. I think there’s one clear nomination (though it’s less clear on what list, more on that later), with the rest of the field pretty wide open. My predictions last year weren’t particularly good, so the only way is up… 📈

But without further ado, here are the favourite games to win Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025.

Candidates for Spiel des Jahres 2025

#1: The Gang

3–6 players, 20 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.7), 89% Spiel

Bet together the order of your hands in Texas Hold’em Poker to win together.

#2: Point of View: Lost Places

2–8 players, 60 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.0), 99% Spiel

A cooperative-communicative game series with different points of view for everyone.

#3: Tower Up

2–4 players, 30–45 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.9), 87% Spiel

Architects compete against one another to construct the best buildings in town.

#4: Castle Combo

2–5 players, 10–25 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.7), 86% Spiel

Draft people from the lower and upper city to create a valuable house.

#5: Chocolates

2–4 players, 15–20 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.0), 100% Spiel

Figure out as much as you can about your box of chocolates BEFORE tasting them!

#6: Slide

2–6 players, 15 minutes, 7+ years, light (1.2), 100% Spiel

Group numbers in your grid to make them disappear.

#7: Krakel Orakel

2–8 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1), 100% Spiel

Can you spot and reveal pictures in a tangle of lines?

#8: Agent Avenue

2–4 players, 10–20 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.4), 100% Spiel

A blend of strategic bluffing and set collection in a whimsical spy world.

#9: Quando

2–6 players, 15 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.0), 100% Spiel

Ditch cards from your hand as you aim to have the lowest score.

#10: Courtisans

2–5 players, 20–30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.4), 91% Spiel

When the Queen holds her banquet, skullduggery is on the menu!

Candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025

#1: Bomb Busters

2–5 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 54% Kennerspiel

Players defuse bombs by deducing and cutting unseen wires of different values.

#2: The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth

2 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.1), 94% Kennerspiel

Play as the Fellowship or Sauron and attempt to determine the fate of Middle-earth.

#3: Faraway

2–6 players, 15–30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9), 67% Kennerspiel

Explore a mysterious land and fulfill quests on your way back.

#4: Blood on the Clocktower

6–21 players, 30–120 minutes, 15+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

Deduce who the Demon is through logic and bluffing. Dead players still play.

#5: Apiary

1–5 players, 60–90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

Hyper-intelligent bees take to outer space to build, explore, and grow.

#6: Wyrmspan

1–5 players, 90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (2.8), 100% Kennerspiel

Build a cavernous sanctuary for dragons of all shapes and sizes!

#7: Wonderland’s War

2–5 players, 45–125 minutes, 13+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

The looking glass has shattered and war has come to Wonderland!

#8: Endeavor: Deep Sea

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.9), 100% Kennerspiel

Lead your research institute to explore ocean depths and publish your findings!

#9: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

1–4 players, 40–160 minutes, 14+ years, medium heavy (3.8), 100% Kennerspiel

Search for signs of alien life by launching probes and analyzing distant signals.

#10: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game

1–4 players, 20 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 75% Kennerspiel

Travel from the Shire and overcome every obstacle as a team.

My two cents

It’s time for my picks for the nominations. The algorithms determined the longlist predictions, but my gut feeling takes over from here on.

My predictions for nominees for Spiel des Jahres 2025

There’s at least five or six games amongst the predictions for the longlist that I could see being nominated, but I had to pick just three of them… 🤞

My predictions for nominees for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2025

Again, many more strong contenders than I could fit on the predictions list. Bomb Busters is the candidate everybody is talking about, and I too am fairly certain it’ll be nominated. Its Kennerspiel score is 54%, so I left it on the anthracite list, though personally I think it’ll end up on the red one.

Conclusion

Another year full of wonderful games – let’s enjoy being spoiled for choice until the trade wars dry up the supplies. 🙈

Also, let’s not forget Kinderspiel des Jahres – my daughters are now 4 and 5 years old, and we’ve already played through most of the back catalogue of past winners, so the whole family is looking forward to more great recommendations.

Stay tuned for the announcement on May 20th! 🤩

As every year, it’s not straightforward to determine what games are eligible for the awards. Generally speaking, it’d be those games release between April 2024 and March 2025 into German retail. Hence, filtering by BGG release year will exclude games that were released earlier elsewhere, but only recently in Germany, and likewise let some games pass that have not seen a German release in that time window. I did my best to catch what I could, but there’s always some that get away. ↩︎

Spiel des Jahres 2024 winners

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 22:54:32 +0300

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

This year’s show was… even longer… 😅 After last year I’ve hoped for a snappier show – instead it was further extended. As much as I appreciate the jury’s work (which I’ve expressed at length), the stage isn’t where they shine, so I don’t understand why we need two awkward hours of their presence. It’s understandable they want to highlight various aspects of board gaming and their activities, since those are the only two hours of attention they get all year, but just as an endless recommendation list would water down the award, the rule in showbiz is to make every minute count.

Anyways, trying not to fall into the same trap, here are the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024!

Spiel des Jahres 2024

Sky Team

2 players, 15 minutes, 12+ years, medium light (2.0)

Pilot and co-pilot work together to land planes.

To quote myself:

Sky Team is highly praised, but has next to no chance of winning.

I guess I was wrong. 😅 It goes to show that any perceived patterns in the jury’s decisions are just based on very small samples. Harald Schrapers, the jury chairman, always emphasises that the only thing they really care about is the fun in the game. And by all accounts, no game was as much fun this year as Sky Team.

Still, this remains a remarkable choice, because the award’s family friendliness was the guiding principle behind the decisions over the past 45 years. It remains to be seen if the market is willing to go along with this new direction.

Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024

Daybreak

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (3.0)

Cooperatively decarbonize the planet and create resilient societies.

Kulturgut Spiel is alive and well! 🥳 Also, Matt Leacock finally got his first main award with his … checking notes … fifth nomination.

This is a great choice on so many levels. A fun game with a serious, yet not imposing, message, which en passant proves that the jury doesn’t always just go with the safe and shallow choices. I can only hope this game will be found underneath countless Christmas trees this year, encourage some honest conversations about the climate crisis (and importantly, the solutions), and encourage more designers to tackle serious topics in their games.

Conclusion

Another year with two co-operative winners after 2021, and two particularly complex ones by the last few years’ standards. Maybe this saves us some of the annual “Spiel des Jahres is only for kids and party games” discussions next year.

The last thing to notice is that the irony of having Daybreak share the winners’ photo with a game about flying, as well as the plastic heavy Kinderspiel winner Magic Keys, seems to be completely lost on the jury. Maybe they should seek some professional help with their show next year – to make it more entertaining and ensure we’re back on time for supper. 😋

Spiel des Jahres 2024 predictions – Part 2!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0300

The waiting is finally coming to an end! On Sunday, July 21, the jury will announce the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024. 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.

I’ve been doing this for four years now and I’ve called seven out of the eight winners correctly. No reason to rest on any laurels – there’s another batch of awards coming up, and this year might be the closest race yet!

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2024

Game	Jury	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Captain Flip	7.2 (5)	5.3	7.0	6.0	28.9%
In the Footsteps of Darwin	7.0 (3)	5.1	7.4	6.2	13.2%
Sky Team	8.8 (4)	7.0	8.2	7.5	57.9%

Obviously, Sky Team is the high favourite according to all metrics. But will the jury follow the numbers? Let’s take a closer look at all the nominees and their pros and cons.

Captain Flip

2–5 players, 20 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.1)

Hoist your flag, recruit a colorful crew, and earn as many gold coins as you can.

The first release by PlayPunk, co-founded by hall of fame member Antoine Bauza, immediately landed them their first nomination. This game is doing to Paolo Mori’s Libertalia what Draftosaurus did to 7 Wonders. That’s a lot of Spiel des Jahres cred in just two sentences.

On the surface, there isn’t all that much to this game of flipping tiles and filling your ship with a colourful set of characters. It’s quite random and solitaire – yet this design somehow manages to pull the magic trick of keeping everyone around the table invested in every single draw and flip of a tile. It’s fast, it’s immediate, it’s fun – in other words: it’s perfect Spiel des Jahres material.

In the Footsteps of Darwin

2–5 players, 20–30 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.6)

Assist Charles Darwin with his research for On the Origins of Species.

I’ll admit I have neither played nor heard all that much about this game until Ben Maddox’s interview which I’ve mentioned in the previous article. One very interesting outcome was that In the Footsteps of Darwin was designed from the onset very intentionally with winning awards in mind. So far this plan seems to (almost) work out: The game got nominated for both As d’Or and Spiel des Jahres, widely regarded as the most important awards in board gaming. It didn’t win the former, but now has the chance to win the latter.

Sky Team

2 players, 15 minutes, 12+ years, medium light (2.0)

Pilot and co-pilot work together to land planes.

Sky Team is only the third two-player-game to be nominated for either Spiel and Kennerspiel after Jambo and Targi. Of course, neither of them won, and I’ve already made the somewhat bold statement during the nominations predictions that Sky Team “has next to no chance of winning”. I’m not so sure of that anymore. For starters, there were similar sentiments that card games or co-ops wouldn’t have a chance of winning Spiel des Jahres – until they did. Also, the jury stated that one can simply play this game in teams – given that MicroMacro and Dorfromantik are essentially solo games that play well with a group, I’d say this logic checks out.

Of course, the strongest argument for Sky Team is its overwhelming reception, both within the geek community (it’s en route of breaking into the BGG top 100) and the jury (just look at the phenominal average score of 8.8).

One last thought about it being nominated on the red list even though most pundits had it under anthracite. First off, it should prove that Spiel des Jahres isn’t nearly as shallow as the grognards want us to believe. Second, it shows that the question of Spiel or Kennerspiel is much less about complexity and much more about approachability. The studio did a great job of providing a clear yet compelling first game experience, while literally hiding the extra material (and complexity) at first.

Who will win?

It may be my ignorance, but In the Footsteps of Darwin is for me the outsider amongst the nominees. I have a really hard time deciding between the other two games. Sky Team appears to be quite an exceptional game, but maybe the whole two-player-curse is still too much of a burden. In the end, my (proverbial) money is on Captain Flip – it’d be the winner most in keeping with the most recent choices.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024

Let’s take a look at the same metrics as above, but for the Kennerspiel nominees:

Game	Jury	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Daybreak	8.3 (4)	4.5	7.8	6.5	40.8%
The Guild of Merchant Explorers	7.3 (3)	6.9	7.7	7.0	24.8%
Ticket to Ride Legacy	8.0 (2)	7.1	8.8	7.3	34.4%

Daybreak hasn’t been available in retail for very long (not at all yet in Europe outside Germany), which harms its rating related metrics. This way, Ticket to Ride Legacy looks like the favourite by those numbers, but Daybreak would be the frontrunner according to the jury and the poll. Again, let’s take a look at the nominees in details to understand their chances of winning.

Daybreak

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (3.0)

Cooperatively decarbonize the planet and create resilient societies.

I had the good fortune of trying out Daybreak at SPIEL Essen last year. I’ll admit, when I sat down at the table, I was overwhelmed by the flurry of icons. 😵‍💫 But quickly, the gears all fit together and the beautiful thematic touches won over my heart before we’d finish the second round. This design is a masterpiece and the way it manages to make a statement without forgetting to be a fun game experience is quite outstanding.

This doesn’t mean it’s perfect – game play can feel fairly solitaire and some thematic choices aren’t to everybody’s taste. Some called the game too easy, other too hard. Some find the heavy topic of the climate crisis disturbing their escapism, others find the game overly optimistic and relying too much on technical advances for its solutions. And pretty much every German seems to take offence with nuclear power being presented as a green source of energy. So should this game receive the award, I think it’s safe to say it’s going to generate some conversations, both in public and around the Christmas tree. In my opinion, this is the strongest argument for making Daybreak the Kennerspiel 2024.

The Guild of Merchant Explorers

1–4 players, 45 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (2.0)

Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure.

This game is so old, not only did I already predict it to be on the longlist last year, but reportedly even its German publisher had already marked it as “out of print”. Now it’s nominated for the biggest award in board gaming and can hope for many more print runs to come.

Despite its age, I still haven’t played it, so I don’t have much more to say about The Guild of Merchant Explorers. My impression is that it was received very warmly and the nomination certainly wasn’t a surprise (other than it not being clear what year it belongs to), but I haven’t heard of much enthusiasm either, so a win would come unexpectedly.

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West

2–5 players, 20–90 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.5)

Build train lines across the United States in a twelve-game campaign.

This game might be the first hobby board game I’d call a true blockbuster title: the biggest publisher in town hires some of the most famous designers to make one of the most popular titles even bigger. Marvelisation in action. Of course, just as Marvel movies can be perfectly executed and highly entertaining cinema, Ticket to Ride Legacy has received high praises for its game play experience.

This experience comes at a cost though. The game retails for 100 euros or more, which is an extremely steep ask for an award that otherwise emphasises approachability every chance they get. It would be very disappointing if the jury displayed this kind of blatant disregard of the economic reality of many of its target audience.

And then there’s the issue of the game’s narrative: Unlike in classic Ticket to Ride, where you’re simply riding the existing railroads, the legacy version is all about building and expanding westwards. For that, it heavily relies on the common tropes of the “Old West”, which is often romanticised in American culture. The designers themselves acknowledge omitting its darker side in a pretty tired note at the end of the rulebook:

Native American tribes were dispossessed and killed. Railroad laborers were exploited, mistreated, and injured. While designing this experience, we found no way to include these elements within the lighter theme of the game.

The German edition made it somehow even worse by translating “light” as “shallow”. I don’t say that every game needs to address every possible problematic aspect of its setting nor that the jury shouldn’t have nominated TtR Legacy because of it, but a note like this just seems like a poor excuse. Harald Schrapers, the jury chairman, wrote an essay in Spielbox 2024/2 expressing his disappointment about the thematic embedding – and yet he still ranks TtR Legacy amongst his top games of 2024.

Who will win?

I guess I made my position pretty clear: if the jury takes their own mission of promoting Kulturgut Spiel seriously, they need to hand the award to Daybreak, period. Even leaving the somewhat political considerations aside, there’s too many aspects speaking against Ticket to Ride Legacy and not enough for The Guild of Merchant Explorers, so my clear favourite on all acounts is Daybreak.

I feel I’ve leaned pretty far out of the window, especially given that I called this the closest race yet. 😅 We shall see if my predictions come true on July 21 – I’ll be even more excited than usual!

Spiel des Jahres 2024 nominations

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 17:00:00 +0200

Let’s dive straight into the nominations and recommendations, before we discuss how good (or bad) my predictions were and if the agreed with our Kennerspiel score.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2024

Captain Flip

2–5 players, 20 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.1), 100% Spiel

Hoist your flag, recruit a colorful crew, and earn as many gold coins as you can.

In the Footsteps of Darwin

2–5 players, 20–30 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.6), 97% Spiel

Assist Charles Darwin with his research for On the Origins of Species.

Sky Team

2 players, 15 minutes, 12+ years, medium light (2.0), 66% Kennerspiel

Pilot and co-pilot work together to land planes.

Spiel des Jahres recommendations

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024

Daybreak

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (3.0), 99% Kennerspiel

Cooperatively decarbonize the planet and create resilient societies.

The Guild of Merchant Explorers

1–4 players, 45 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (2.0), 95% Kennerspiel

Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure.

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West

2–5 players, 20–90 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.5), 94% Kennerspiel

Build train lines across the United States in a twelve-game campaign.

Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendations

How good were the predictions?

This really is a drama in three acts: the decision of Kennerspiel or not, the algorithm picking the longlist, and finally my guts picking the shortlist.

Kennerspiel score

This was a bad year for the Kennerspiel score… 🙈 It classified four out of sixteen games wrong: It saw Sky Team and Harmonies as Kennerspiel and Botanicus and Ritual as Spiel. An acuracy of 75% is pretty poor – the only solace I can take is that I correctly saw Sky Team on the red list… 🤷

Longlist

It’s not getting better… 😅 The algorithm picked out only three out of nine games on the Spiel longlist, plus one game for the wrong award, plus one “honourable mention”. Things look a little brighter for Kennerspiel where the algorithm predicted four out of seven entries, plus one honourable mention. In summary, this would be a 44% hit rate (63% if we count all those pluses). In a year where I was more confident about the longlist than in any previous edition, it’s a bit disappointing.

There’s some good news though: 11, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 22. Those are the positions on their respective prediction lists for seven out of the eight misses. I’ll call those pretty close – Ritual on #292 of the Spiel list is the only catastrophic miss.

Shortlist

Again, not great… Only two out of six nominees called correctly, one of them on the wrong list. That’s my worst year so far – the score so far is two years with three and two years with four correct predictions. I did announce this more or less, but it’s still a bit disappointing. I’ve got some ideas how to improve the algorithm for next year, so let’s hope it’ll be better… 🤞

That’s it for now, we’ll be back soon with a little more in-depth analyses on the six nominees and their chances of winning an award.

Spiel des Jahres 2024 predictions

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:00:00 +0300

Spiel des Jahres 2024 is around the corner! As in the previous four 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 June 11th.

As every year, I’ll let the algorithms speak, but I’ve added something new this year: I tried to track the jury members’ reviews of all eligible¹ games, in particular when they publish scores (such as in the magazine Spielbox), and fed those into the predictions. The other major contributor are the “recommendendations to the jury”. Our very own Kennerspiel score is then used to sort those into their respective list of the top 10 contenders for either award. You can find the detailed analysis here and complete results here.

This is quite a curious year. Usually, I’ve had quite clear favourites for the nominations or even the winners, but would find lots of surprises on the longlist. This year, however, there’s been a large number of games with a really warm reception by the jury, which I believe we will see on the longlist, but not really any game that stands out as a clear favourite for the nominations.

The jury chairman, Harald Schrapers, already spoke some time ago of the year of the card games, so prepare for lots of small but original card games in the predictions, which might be one reason why there’s no clear favourite.

But without further ado, here are the favourite games to win Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024.

Candidates for Spiel des Jahres 2024

#1: The Same Game

3–6 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.0), 100% Spiel

Discuss how completely different objects might share something in common.

A cooperative party game by Wolfgang Warsch – The Same Game is a game to watch!

#2: FTW?!

2–6 players, 25–40 minutes, 8+ years, 90% Spiel

Play your cards cleverly to be the 1337 in FTW?!

FTW?!, an UNO variant, could be Friedemann Friese’s first nomination in over a decade.

#3: 5 Towers

2–5 players, 15–30 minutes, 7+ years, 79% Spiel

Get the most cards and build fantastic towers!

Kasper Lapp strikes again with 5 Towers!

#4: Mycelia

1–4 players, 45 minutes, 9+ years, medium light (2.0), 62% Spiel

Attract help from forest dwellers to remove dewdrops from your field.

One of two games called Mycelia from last year – what a sign if there ever was one that we’ve had enough nature kitsch!

#5: Sides

2–9 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 74% Spiel

Team members work together to have two of them guessing hidden word.

Sides looks a bit like a game generated by an AI that was trained on previous Spiel des Jahres winners. Make of that what you will.

#6: Trekking Through History

2–4 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.8), 93% Spiel

Time travel to some of the greatest moments in human history.

Trekking Through History used to have a beautiful cover. What has happened to it?

#7: Block and Key

1–4 players, 20–40 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.7), 97% Spiel

Cleverly place 3D blocks in a shared space to unlock the key to victory points.

#8: Trio

3–5 players, 15 minutes, 6+ years, light (1.0), 99% Spiel

Reveal anyone’s lowest or highest card and keep going until there’re three of a kind!

Trio has won this year’s As d’Or, France’s answer to the Spiel des Jahres, so is definitely one to consider.

#9: Phantom Ink

4–8 players, 10–15 minutes, 13+ years, light (1.1), 99% Spiel

Spirits race to get their medium teammates to guess a secret object.

Phantom Ink is another word guessing party game, but one with a lot of atmosphere. Its chances might be drastically improved by its much better German title.

#10: Comet

2–4 players, 45–75 minutes, 12+ years, medium light (2.0), 70% Spiel

Save extinct and endangered species from their deadly fate by the threatening comet!

Candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024

#1: Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West

2–5 players, 20–90 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.5), 94% Kennerspiel

Build train lines across the United States in a twelve-game campaign.

The jury states that they won’t consider straight reimplementations of previous games, but they did nominate three different Pandemic variants over the year. Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West could definitely find a place on the longlist.

#2: Sky Team

2 players, 15 minutes, 12+ years, medium light (2.0), 66% Kennerspiel

Pilot and co-pilot work together to land planes.

The last 2-player game to be nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres was Targi in 2012. Sky Team is highly praised, but has next to no chance of winning.

#3: Obsession

1–4 players, 30–90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.1), 100% Kennerspiel

Renovate an estate, manage servants, and pursue romance in Victorian England.

Obsession was first released in 2018 and has gathered quite the following over the years, sitting at #62 on BGG.

#4: Forest Shuffle

2–5 players, 40–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 94% Kennerspiel

Gather the most valuable trees and attract species to them.

Forest Shuffle is high up on most pundits’ lists. I’d say the theme is super bland, but at least in German its title is a pretty good pun.

#5: Caper: Europe

2 players, 25–35 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.1), 77% Kennerspiel

Three heists. Two rivals. One criminal mastermind will rise to the top.

#6: Heat: Pedal to the Metal

1–6 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 66% Kennerspiel

Manage your race car’s speed to keep from overheating.

Heat has been in the BGG hotness pretty much non-stop since its release and has climbed to #42. The jury however has not been as hot on it (pun intended) as the community.

#7: The Guild of Merchant Explorers

1–4 players, 45 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (2.0), 95% Kennerspiel

Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure.

The Guild of Merchant Explorers was actually also #7 on last year’s predictions, but apparently the jury only considers it for this year. Sometimes that’s the hardest part of the predictions. 🤷

#8: Daybreak

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 10+ years, medium (3.0), 99% Kennerspiel

Cooperatively decarbonize the planet and create resilient societies.

What a topical game between all those anthropomorphic animals! Daybreak combines a bold theme with interesting gameplay – and again has a much better title in German.

#9: Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory

2–4 players, 90–180 minutes, 14+ years, medium heavy (4.2), 100% Kennerspiel

Simulate a whole contemporary nation in this asymmetric, politico-economic euro-game.

At least for me, Hegemony shot out of nowhere into the BGG top 100. Quite heavy overall, but a place on the longlist is always possible.

#10: Darwin’s Journey

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 14+ years, medium heavy (3.9), 100% Kennerspiel

Retrace Darwin’s journey to the Galapagos in a worker-placement adventure.

My two cents

It’s time for my picks for the nominations. As indicated in the introduction, I think the algorithm has done a pretty good at predicting the longlist, which means there’s lots of strong contenders. Let’s go with these predictions for the nominations:

My predictions for nominees for Spiel des Jahres 2024

The grognards will go crazy if there’s three party games on the shortlist, but those are just the most approachable kind of games.

My predictions for nominees for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024

To be honest, I’d see Sky Team rather on the red list, but I’ll stick with the categorisation of the algorithm here.

Honourable mentions

Finally, I always like to sneak in a few more games that I think have a good shot at the longlist, even though the algorithm didn’t place them in the top 10.

Conclusion

This year is set to be one that lives from its breadth rather than its depth. I’d say the race is pretty open in both awards, much more so than in previous years. While this makes my job as a predictor harder, as a board game fan I’m looking forward to the surprises that the jury will have in store for us.

With every passing year, I also get more and more excited about the picks for Kinderspiel des Jahres – so far all their recommendations were hits with my kids, and I can’t wait to see what’s the latest hotness in children’s games.

Stay tuned for the announcement on June 11th! 🤩

As every year, it’s not straightforward to determine what games are eligible for the awards. Generally speaking, it’d be those games release between April 2023 and March 2024 into German retail. Hence, filtering by BGG release year will exclude games that were released earlier elsewhere, but only recently in Germany, and likewise let some games pass that have not seen a German release in that time window. I did my best to catch what I could, but there’s always some that get away. ↩︎

Spiel des Jahres 2023 winners

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 16:25:13 +0300

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.

But without further ado, here are the winners of Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023!

Spiel des Jahres 2023

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

1–6 players, 30–60 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.7)

In the end, the main award went to what most observers (myself included) considered the favourite. I guess I should be happy the jury didn’t pick Next Station: London, so I don’t have to stop being Spiel des Jahres’s fanboy. 😅

Maybe we can continue the co-op vs solo game discussion some other time, but for now I really do think this is a very pleasing puzzle, whether on your own or with friends, and it’ll make a great ambassador for the hobby, maybe even pull in a video gamer or two. I don’t think it’ll knock anybody off their socks or redefine their expectations of board gaming, but they’ll have a good time, and that’s what matters most.

Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023

Challengers!

1–8 players, 45 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.8)

Just as with Spiel des Jahres, most people’s first guess won Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023. This decision was somewhat controversial nonetheless: not so much because of the game’s qualities, but because of the colour of the award. Some people went full on gatekeeper because the jury called Challengers! a “connoisseur game” – just read through the comment section of this BGG news article 🍿.

It is worth noticing that this year’s Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres are only separated by 0.1 on BGG’s complexity scale (1.7 and 1.8 respectively, at the time of writing). And I certainly have been considering Challengers! a candidate for Spiel des Jahres as well. But one also needs to trust the jury in their judgement here who don’t blindly follow BGG’s data and apply some algorithm (trust me, I’ve tried 😅), but actually watch a wide spectrum of people play the games and hence understand the difficulty they can present. I highly doubt the 28 people who voted Challengers! to be a “light” game (complexity: 1) ever tried to explain the game to casual gamers and then leave them to fight their battles on their own.

In the end, we’re left with a winner that’s not quite like any other game out there and hence could push people’s expectations of board games today. Challengers! doesn’t have the same strategic depth as the other nominees, but if there were no skills involved, how come I fail this consistently with my decks after dozens of games on Board Game Arena? 😉

Special Awards 2023

Unlock!: Game Adventures

1–5 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.4)

Let’s not forget the special award for Unlock!: Game Adventures as well as Unlock! Kids: Detective Stories, and to some extent the whole Unlock! line. I’ve personally been a big fan of their games for a long time and agree with the jury’s sentiment that the entries have become even better over time. Let’s hope that this rare honour will encourage them to keep it up – and maybe become a little faster in bringing new cases from France out into the rest of the world.

Conclusion

If you had asked me in winter about my guess for Spiel des Jahres 2023, I would’ve said it’ll be a battle between Dorfromantik and Challengers! (with a slight advantage for the latter), but I wouldn’t have a clue about Kennerspiel. Because it didn’t come head to head between the two favourites, I can now claim that I called both awards correctly again, bringing my total to seven out of eight over the past four years.

As always, it’s been a lot of fun, and I’m already looking forward to another year of gaming and predictions. With a little luck, I’ll be live at the ceremony in Berlin next July again. 🤞

Spiel des Jahres 2023 predictions – Part 2!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:32:50 +0300

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.

After two years of calling both winners correctly, I’ve missed the Spiel des Jahres 2022 winner Cascadia last year, so I hope I’ll do better this year. 😎

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2023

Before we dive into the individual games, let’s look at some numbers to see some objective measures for them – as far as this is possible. What we’ve got at our disposal are the recommendations to the S_d_J bot, BoardGameGeek’s average rating and the Bayesian rating. Additionally, I’ve created a poll on BGG where the geeks could have their say:

Game	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Dorfromantik	7.0	7.8	6.5	69.6%
Fun Facts	6.2	7.0	6.0	13.0%
Next Station	7.5	7.5	6.5	17.4%

This looks like a head-to-head between Dorfromantik and Next Station: London. Or could this be an underdog win for Fun Facts? Let’s take a closer look at the nominees.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

1–6 players, 30–60 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.7)

There’s a lot of buzz going on around this video game adaptation that the jury describes as a “feel-good-game”. It sure feels soothing how the landscape evolves over the course of the game, while presenting an interesting challenge to score as many points as possible. The campaign mode with its unlockable content offers some fresh challenges every time and provides a great excuse to come back to the game again and again.

I definitely had a lovely time playing through the campaign for eleven straight evenings. I even found myself looking forward to incorporating that new tile I just unlocked into my strategy for the next game and chase a new highscore. Sure, for the last game or two it did feel like I was mostly going through the motions just to tick off the last few boxes, but on the other hand: what was the last game you played for eleven days in a row?

But hidden in there is also my biggest concern: for me, Dorfromantik is essentially a solo game. Of course, you can discuss with your group where to place a tile, but that’s true for any solo game – by that logic, they’re all just “co-operative games you can play on your own”.

One final question remains: Will the jury award Spiel des Jahres to another comforting hex-tile-laying game one year after Cascadia? They always claim that they don’t concern themselves with such considerations, and the two games do play out quite differently. Still, the award is meant as an ambassador for the board gaming hobby, so highlighting the breadth of what a game could be beyond plopping hexes on the table yet again can’t be entirely dismissed.

Fun Facts

4–8 players, 30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.0)

The pitch of a party game that allows you to get to know your group, but in a controlled and gentle manner, seems to be a perfect match for a Spiel des Jahres. Of course, there isn’t “enough game” to it for the ‘geek crowd, so don’t be fooled by the numbers above. The jury definitely has a fondness for very direct games that mostly play above the table: in the interactions between the players.

Still, I was a little surprised by the nomination. Whilst the reviews were by and large very positive, the game seems to work best with players you already somewhat know. In a fairly random group, the game can fall flat since you have no reference points to go on about when comparing one player’s answer to another one’s. A Spiel des Jahres should work for anybody, so that caveat seems significant to me and puts Fun Facts at some disadvantage in the competition for the red meeple.

Next Station: London

1–4 players, 25–30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.4)

By my count, this is the forth “random’n’write” game to be nominated for either award over the past decade, and to be honest, I’m not sure what this particular variant adds to the genre. I do find it very elegant how the fact that every players draws a different underground line every round breaks the symmetry such that everybody’s tube map will look different despite following the same cards. But as far as the actual gameplay goes, I found the very similar Voll Verplant to be the more intriguing puzzle. My final grump is that a winning map looks nothing like an actual underground map: the scoring incentivises players to zig-zag through quarters and back and forth across the river, and that’s just not how an efficient public transport system is designed.

This is not to say Next Station: London wouldn’t be a fine game and a deserving nominee, but I’d be fairly disappointed if it did win the award that puts it in line with such giants as CATAN and Carcassonne.

OK, one more complaint, then I’ll shut up: I had a hard time learning the game from the rule book, and I’ve played over 600 different games. How would this fair with the average gamer?

Also, there’s zero interaction between players. (Yeah, I lied, I wasn’t done.) Like, not even a race for completing an objective first or anything. Why would the jury shout from the roof that games are a cultural and social good worth studying and promoting, just to put the spotlight on a game that has players silently ignore each other for half an hour whilst drawing the least efficient tube maps possible?

Again, not a bad game by any stretch, I just don’t see it as Spiel des Jahres material.

Who will win?

Alright, I guess it doesn’t come as a surprise that I don’t think Next Station: London will (or rather: should) win. As I already said, Fun Facts is in some respects the perfect Spiel des Jahres, still my money is on Dorfromantik. It has a couple of things going for itself:

The jury clearly disagrees with my assessment of it being a solo (only) game, so that doesn’t seem to be an obstacle.
Maybe being a solo game isn’t all that bad? Maybe it’s time to highlight this part of the hobby? But then again, Harald Schrapers, chair of the jury, wrote a whole editorial on how he’s “totally not interested” in solo gaming (spielbox 2019/7).
From a social aspect, maybe the strongest draw could be the promise of bringing video gamers into the analogue tabletop world. As an ambassador for the hobby, this could be the most valuable asset of them all.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023

Let’s take a look at the same metrics as above, but for the Kennerspiel nominees:

Game	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Challengers!	6.4	7.2	6.3	29.8%
IKI	6.6	7.7	6.9	14.9%
Planet Unknown	6.7	8.0	7.2	55.3%

The numbers clearly favour Planet Unknown to win Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023. Will the jury agree with the wisdom of the crowd?

Challengers!

1–8 players, 45 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.8)

This one was a bit of a surprise to the algorithm, but not because it was nominated, but on what list. It had a 0% Kennerspiel score, and unlike some other decisions by the algorithm, in this case I agreed with its classification. The cartoonish appearance and the lack of player agency during large portions of the game seem much better suited for a Spiel than a Kennerspiel. And indeed, when presenting the longlist in ascending order of difficulty, the jury mentioned Challengers! as the simplest amongst the Kennerspiel recommendations, i.e., the one that would have been most likely to leap over to the other award. Having played this game now with more players, I do see where the jury is coming from: there’s a lot of details going on that aren’t intuitive on first playthrough. What’s worse: In the usual setting, where one player explains the rules to the rest of the group, you might have up to three head-to-head battles with new players left entirely to their own devices and being confused what’s the difference between “gaining the flag”, “in flag possession” and “on flag loss”.

So, while I do think that this game plays out like a Spiel for skilled players, it presents the barriers of entry like a Kennerspiel for casual players, and that’s what matters most for the classification of the award type.

But once that barrier is cleared, I think this is quite an exceptional game, certainly in the sense that there isn’t really anything like it out there. The jury mentions that this is a Kennerspiel that creates a party game atmosphere, and I think once you buy into the mindset and let go of control of your team, it’s really entertaining to come up with interesting combos, just to see your team completely fail to execute your brilliant strategy on the pitch.

Of course, there’s a lot of luck and randomness involved, which can lead to frustrating moments, but this is a game that plays out so quickly that it’s not a bug but a feature. There really are a lot of clever little design decisions in there which make this game sing. I’m certainly already excited to see how Challengers! 2 will stir up the formula.

IKI

2–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0)

This is the second edition of a game that itself re-implements Edo Craftsman Story, a game that is almost a decade old. In a time that’s dominated by the cult of the new and where a second print run is the exception, it’s nice to see so much appreciation for a game past its initial hype cycle.

I haven’t played IKI yet, so don’t have much to say about the gameplay. The jury points out how the mechanics actually capture the spirit of being a trader in Japan at the time, which sounds like an intriguing proposition.

The last thing I’ll have to say is that the complexity seems on the upper end of what the jury would consider for a Kennerspiel. Not out of the question, but it does make a win for IKI less likely.

Planet Unknown

1–6 players, 60–80 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2)

Another game I haven’t played, but the buzz is quite strong. The combination of tile laying and tech tree seems fresh enough. Opinions are split on the central carousel that determines what tiles are available to each player every round – both if it was necessary to blow up the price of the game like this and whether calling it the Lazy S.U.S.A.N. space station is a clever pun or a little trite.

By all means, the reviews are strong and both weight and length seem to hit the sweet spot of a Kennerspiel, so Planet Unknown is definitely a strong contender.

Who will win?

I think it’s clear that all three nominees are very strong and have a realistic chance of winning – none of them would be a big surprise. But in the end I’ll go with the title that had the strongest reviews and was the frontrunner right from the start: Challengers! It’s the most unusual game amongst the nominees (which isn’t necessarily something the jury cares about, see the very safe picks from last year), but I think in many respects it can push the public’s perception of what a board game can be and do, which is something the jury cares about deeply. (At least I interpret their choises this way… 😉)

Let’s see if this bet-against-the-odds will pay off for me. We’ll be wiser on Sunday! I hope you’re as excited as I am. 😎

Spiel des Jahres 2023 nominations

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sun, 02 Jul 2023 23:20:42 +0300

Nominations are out! The jury selected a total of fifteen games for their longlist, ten for Spiel des Jahres and five 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.

Let’s dive straight into the nominations and recommendations, before we discuss how good (or bad) my predictions were and if the agreed with our Kennerspiel score.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2023

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

1–6 players, 30–60 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.7), 100% Spiel

Probably the strongest contender for a nomination beforehand. No surprises here…

Fun Facts

4–8 players, 30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.0), 100% Spiel

Together with That’s Not a Hat, designer Kasper Lapp had two entries with quite some buzz, though the algorithm wouldn’t pick it up and placed Fun Facts on #36 of the predictions.

Next Station: London

1–4 players, 25–30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.4), 100% Spiel

This was the #1 prediction, so the nomination is a logical consequence, even though I didn’t see it being nominated.

Spiel des Jahres recommendations

Akropolis: Having won the As d’Or and being placed #5 by the algorithm, “just” a recommendation is almost disappointing… 😉
HITSTER: Only #18 by the algorithm, but I squeezed it in as an honourable mention. This could’ve been a strong contender for Spiel des Jahres, but it works best with a paid Spotify subscription, which really hampered its chances for a nomination.
KuZOOkA: I’ve even had this down for a nomination, so a recommendation was expected in the end.
MANTIS: This year’s obligatory jury suprise, just #173 prediction according to algorithm. Another simple card game by the Exploding Kittens publishers.
QE: For me this was a candidate for a Kennerspiel nomination – in the end, the algorithm was right, predicting a place on the longlist for Spiel des Jahres.
Sea Salt & Paper: At #17 of the predictions a near miss. Another fairly simple card game that was on many commentators’ lists.
That’s Not a Hat: As mentioned with Fun Facts, this was another much discussed game. At #20, the algorithm actually gave it the better odds.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023

Challengers!

1–8 players, 45 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.8), 0% Kennerspiel

Challengers! was definitely one of the jury members’ darlings and couldn’t possibly be absent from any predictions list. The algorithm put it on #16, I saw it amongst the nominations – for Spiel des Jahres… We’ll have more things to discuss on this topic in the follow-up predictions article.

IKI

2–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

Even though the algorithm placed it #2 amongst the predictions, this game feels a bit like an underdog, partially because it was originally released in 2015, but didn’t receive much attention until its got a second edition. Now it’s nominated for the most prestigious award in board gaming!

Planet Unknown

1–6 players, 60–80 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 7% Kennerspiel

The only Kennerspiel nomination I got dead-on right, even though the algorithm placed it only on #21 – again for the wrong award…

Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendations

Council of Shadows: I even thought a nomination was possible, even though the algorithm placed it only #82. In the end probably a bit too heavy for a nomination.
Mindbug: First Contact: Jury surprises, part 2. This one the algorithm had only as prediction #101. I can’t say I’ve heard much else about the game otherwise either, though it has a very famous name amongst its design team…

Special Awards 2023

Unlock!: Game Adventures

1–5 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.4), 100% Kennerspiel

The jury also awarded two special awards this year, the first in five years and the first ever for a Kinderspiel. This honour goes to the Unlock! series in general, and to their latest installment in particular, which lifts the concept on a wonderful meta level by choosing the three popular games Mysterium, Ticket to Ride and Pandemic as background stories.

At this point in the history of Spiel des Jahres it is almost a running gag that Pandemic designer Matt Leacock has never won the main award. He was nominated three times with various Pandemic variants and received said last special award for Pandemic Legacy: Season 2. Now his game inspired another special award winner – but still no main award. Maybe the jury waits for Season 13 for that?

How good were the predictions?

This really is a drama in three acts: the decision of Kennerspiel or not, the algorithm picking the longlist, and finally my guts picking the shortlist.

Kennerspiel score

Of the fifteen games on the two longlists, the algorithm classified two wrong – both nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres: Challengers! and Planet Unknown. The former was sorted as the lightest amongst the connoisseur games as presented by the jury, so at least that seems like a near miss, even though the algorithm was 100% convinced it should be on the Spiel des Jahres list. 🙈 Still, overall 87% correct ain’t too bad.

Longlist

This one’s pretty bad… 😅 The algorithm predicted a mere six out of fifteen games (40%) correctly. I can at least claim for myself that I predicted or mentioned honourably a further four games, bumping the accuracy to 67%, which is somewhat in line with previous years.

Shortlist

It’s not getting any better. This year, I only called three out of six nominations correctly – one of them for the wrong award. Two out of those predictions were “manual overrides” because the algorithm didn’t pick up those games at all. Overall, the weakest year so far for my predictions, it appears I need to adjust the algorithms a little bit.

That’s it for now, we’ll be back soon with a little more in-depth analyses on the six nominees and their chances of winning an award.

Spiel des Jahres 2023 predictions

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sat, 20 May 2023 22:24:54 +0300

Spiel des Jahres 2023 is around the corner! 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 22nd.

As every year, I’ll let the algorithms speak. The predictions for the longlist come directly from the recommendendations out of all eligible¹ games. Our very own Kennerspiel score is then used to sort those into their respective list of the top 10 contenders for either award. You can find the detailed analysis here and complete results here. But without further ado, here are the favourite games to win Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023.

Candidates for Spiel des Jahres 2023

#1: Next Station: London

1–4 players, 25–30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.4), 100% Spiel

Draw tube lines to cross the Thames and connect London.

#2: Splendor Duel

2 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 70% Spiel

Renaissance merchants go head to head to please nobility.

#3: Wonder Woods

2–5 players, 20–25 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.2), 100% Spiel

Use bluff and deduction in order to find the best mushroom spots.

#4: [kosmopoli:t]

4–8 players, 6 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.3), 100% Spiel

Cooperative Kitchen Work serving client from all over the world.

#5: Akropolis

2–4 players, 20–30 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.8), 100% Spiel

Build your Greek city on multiple levels to keep your districts perfectly placed.

#6: KuZOOkA

2–6 players, 30–45 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (2.0), 100% Spiel

Discover the most promising escape option and break out of the zoo.

#7: Caldera Park

1–4 players, 30–40 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 100% Spiel

Take care of animals in your park by forming big herds and avoiding bad weather.

#8: Inside Job

2–5 players, 20–30 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.7), 100% Spiel

Agents work together to complete missions and gather intel but who’s “The Insider”?

#9: QE

3–5 players, 45 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.6), 100% Spiel

Bid ANYTHING to bail out companies, but just don’t bid the MOST!

#10: Dorfromantik: The Board Game

1–6 players, 30–60 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.7), 100% Spiel

Experience the peaceful and relaxed atmosphere of the video game on your table.

Candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023

#1: Terra Nova

2–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.8), 100% Kennerspiel

Control one of ten asymmetric factions in a streamlined version of Terra Mystica.

#2: IKI

2–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

Hire artisans, set them up in the market and acquire prestige in feudal Japan.

#3: Flamecraft

1–5 players, 60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 100% Kennerspiel

In a magical realm a village awakes, and artisan dragons make coffee and cakes!

#4: Atiwa

1–4 players, 30–120 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.7), 99% Kennerspiel

Choose your actions carefully as you balance the needs of the community and nature.

#5: Tiletum

1–4 players, 60–100 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.4), 100% Kennerspiel

Use dice for resources and actions to gain riches in the Renaissance.

#6: Beer & Bread

2 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.4), 100% Kennerspiel

Two villages face off in the traditions of brewing beer and baking bread.

#7: The Guild of Merchant Explorers

1–4 players, 45 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (2.1), 100% Kennerspiel

Explore strange lands, establish trade routes, and search for treasure.

#8: Whirling Witchcraft

2–5 players, 15–30 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (1.8), 98% Kennerspiel

Use your recipes to generate ingredients and overflow your opponent’s cauldron.

#9: The Hunger

2–6 players, 60 minutes, 12+ years, medium light (2.3), 100% Kennerspiel

As a vampire, you want to hunt humans, but you must return home before sunrise…

#10: Oltréé

2–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (2.4), 100% Kennerspiel

Rangers help local communities and defend their Kingdom in order to restore hope.

My two cents

This is where I usually take the algorithmic predictions for the longlists and pick three games each that I think the jury will nominate. But this year, I’ll proceed a little different – because I don’t agree with the algorithms all that much… 🙈 So I’ll go pretty freestyle with my predictions for the nominees, both with picks from outside the algorithm’s top 10 and contradicting the Kennerspiel score. 😅

My predictions for nominees for Spiel des Jahres 2023

My predictions for nominees for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2023

Honourable mentions

Lastly, let me squeeze in a few more titles in order to increase my chance of covering the whole list. Since I’ve already turned my back on my own algorithms, let me just throw out a few more title I think it might have missed… 😉

Conclusion

As you can tell from the somewhat uncommon way I picked the predictions for the shortlist, I feel like there are much fewer “obvious” candidates than in previous year – in particular for Kennerspiel, which is weird, since that’s usually the award where us board game nerds are much more up-to-date.

So even more than in previous years, I’ll be excited to hear what the jury will surprise us with.

Finally, let’s not forget Kinderspiel des Jahres. I’m really curious about that one – but from a regular customer’s perspective, since I really appreciate the guidance to new games I can try with my kids. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧

As every year, it’s not straightforward to determine what games are eligible for the awards. Generally speaking, it’d be those games release between April 2022 and March 2023 into German retail. Hence, filtering by BGG release year will exclude games that were released earlier elsewhere, but only recently in Germany, and likewise let some games pass that have not seen a German release in that time window. I did my best to catch what I could, but there’s always some that get away. ↩︎

Spiel des Jahres 2022 winners

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 19:00:00 +0200

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!

Spiel des Jahres 2022

Cascadia

1–4 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9)

In the end, it was the favourite that won Spiel des Jahres 2022. It’s the first award I called wrong in three years – still not a bad quota I guess. 🤷 Somewhat ironically, Cascadia remains the only game of the six nominees I haven’t played yet, but after playing SCOUT and Top Ten, I do see how those games might not be for everyone. On the other hand, the positivity towards Cascadia was overwhelming – it’s rare to see the ‘geek crowd being so enthusiastic about the jury’s decision. All in all, it appears Cascadia will make a great ambassador for the hobby board gaming.

Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022

Living Forest

1–4 players, 40 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2)

This award I got right, and as you could read from my previous post, I very much agree with this decision. Similar to the red award, I could see good reasons why the other Kennerspiel nominees Cryptid and Dune: Imperium have a bit narrower audiences, but I think Living Forest hits the sweetspot of a games that’s “one step up” from a Spiel whilst still remaining fairly accessible. I’m certain many many people will enjoy planting those trees and extinguishing those forest fires as much as I do.

Conclusion

I feel like I say this every year, but I think we’ve had another very strong year with six excellent nominees that also were very different from each other. I blame the uniform strength on my first wrong call since I started these predictions. 😉

Attending the award ceremony will make this a very special year for me, and I hope I’ll soon find the time to write a little article about my experience in Berlin.

As always, this has been great fun and I hope to be back with my predictions for Spiel des Jahres 2023!

Spiel des Jahres 2022 predictions – Part 2!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0300

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.

I’m proud to say that I’ve called both awards correctly for two years running, so there is a bit of pressure to keep up the streak. 😅 So without further ado, let’s look at the nominees.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2022

Game	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Cascadia	8.1	8.0	7.6	77.8%
SCOUT	6.9	7.7	6.5	13.6%
Top Ten	7.2	7.6	6.2	8.6%

No doubt, the numbers are in favour of Cascadia. But will the jury agree? Let’s look at the nominees in a little more detail.

Cascadia

1–4 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9)

As mentioned, Cascadia was high on everybody’s list from the beginning. This tile-laying game of creating landscapes filled with animals certainly hit a nerve with the geek community: it’s currently ranked #68 overall on BGG and #1 in abstract games.

Despite these high praises and the strong numbers, I feel like there are a lot of caveats here. First, our Kennerspiel score was a little undecided as to what award it should be nominted in, so that speaks for a Spiel on the heavier side. Not a negative per se, but the jury did favour very light games over the past years for the family award. Also that classification as an abstract game isn’t particularly favourable: it exposes the fact that the setting is nothing but an excuse to draw cute animals on the tiles.

None of this matters if the gameplay was an overwhelming experience. But when reading through the jury’s reviews, the tone isn’t exactly enthusiastic. While everybody seems to have a good time, Cascadia doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

When you think of Spiel des Jahres as an ambassador for the hobby board gaming, I don’t think Cascadia is the best game for this job. Overall, it might be a fun, clever puzzle, but it also has a slightly dry and geeky aura to it that might fail to pull in new players.

SCOUT

2–5 players, 15 minutes, 9+ years, light (1.4)

As soon as the nomination for SCOUT was announced, the jokes started to come in where on the tiny box the publisher would even put the red meeple. There certainly was a time when a small box card game would have been considered without chances of winning Spiel des Jahres, but Hanabi proved that this certainly isn’t the case anymore.

Card games do have some advantages: they’re cheap, portable and don’t intimidate anyone. But all accounts, SCOUT also has some very clever mechanisms going for itself.

Still, I would consider this to be the dark horse in this year’s race, though it would be a great service to the hobby if the jury showcased this gem from Japan to the Western markets.

Top Ten

4–9 players, 30 minutes, 14+ years, light (1.1)

Top Ten was the nominee that filled the “not another party game” square in the annual Spiel des Jahres bullshit bingo. I got the impression most geeks saw this as another variation of Wavelength and glanced over it. But when reading through the reviews, they’re full of testimonies of joy and laughter. What better motivation to get people to the table?

Of course, there are always caveats. Maybe most importantly, a game like this requires the group to come together and bring the game alive with their creativity. That’s not to everyone’s liking, but the fact that the people around the table matter more than the mechanics is still a plus in my book.

The other, more formal, concern is that this would be the first Spiel des Jahres that doesn’t (claim to) work for three players. I’ve stipulated years ago that a Spiel des Jahres must work for three and four players, full stop. But the jury stated that MicroMacro doesn’t work for four players, and claiming games like Codenames and Just One can be played with three players is just a lie publishers habitually print on boxes. This didn’t stop the jury then and it shouldn’t stop them now.

Who will win?

I guess you don’t need to read between the lines above, my favourite for Spiel des Jahres 2022 is Top Ten. It just fits best in line with past winners: approachable, quick, fun – the best games of the three to bring all kinds of people together around the table. By all means, Cascadia and SCOUT seem strong games that definitely have their fans, but my feeling tells me that Top Ten is the kind of game the jury is after.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022

Let’s take a look at the same metrics as above, but for the Kennerspiel nominees:

Game	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Cryptid	8.6	7.5	7.2	25.0%
Dune: Imperium	6.9	8.3	8.0	52.5%
Living Forest	7.3	7.4	6.3	22.5%

The recommendation algorithm picks Cryptid as its favourite, whilst the geeks choose Dune: Imperium. Or maybe Living Forest will surprise everyone in the end? Let’s take a look at the candidates!

Cryptid

3–5 players, 30–50 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2)

This still is an interesting nomination to me. Logical deduction games haven’t received much attention by the jury in the past, so it’s quite nice they highlight this genre as well. It’s still a tough sale for the general audience: essentially, you’re trying to solve a very cerebral puzzle, and there’s plenty of people who don’t particularly enjoy that kind of pastime.

But even within the genre, I have some reservations about Cryptid: I’ve played it twice, and both times someone at the table understood their clue wrong, which meant the game just completely fell apart. It feels in a way “irresponsible” to “unleash” this game to a wide audience that often will play fast and loose with the rules.

Finally, in the very same genre we’ve also had The Search for Planet X released in Germany recently which I consider to be the stronger game.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like deduction games and Cryptid in particular. Lots of people do – there’s a lot of positive ratings of this relatively old game, so the strong performance for the recommendation algorithm is partially explained by that.

Dune: Imperium

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0)

There have been much discussions beforehand if the jury would nominate a franchise game. They obviously did, and to paraphrase the jury’s chairman Harald Schrapers, they simply don’t care about these things, only if the game is fun. Many people will agree that Dune: Imperium is – it’s currently ranked as the 15th best game of all times on BGG.

Does this make it the favourite to win Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022? Not necessarily. For starters, it is pretty complex for an award that’s meant to take gamers one (and only one!) step further than the typical Spiel. There’s also some consideration if this combination of deck building and worker placement is too similar to last year’s nominee Lost Ruins of Arnak. I don’t think the jury cares - they might’ve, if Arnak had actually won.

In the end what we have is a fairly complex game with lots of high praises that might be just out of reach for the main award.

Living Forest

1–4 players, 40 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2)

Living Forest has received wider distribution only quite recently, so hasn’t gathered too many ratings and is hence not strongly represented in the recommendations yet. But the jury has given almost unanimously high praises, so don’t make the mistake of overlooking this one.

The mixture of deck building and push-your-luck isn’t particularly new – it’s the same receipe behind Kennerspiel des Jahres 2018 winner The Quacks of Quedlinburg. But Living Forest still manages to create its very distinct spin on those ingredients and adds a pleasant dose of player interaction on top of that.

I’ve heard many experienced games being somewhat lukewarm on Living Forest after a game or two. I obviously don’t want to deny them their opinions, but I believe some of them aren’t quite open to the wonderful journey that the game takes you on as you explore the Living Forest deeper and deeper. During the first game, you might just be happy to draw some cards and build some trees. Then you discover the synergies and create a more efficient engine. Finally, you realise how ever decision you make affects the other players and become fiercely competitive.

I’ve played dozens of games on Board Game Arena and I’m still looking forward to many more!

Who will win?

Again, I think it’s pretty clear from the above that my money is on Living Forest to win Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022. It just hits the sweet spot of a fairly approachable game that offers enough challenges for those who are ready for a bit deeper experience. Cryptid and Dune: Imperium are clearly very strong games in their own right, but both the jury’s and my own enthusiasm quite clearly point towards Living Forest.

So it appears that for both awards I picked the nominee the community considers the least likely. We’ll know more on July 16. This award ceremony will actually mark the first time it’s being held on a Saturday evening and I have the immense honour to be in Berlin for the event. Needless to say, I’m very excited about this. Follow me on Twitter for some live coverage! 😎

Spiel des Jahres 2022 nominations

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Tue, 24 May 2022 17:04:17 +0300

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.

Let’s dive straight into the nominations and recommendations, before we discuss how good (or bad) my predictions were and if the agreed with our Kennerspiel score.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2022

Cascadia

1–4 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9), 53% Kennerspiel

It’s probably safe to say this was the most mentioned game for a nomination. The question wasn’t so much if Cascadia would be nominated, but where: our algorithm classified it as a Kennerspiel (just about, more on this below), but the jury put it on the Spiel list in the end. The game has been discussed now so much that many consider it the favourite for the win, but I think the competion is very strong.

SCOUT

2–5 players, 15 minutes, 9+ years, light (1.4), 98% Spiel

SCOUT was one of the game I really had to mention because there were some strong reviews, but the algorithm didn’t quite pick it up. (It was #39 on my predictions list.) Availability seems very patchy and a significant number of commentators could have seen it on the Kennerspiel list instead, so this getting nominated is still a bit of a surprise in the end.

Top Ten

4–9 players, 30 minutes, 14+ years, light (1.1), 98% Spiel

While not entirely new in its core concept, the jury’s reviews of Top Ten were so strong that I was the most certain about this one being nominated. There’s plenty of people who seem unhappy about the prospect of “yet another party game” winning Spiel des Jahres, but I’m sure the jury has a much better insights into what the market craves for than anybody else.

Spiel des Jahres recommendations

7 Wonders: Architects: One of the more expected recommendations. A crowd pleaser without being very exciting or new either.
echoes: The Dancer: I’ve definitely had this series on my radar (if you pardon the pun), but the algorithm put echoes: The Cocktail as the highest bet on #46. By the way: this recommendation “proves” that the jury doesn’t shy away from app assisted games. They care much more about spreading board gaming to wider circles than gatekeeping “the pure lore”.
Magic Rabbit: Every year, the jury has some surprises in store, and this is definitely one of them. According to BGG, it was first released in 2020, and the lack of mentioning it elsewhere meant that our algorithm completely missed it. 🤷 A super quick co-operative deduction game does sound like an intriguing proposition though.
My Gold Mine: The other big surprise on the list. It seems on the border to Kinderspiel, which might partially explain why the algorithm placed it only at #49.
So Clover!: I even saw this as a candidate for a nomination, so the recommendation is well expected.
Trek 12: Himalaya: At #15 on the predictions, I’d call this a near miss. The jury has given the spotlight to many roll & write games over the year, and it appears this one offers enough new ideas to the genre for a recommendation.

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022

Cryptid

3–5 players, 30–50 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 74% Kennerspiel

Cryptid was the #1 candidate for the algorithm, so the nomination does not come as a surprise from that perspective, though deduction games haven’t received that much recognition by the jury lately.

Dune: Imperium

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

The possibility of a nomination for Dune: Imperium was heavily discussed beforehand, but less because of the actual game and more about the question if the jury would give recognition to a game with a strong franchise. Indeed, this hasn’t really happened since The Lord of the Rings more than two decades ago, so this alone speaks volumes to the quality of this game.

Living Forest

1–4 players, 40 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 77% Kennerspiel

Following the enthusiastic reviews by jury members, anything but a nomination for Living Forest would have been a surprise. As it stands, these praises also make it the early favourite to win Kennerspiel des Jahres, but there’s still plenty of time until the final decision in July.

Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendations

Ark Nova: As expected, this heavyweight got the “Barrage treatment” – a place on the longlist, but the jury made it clear that this game is outside the scope of a Kennerspiel.
Khôra: Rise of an Empire: While frequently mentioned by other pundits, our algorithm only gave it outsider chances at #38. The theme seems quite bland, but that never stopped the jury before.
Witchstone: At #11 on the predictions list, I’m going to call this one a very near miss. It’s been on many other lists too, so no surprise it got recommended by the jury.

How good were the predictions?

This really is a drama in three acts: the decision of Kennerspiel or not, the algorithm picking the longlist, and finally my guts picking the shortlist.

Kennerspiel score

Out of fifteen games on both longlists, our algorithm classified fourteen in agreement with the jury – that’s 93% accurate. Only Cascadia was marked incorrectly as a Kennerspiel, but its score was merely 53%. So really, the algorithm considered this as a coin toss, as did most commentators, so I’d say that’s a pretty good result for the Kennerspiel score.

Longlist

Overall, I called nine out of fifteen games on the longlist correctly, which matches the result of two years ago and is two short of last year. Five out of nine correct for Spiel (four if you don’t count Cascadia on the wrong list, or even only three since SCOUT didn’t come out of the algorithm) and four out of six for Kennerspiel is a fine result, but clearly this year was less predictable than last.

Shortlist

Just like the past two years, I predicted four out of six nominations correctly in total – I think 67% accurate is a result to celebrate. Even if you don’t count Cascadia, 50% is still pretty good and I’m glad it worked out fine – when I saw the longlist with its numerous surprises, I was afraid I’d be way off this year. 😅

That’s it for now, we’ll be back in July with a little more in-depth analyses on the six nominees and their chances of winning an award.

Spiel des Jahres 2022 predictions

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Mon, 16 May 2022 18:40:51 +0300

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.

Even more so than in previous years, I didn’t have much time (thanks, kids 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧), so I’ve mostly used the same algorithmic approach as last year. First, I took all eligible¹ games and separated them into two lists: one for Spiel des Jahres and one for Kennerspiel des Jahres, depending on their Kennerspiel score.² Then I ranked those games in a couple of different ways, and finally combined those into the final result:

Recommend.Games recommendation algorithm (50% ranking, 25% score). This has proven to be a powerful and reliable method to capture the jury’s taste, but it’s slow to recommend new games with few ratings.
Spiel des Jahres probability (10%). Similar to the model that calculates the Kennerspiel score, I’ve trained a model that tries to predict a game’s chances to end up on the jury’s longlist. This is particularly designed to unearth candidates with few votes, but it’s still rudimentary at this point.
Average BoardGameGeek rating (5%). Let the gamers speak! In order to give new games a chance, we’ll take a look at the simple average rating.
Geek score (aka Bayesian average, 5%). This score starts out at 5.5, and gets closer to the actual average the more ratings come in. It’s more reliable, but also strongly favours games that have been around for longer and hence gathered more ratings.
Recommend.Games ranking (5%). We introduced a new default ranking on R.G a couple of months ago, which seems to pick up new games shooting up the hotness a little faster than on BGG, so let’s give it a shot as part of these predictions. 🤓

You can find the detailed analysis here and complete results here. But without further ado, here are the favourite games to win Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022.

Candidates for Spiel des Jahres 2022

#1: Die wandelnden Türme

2–6 players, 30 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (2.0), 96% Spiel

Well, this is something of a surprise prediction since Die wandelnden Türme doesn’t even have an English title yet and only a handful of ratings on BGG. There must be something about this game if the algorithm could still pick it up amongst the crowd.

#2: So Clover!

3–6 players, 30 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1), 100% Spiel

A cooperative word–association game by publisher Repos Production, in many ways reminiscent of Spiel des Jahres winner Just One. The jury generally doesn’t mind repeating themselves, so So Clover! is definitely in the running.

#3: Top Ten

4–9 players, 30 minutes, 14+ years, light (1.1), 98% Spiel

Another cooperative party game, light and with an immediate hook – exactly what the jury is looking for.

#4: Lost Cities: Roll & Write

2–5 players, 30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.1), 97% Spiel

This is an interesting one: While the jury completely ignored the original Lost Cities (now considered a classic), it did pin the main award on Keltis (essentially the board game version). Will they come back to the same system for the Roll & Write version?

#5: Cross Clues

2–6 players, 5–10 minutes, 7+ years, light (1.0), 100% Spiel

…and another cooperative word–association party game… I sense a pattern! 😅 Does Cross Clues have what it takes to set itself apart from its competitors?

#6: Fire & Stone

2–4 players, 45–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 86% Spiel

The latest game by “Mr. Carcassonne”, so this fact alone makes Fire & Stone an interesting game to watch.

#7: Explorers

1–4 players, 20 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (1.8), 98% Spiel

Phil Walker-Harding has built an impressive portfolio of award winning games over the past years, so Explorers could be his next shot at winning Spiel des Jahres.

#8: 7 Wonders: Architects

2–7 players, 25 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.4), 99% Spiel

The little sibling of the inaugural Kennerspiel des Jahres winner already won the 2022 As d’Or, the French equivalent of Spiel des Jahres, so this is definitely one to watch.

#9: Hula-Hoo!

2–6 players, 10–20 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (2.0), 95% Spiel

There’s been many cute and/or ugly animal themed light games by Jacques Zeimet that were often well received by the jury, so Hula-Hoo! could be the next in that line.

#10: TRAILS

2–4 players, 20–40 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.8), 93% Spiel

PARKS wasn’t as well received in Germany as it was internationally, so maybe its successor TRAILS will fare better.

My two cents

Alrighty, so these were the top ten candidates for a recommendation as determined by our algorithm. As always, I’ll add my personal best guess for the three nominees:

Candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2022

#1: Cryptid

3–5 players, 30–50 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 74% Kennerspiel

A bit of a latecomer to Germany, Cryptid already gathered a lot of momentum internationally and hence is an easy recommendation for our algorithm.

#2: Cascadia

1–4 players, 30–45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.9), 53% Kennerspiel

Cascadia is another international favourite that was met with positive reviews, though most find it soothing rather than exciting. Also, it seems to be just on the border between the two awards, so could end up on either list.

#3: Ark Nova

1–4 players, 90–150 minutes, 14+ years, medium heavy (3.7), 100% Kennerspiel

Ark Nova is the heavy eurogame of the season and has a good shot at a spot on the longlist. It’s way too heavy for a nomination though.

#4: The Search for Planet X

1–4 players, 60 minutes, 13+ years, medium light (2.3), 98% Kennerspiel

Just like Cryptid, The Search for Planet X is a deduction game that gained a lot of recognition internationally and now could receive its share of fame in Germany.

#5: Meadow

1–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 97% Kennerspiel

Another non–controversial game with a soothing animal theme. I don’t have more to say about Meadow.

#6: Dune: Imperium

1–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 14+ years, medium (3.0), 100% Kennerspiel

My feeling is that games with a strong franchise generally are somewhat outside the jury’s scope: While strongly drawing in the enthusiastic fan base, it leaves the majority of the audience rather distance. Dune: Imperium might just be the exception to the rule since the reviews were really strong.

#7: The Red Cathedral

1–4 players, 80 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.8), 100% Kennerspiel

Another game that was available internationally and has recently seen a German release from Kosmos, who certainly know how to win awards with their games.

#8: Canvas

1–5 players, 30 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (1.7), 88% Kennerspiel

Canvas definitely has some stunning artwork, though the critical response to the gameplay was rather lackluster…

#9: Free Ride

1–5 players, 50–90 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.7), 100% Kennerspiel

Friedemann Friese’s venture into the train game genre. It’s been a while since the jury was really excited by one of his creations.

#10: Living Forest

1–4 players, 40 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 77% Kennerspiel

Living Forest is the latest Kennerspiel hotness. It got quite recently released and hasn’t received a lot of ratings yet, but is definitely on the jury’s radar.

My two cents

Same procedure as for Spiel des Jahres, here are my three top picks for Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination:

Honourable mentions

This is always the section where I squeeze in a few more title in order to increase my chance of covering the whole list. There’s plenty of strong games I could mention, but I’ll restrict myself to two additional candidates for Spiel des Jahres that the algorithm just wouldn’t quite pick up:

Voll verplant (internationally known as Metro X): A simple to learn, yet very difficult to master flip & write subway building game.
SCOUT: A highly celebrated ladder–climbing game from highly celebrated publisher Oink Games.

Conclusion

Looking through the list of games, there’s two trends I see:

Games arriving late to Germany. More so than in previous years, there’s plenty of titles with release date 2020 or earlier in the BGG database which have become only available in the past 12 months to the German market. Of course, there’s a bias towards these games in the algorithm since they received more ratings than brand new titles, but there might also be some release delays due to the ongoing effects of COVID–19.
Nature. Maybe this is the legacy of smash hit Wingspan or maybe it’s people looking for comfort. But there are definitely a lot of animals, plants, parks, etc, on the covers of this list.

Will the jury agree and follow my predictions? We’ll see on Monday, May 23. I can’t wait! 🤩

As every year, it’s not straightforward to determine what games are eligible for the awards. Generally speaking, it’d be those games release between April 2021 and March 2022 into German retail. Hence, filtering by BGG release year will exclude games that were released earlier elsewhere, but only recently in Germany, and likewise let some games pass that have not seen a German release in that time window. I did my best to catch what I could, but there’s always some that get away. ↩︎
I’ll trust the algorithm and the scores it outputs blindly. As every year, it’ll be an interesting validation of the Kennerspiel score to see whether the jury agrees or not. ↩︎

Spiel des Jahres 2021 winners

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0300

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!

Spiel des Jahres 2021

MicroMacro: Crime City

1–4 players, 15–45 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1)

MicroMacro was the favourite for many people, myself included. From the first day this was announced, it was clear that this game is special. The perfect blend of artwork and gameplay, the immediate access, the whimsical characters and storytelling… As I’ve mentioned before, I believe this game will be a great ambassador for the hobby. A deserving winner.

Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021

Paleo

1–4 players, 45–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.6)

Within the geek community, Lost Ruins of Arnak was considered the favourite for Kennerspiel (perhaps unsurprising, given how it shot up the rankings), but for me Paleo has long been the frontrunner. I’ve praised before how important every single turn feels, but how quickly they play regardless. The excitement might wane a little after you’ve explored all modules, but the first big expansion has been announced, so there’s always something new in the stone ages. 😎

Conclusion

First of all, my humble brag: I did it again – I called both awards correctly. 😌 In the end, they went to the two games I had in mind for months, but it really wasn’t as obvious as it appears since all the nominees were exceptionally strong in my opinion.

As I like to point out, I really try to do these predictions “by the numbers”, i.e., let data and algorithms speak, not my personal taste. However, in this case, both winners were games that I grabbed and played through as soon as I could get my hands on them. So I feel like I “won” twice this year: not only did I predict both awards correctly, I also thoroughly enjoyed playing both winners. And I do believe these games will bring a lot of joy to the people who follow the jury’s recommendation and buy them for their families and friends.

So long, we’ll see each other again for my Spiel des Jahres 2022 predictions – hopefully COVID–19 will be nothing but a bad memory by then! 🦠

It’s weird to think that in a way, for the past 18 months or so, we had nothing to do but sit at home, but still I managed to be on the move during both livestreams last year (in a supermarket) and this (on a playground). I wonder what people where thinking of me when I was commenting and cheering into my phone… 🧐 ↩︎

Spiel des Jahres 2021 predictions – Part 2!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0300

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… 🤷

Last year I manage to call both awards correctly. Quite a bar to clear again.

Let’s check out the nominees!

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2021

Before we dive into the individual games, let’s look at some numbers to see some objective measures for them – as far as this is possible. What we’ve got at our disposal are the recommendations to the S_d_J bot, BoardGameGeek’s average rating, and the Bayesian rating. Additionally, I’ve created a poll on BGG where the geeks could have their say:

Game	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
MicroMacro: Crime City	8.0	7.9	6.9	61%
The Adventures of Robin Hood	7.2	8.1	6.1	32%
Zombie Teenz Evolution	2.4	8.1	6.0	7%

Overall, MicroMacro seems to be favourite, but will it survive our own scrutiny?

MicroMacro: Crime City

1–4 players, 15–45 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1)

As has been discussed many times, possibly the greatest strength is the immediacy of this game. Better than no rules required: not even opening the box is required. Genius. Also, the jury emphasises that the winner should be ambassador for the hobby board gaming. MicroMacro would definitely broaden many people’s perception of what a modern board game can be. On top of that, it also made quite the impression amongst the more hardcore gamers, which shows its universal appeal.

But before we get too excited, there are some important caveats. The crime theme might be the most obvious – murder and other quite mature topics might not be everyone’s idea of family entertainment. The publisher certainly struggles with this: my edition says 8+ years on the box, later editions seem to say 12+. They also introduced some form of content warning for the successor, so parents can stay clear of cases that might not be suitable for their offspring. Overall, judging by their statements, the jury seems to have little objections to some comic figures being murdered, so this might not be an obstacle to the red meeple after all.

The other issue is player count. The box claims that this game is for 1 to 4 players, but the jury “corrected” this in their announcement to 1 to 3 players. Those who played the game know that sometimes even two players can be a crowd, so this game wouldn’t really be one to be enjoyed by the whole family around the Christmas tree – and candles definitely won’t provide enough light to read the details off that giant map… 🕯

Let me take this opportunity to address the “it’s not a game, it’s a puzzle” faction. First off, even if this were true, the jury clearly wouldn’t care: Already in their second year, in 1980, they awarded a special prize for the Rubik’s Cube, which undoubtably is a solitaire puzzle. An experience someone who loves games would enjoy? Bring it on…

Still, I’d like to make the argument that this is, in fact, a game. The standard version, where the game asks you to answer one question about the case after another, might present itself as a series of puzzles, with no player decisions to influence the course of the game at all. But I’d urge anyone playing this game to quickly switch to the advanced version. There, players are presented with the crime, but are then left alone to investigate the full story on their own. No guiding hand by the game, no feedback if the investigation is complete. The group needs to decide for themselves in what order to investigate the different scenes and when to call it complete. This experience differs crucially from a classic puzzle that gives you unambiguous feedback when it’s done.

But then again, it really doesn’t matter anyways…

The Adventures of Robin Hood

2–4 players, 60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.7)

Robin Hood has been praised for its narrative experience that perfectly blends art, mechanics and storytelling. The classic tale will draw in many people for their childhood memories. Moving around freely on a game board and opening “advent calendars” along the way just sounds like a lot of fun, and the book looks gorgeous.

Keeping in mind that there is no English edition yet and consequently only very few ratings on BGG, it is actually remarkable how highly our algorithm already rates the game. By all appearances, this is a strong contender.

If there’s one drawback, it might be the price point. It retails at around 50€, but will have run its course after a finite number of plays. This might not sit well with the very casual audience the award is aimed at.

Further, it appears the designer chose a pretty traditional set of characters. This might please fans of the original stories, but for my taste I’d appreciated the courage for a more diverse representation in 2021. The jury wants to award a game for everyone, so any player should be able to see themselves in the game.

Zombie Teenz Evolution

2–4 players, 15–25 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.3)

There’s no way around it, this is the dark horse amongst the nominations. Neither the core mechanics nor the zombie theme seem terribly exciting for hardcore gamers, but for many people that haven’t played dozens of zombie games, this is actually surprisingly appealing. The legacy elements promise an interesting and engaging story, and unlike Robin Hood, this game has been praised for its diverse cast, including a wheelchair on the cover. I imagine this must mean the world for a lot of kids who feel very empowered by this image.

The numbers don’t look very good for this game, but then again, it had just been released and it doesn’t really seem to be targeted at BGG’s core demographics. But there is a serious obstacle to winning the main award: both the cartoon artwork and the “teenz” in the title suggest that this is a family game. And while many people will refer to the red award as the “family game of the year”, the jury will go through great length to avoid this term since, again, the Spiel des Jahres is meant to be for everyone and that includes groups without children. Pinning the award on what appears to be a game for a young audience might exclude some loyal fans.

Who will win?

I’ve been going back and forth on this – as you can tell, there’s pros and cons for each of the nominees. In the end though, my money is on MicroMacro: Crime City to win Spiel des Jahres 2021, ahead of The Adventures of Robin Hood on close second, with Zombie Teenz Evolution in a respectable, but slightly more distant third place. The immediate access of MicroMacro and potential shift in the perception what a game can be is just too enticing to pass.

Still, any of the potential outcomes on July 19 wouldn’t surprise me. It’ll be exciting!

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021

Let’s take a look at the same metrics as above, but for the Kennerspiel nominees:

Game	R.G	Average	Bayes	Poll
Fantasy Realms	6.8	7.5	7.0	5%
Lost Ruins of Arnak	7.5	8.1	7.6	79%
Paleo	7.6	7.9	6.8	16%

This promises an even closer race – the numbers certainly don’t yield any clear favourites. 🤷

Fantasy Realms

3–6 players, 20 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (1.7)

Fantasy Realms has been around internationally for some time and has garnered a loyal fanbase, though it failed to make a huge impact so far. Winning Kennerspiel could change that.

It certainly has a lot going for itself. A quick card game with lots of winning combinations to be discovered sounds like something the jury always appreciates, in particular since they clearly lean towards simpler games for both awards. The fast playing time and wide player count could make it the ideal “step up” for those who seeks the next challenge after enjoying a Spiel des Jahres winner.

There is the issue of its bland theme and artwork. It doesn’t have to be a negative though, as a generic setting might just mean lots of people will be open to playing a particular game. In this particular case, the artwork does feel pretty old-fashioned, including some of the more problematic tropes of the genre. When drawing in new gamers, appealing artwork is very important, so I really think this game could be a winner with better artwork.

Lost Ruins of Arnak

1–4 players, 30–120 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.8)

Arnak certainly is a fan favourite (currently #63 on BGG, and climbing) – choosing this game could make the skeptical crowd on the ‘geek very happy. Probably unsurprisingly, it’s also by far the most selected option in the poll. The game does come with a broadly appealing theme, a successful merging of two evergreen mechanics (deck building and worker placement), and great development work that makes playing the game very intuitive.

It is on the pretty heavy side for the award though. There’s a lot going on in terms of different tiles, tracks, effects… If a Kennerspiel is meant to be one step up, this game might really be two steps.

It also seems to draw some lukewarm responses from critics. While the execution of the design is generally praised, it doesn’t seem to do anything special. On the other hand, this comes from people who have played hundreds of games and chase that next big innovation, while the Kennerspiel award is targeted at people who might have never played a worker placement nor deck building game and might really enjoy those mechanics here.

On that note: I’ve heard there’s another Indiana Jones movie in the making – I smell a branded version of Arnak soon… 🤠

Paleo

1–4 players, 45–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.6)

Paleo was for me an early favourite and hasn’t disappointed so far. While it’s not exactly a “fresh” theme, the prehistoric setting hasn’t worn out yet, the graphics are clean and inviting and the mammoth on the cover definitely makes we want to explore more. But maybe most importantly the mechanics are the most innovative amongst the nominees – without leaving less experienced players lost. Every turn offers a quick but always interesting decision. As the Spiel nominees prove, co-operative games are in higher demand than ever, and this one has the whole table involved from the first to the last card in your deck.

As you can tell, I quite enjoyed playing Paleo and think it’s very much worthy of the Kennerspiel trophy. But it’s not just my enthusiasm, the critical response was very positive and might get second time designer Peter Rustemeyer’s hopes up.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s consider what could get in the way of Paleo’s victory. First off, the often criticised rule book. The jury is very harsh when it comes to judging rule books – rightfully so, as badly written rules are the biggest obstacle in the way of players enjoying a game. But they wouldn’t have even recommended Paleo if they thought the rules as printed are too obtuse, so I doubt it’s a concern now.

The game is also on the heavier side of what’s usually consider for the award, but for me it’s about the same complexity as Wingspan – if anything easier to approach as a co-operative campaign game. Talking of which, the different modules and levels make it feel somewhat finite, but then again the levels are fairly replayable and the jury doesn’t seem to mind too much anyways.

One last sticking point might be player count. It’s well compatible with usual Kennerspiel metrics as printed on the box, but the rules start by saying that under no circumstances should you try this game for the first time with four players. That first play is really critical for a game that’s supposed to reach a wide audience, so this caveat could prove costly.

Who will win?

I’ll contradict the BGG crowd and say that Arnak has the lowest chance of winning Kennerspiel – despite all its quality there seems to be no “hook” that would draw new players in. On the other hand, judging by the jury’s statements, Fantasy Realms would make a fabulous winner – if it came with a fresher, more appealing look… So, after all my praises, it’s no surprise Paleo is my favourite to win Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021. However, I really do believe that all three nominees are very strong and have a realistic chance of winning.

That’s all for now – I feel like I need to apologise since it took me over two thousand words just to express “they’re all pretty good…” 🤷 Anyways, all this makes me just more excited for the announcement on July 19. 🤓

Spiel des Jahres 2021 nominations

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Tue, 18 May 2021 23:25:00 +0300

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.

Let’s dive straight into the nominations and recommendations, before we discuss how good (or bad) my predictions were and if the Kennerspiel score is any good.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres 2021

MicroMacro: Crime City

1–4 players, 15–45 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1)

MicroMacro was a strong favourite of many pundits, so it is no surprise to see it nominated. The proposition of jumping straight into the game – before even unwrapping the box – is clearly something the jury values highly.

Kudos also to the publisher for timing the announcement of the sequel MicroMacro: Full House perfectly! Interestingly, the next installment will include a form of content warning that should enable parents to decide if a particular case is suitable for their children. This system might remove the main obstacle for MicroMacro to claim Spiel des Jahres.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

2–4 players, 60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.7)

Another game that was on everybody’s mind. It looks as though Michael Menzel managed to capture the essence of Andor’s narrative game experience with a system simple enough for the red award.

Zombie Teenz Evolution

2–4 players, 15–25 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.3)

This game completely eluded me (as pretty much everybody else) – our algorithm placed it in 345th position. 😳 In all fairness, it received very few ratings so far. Further, its younger target audience is not well represented in BoardGameGeek’s user base, so the algorithm struggles to pick up the signal amongst the noise.

Looking at the three nominations it’s worth noticing that they are all co-operative. While it may seem plausible that people seek a bonding experience while they’re locked inside due to a raging pandemic, these games have of course been in the development for years. Generally, co-operatives have been on the rise for years now, so those three nominations shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the natural crescendo of a long term trend.

Spiel des Jahres recommendations

Biss 20: This one was at least #30 on the predictions list. Another light co-operative game, very much in keeping with this year’s theme!
Chakra: Completely missed this one – BGG’s release year is 2019, but the German edition just came out, so it slipped under my radar.
Point Salad: Sometimes, when I see a game, I get the immediate impression: “This is Spiel des Jahres material!” Point Salad was one of these games…
Switch & Signal: I even had this one down as a nomination – for Kennerspiel des Jahres. Another co-operative, of course.
The Key: Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land: I had its two other cousins on my nominations list who have more ratings and hence are much more visible to the recommender. I’d like to learn the jury’s reasoning for picking this game in particular out of a series of three. (And counting?) 🤷

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021

Fantasy Realms

3–6 players, 20 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (1.7)

Our algorithm was 100% sure Fantasy Realms wasn’t a Kennerspiel. 😅 (More on that below.) After publishing my predictions, I read more praise by jury members, and realised how well it suits their criteria, so in the end it wasn’t a surprise to see it nominated – just on this particular list.

Lost Ruins of Arnak

1–4 players, 30–120 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.8)

Lost Ruins of Arnak has already made its way into the BGG’s top 100, and the jury clearly agrees with this assessment. While it’s quite heavy for one of the awards, it’s still lighter than some previous winners (though that hasn’t happened since 2013’s Andor), so don’t write if off just yet.

Paleo

1–4 players, 45–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.6)

Not to brag, but I called this one months ago. 🧐 The jury did complain about many rule books this year not being properly tested, and while they didn’t mention Paleo specifically, after all the discussions before the announcements that one was clearly on their mind. In the end, the game’s strengths clearly outweight those obstacles.

Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendations

Aeon’s End: This game has been around for some time and earned itself a strong fan base, so a recommendation by the jury was a fairly safe bet.
Barrage: Definitely on the very heavy side even for a Kennerspiel, yet Udo Bartsch’s high praises left no doubt about a recommendation.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion: Similar to the previous entry, I had a good feeling about a recommendation, but didn’t think it’d be actually considered for the award.
Riftforce: I completely missed this one, as did the algorithm, placing it at position 81. At least it classified it correctly as a Kennerspiel – with 51% confidence. 😰 The only pure two-player-game on either list, this proves how hard it is for lower player counts, even during a pandemic induced shortage of playmates.

How good were the predictions?

This really is a drama in three acts: the decision of Kennerspiel or not, the algorithm picking the longlist, and finally my guts picking the shortlist.

Kennerspiel score

When I introduced the Kennerspiel score a couple of months ago, I didn’t really have a good validation set to evaluate my model against. Now I do!

Out of the fifteen games on the longlist, the algorithm classified thirteen correctly. One was predicted wrong on either side of the line: The model saw Fantasy Realms as a Spiel and Switch & Signal as a Kennerspiel, but the jury saw it reversed. 87% accuracy is actually pretty decent for such a simple model trained on a small dataset, but it’s still a nagging feeling just how far off the score for Fantasy Realms was.

Anyways, we live and we learn, and the model has already been updated with the jury’s latest decisions, so hopefully next year it’ll work even better!

Longlist

I called eleven out of fifteen overall, with five out of eight for Spiel des Jahres and six out of seven for Kennerspiel des Jahres. I reward myself a point for The Key: Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land as I always treated them as a series. 🔑 Likewise I consider Aeon’s End, Barrage, and Gloomhaven as hits. Feel free to disagree.

I’d say this really is a satifying result. Last year, I only called nine out of fifteen games on the longlists, so my approach is definitely moving into the right direction.

Shortlist

Two out of three for both awards dead on, another game at least predicted for a recommendation – that’s not too bad. 🧐 I will not deny that Zombie Teenz Evolution bothers me though since I hadn’t even heard of that before.

Still, this year’s outcome sets quite a high benchmark to exceed next year. I’ll take the learnings from this year and hopefully will be able to improve my methods even further. 🤓

All that’s left to do is waiting. The jury will announce the winners on July 19, we’ll be back shortly before that with the favourites for the two awards. 🏆

Spiel des Jahres 2021 predictions

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Fri, 14 May 2021 02:30:00 +0300

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.)

Unlike last year, I won’t use hard filters though to distinguish between red and anthracite games, but will rely on the Kennerspiel score I developed a couple of months back. This model tries to predict if a game is a Kennerspiel or not based on some key features, like complexity, play time, age recommendations and game type. The jury’s decision this year what list a game belongs to will be the first actual test for that model too, so let’s hope it actually made sense! 🤞

Even more so than the previous year, I’ll take an algorithmic approach. That is, I do not follow my own taste or gut feelings, but I let the numbers talk. First, I took all eligible games¹ and separated them into two lists: one for Spiel des Jahres and one for Kennerspiel des Jahres, depending on their Kennerspiel score. Then I ranked those games in a couple of different ways, and finally combined those into the final result:

Sorted by the Recommend.Games recommendation algorithm (90%). This has proven to be a powerful and reliable method to capture the jury’s taste, but it’s slow to recommend new games with few ratings.
Spiel des Jahres probability (5%). Similar to the model that calculates the Kennerspiel score, I’ve trained a model that tries to predict a game’s chances to end up on the jury’s longlist. This is particularly designed to unearth candidates with few votes, but it’s still rudimentary at this point.
Average BoardGameGeek rating (2.5%). Let the gamers speak! In order to give new games a chance, we’ll take a look at the simple average rating.
Geek score (aka Bayesian average, 2.5%). This score starts out at 5.5, and gets closer to the actual average the more ratings come in. It’s more reliable, but also strongly favours games that have been around for longer and hence gathered more ratings.

You can find the detailed analysis here and complete results here. But without further ado, here are the favourite games to win Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021.

Candidates for Spiel des Jahres 2021

#1: MicroMacro: Crime City

1–4 players, 15–45 minutes, 10+ years, light (1.1), 99% Spiel

Some games can be played without reading any rules. MicroMacro goes one step further: You can start playing the game right on the box. This alone makes it a strong contender. I wonder though if the jury will consider a game full of murders and crimes a pleasant pastime for families.

#2: PARKS

1–5 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 88% Spiel

Something of a latecomer to Germany, the looks and theme of PARKS are somewhat reminiscent of the previous Kennerspiel winner Wingspan. Will this work to its advantage?

#3: Detective Club

4–8 players, 45 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.2), 100% Spiel

Light and social, just like the jury likes their red games. Detective Club requires at least four players though, and the jury generally wants three players as well.

#4: Fantasy Realms

3–6 players, 20 minutes, 14+ years, medium light (1.7), 100% Spiel

Quite an old game by international standards, but it garnered its share of positive review. A breezy card game might just be what the jury is looking for!

#5: The Castles of Tuscany

2–4 players, 45–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 89% Spiel

There’s no doubt that the jury is a fan of Stefan Feld’s work. The Castles of Tuscany could earn him his first Spiel des Jahres nomination.

#6: Point Salad

2–6 players, 15–30 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.2), 100% Spiel

By all accounts, this seems to be a light and fun card game that could well be in the jury’s wheelhouse. I love the self-ironic title, but will the average gamer get the joke?

#7: Trails of Tucana

1–8 players, 15 minutes, 8+ years, light (1.3), 100% Spiel

Yet another simple roll/flip’n’write. It reminds me a lot of last year’s Silver & Gold which I had high hopes for, but was completely ignored by the jury. Might not be the best omen for Trails of Tucana.

#8: The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club & Theft at Cliffrock Villa

1–4 players, 15–20 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (2.0), 99% Spiel

One year after his smash hit The Crew, Thomas Sing might reach for Spiel des Jahres this time. A real-time deduction game sure sounds like a winning combo!

#9: New York Zoo

1–5 players, 30–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.0), 96% Spiel

Another puzzle game by Uwe Rosenberg, this time filled to the brim with cute animals. Who could resist this proposition?

#10: The Adventures of Robin Hood

2–4 players, 60 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (1.7), 99% Spiel

As a very recent release, Robin Hood doesn’t have many ratings yet, so it’s hard for the algorithm to pick up. But by all appearances, Michael Menzel of Andor fame pulled off another great story game.

My two cents

Alright, that’s what the algorithms say. But just like last year, I’d like to let my guts have some say as well. These are the three games I consider having the best shot at ending up on the jury’s shortlist:

Candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021

#1: The Isle of Cats

1–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 8+ years, medium light (2.3), 94% Kennerspiel

The Internet loves cats, and, apparently, so does the BGG crowd. Card drafting and tile laying combined with lots of cats – what’s there not to like?

#2: Calico

1–4 players, 30–45 minutes, 13+ years, medium light (2.2), 62% Kennerspiel

More cats, more puzzling – I sense a theme here. Calico is held in high regards as well, even for Spiel des Jahres by some. It’ll be exciting to see if the jury has it on their list, and, if so, on which.

#3: Lost Ruins of Arnak

1–4 players, 30–120 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.8), 100% Kennerspiel

This game seems to be on everybody’s mind, and even though nobody seems excited by it, the consensus is that Lost Ruins of Arnak perfectly executes its combination of deckbuilding and worker placement.

#4: Brass: Birmingham

2–4 players, 60–120 minutes, 14+ years, medium heavy (3.9), 100% Kennerspiel

Certainly a fan favourite, it climbed to #3 on BGG before it finally received a German release. It’s definitely way too heavy to win Kennerspiel, but that wouldn’t stop the jury from recommending it.

#5: Yukon Airways

1–4 players, 60–90 minutes, 14+ years, medium (2.7), 100% Kennerspiel

The only thing on my mind about this game: Would the jury really award a game about flying after we’ve been collectively grounded for over a year?

#6: Switch & Signal

2–4 players, 45 minutes, 10+ years, medium light (2.2), 83% Kennerspiel

Train games have a long tradition in board gaming, but Switch & Signal is the first one I know of to approach the topic co-operatively. Colour me intrigued.

#7: Paleo

1–4 players, 45–60 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.6), 88% Kennerspiel

Paleo already received so much love for the game, and so much criticism for the rule book. The jury is known to exclude games when they just put an undue burden on the players to learn, but in this case the qualities of the game probably win.

#8: Welcome to New Las Vegas

1–50 players, 35 minutes, 10+ years, medium (2.9), 100% Kennerspiel

The jury ignored the original Welcome To…, but will it notice this more complex version set in Nevada?

#9: Tapestry

1–5 players, 90–120 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.9), 100% Kennerspiel

Stonemaier Games sure knows how to put out beautful products, but I think in the case of Tapestry the result is just too big and too expensive for a Kennerspiel des Jahres.

#10: Paris

2–4 players, 90 minutes, 12+ years, medium (2.7), 100% Kennerspiel

The K&K of board gaming show no signs of slowing down, and their latest brain child Paris has received a lot of love.

My two cents

Finally, here are my three top candidates for a spot on the shortlist for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021:

Again, I think this is another year of fantastic games, so competition for the awards will be fierce. I’m certainly looking forward to learning if the jury agrees with my (algorithm’s) assessment!

Honourable mentions

Last but not least I want to send you off with a couple of games that didn’t make the algorithm’s cut, but are still interesting in their own rights and might end up amongst the recommendations:

Spiel des Jahres

Paris: La Cité de la Lumière: Highly rated by the algorithm, but no chance for the main award as a two-player-game.
Aqualin: Ditto.
Krazy Pix: Not many party games on this list, so here’s one.
Abandon All Artichokes: Such a fresh and unexpected theme, would make a great entry level deckbuilder.
Cantaloop: Book 1 – Breaking into Prison: Point-and-click adventures as a board game could draw in a lot of new gamers.
The Fox in the Forest Duet: The competitive version has been recommended last year, so maybe the co-operative version has a chance this year.

Kennerspiel des Jahres

Barrage: A heavy-weight that might receive a recommendation.
Nidavellir
It’s a Wonderful World
Glasgow
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion: This lighter and more approachable version of BGG’s #1 might be a candidate for Kennerspiel des Jahres.
Under Falling Skies: The jury loves to cover all aspects of gaming, so here’s a solo game that received a lot of praises.
The 7th Continent: Classic Edition
Faiyum
Cubitos
Anno 1800
Pandemic Legacy: Season 0: The jury has a well-documented love for this series, so it seems unlikely they’ll say goodbye silently.
Aeon’s End: Another very late arrival to Germany. Thematically probably outside the jury’s comfort zone, but they do love their deckbuilders and co-ops…

As every year, it’s not straightforward to determine what games are eligible for the awards. Generally speaking, it’d be those games release between April 2020 and March 2021 into German retail (though because of COVID–19 hitting in March last year we might see a few latecomers this year). Hence, filtering by BGG release year will exclude games that were released earlier elsewhere, but only recently in Germany, and likewise let some games pass that have not seen a German release in that time window. I did my best to catch what I could, but there’s always some that get away. ↩︎

What makes a Kennerspiel?

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 22:34:57 +0200

Spiel des Jahres 2021 nominations might still be a couple of months away, but I thought now is still a good time to return to one of the harder questions in my predictions post from last year: What exactly makes a game a Kennerspiel? By that I don’t mean the qualities that earn a game the award, but the distinction between the more casual Spiel and the more complex Kennerspiel categories.

This question was particularly pertinent in 2020 when four out of the six nominees for the two adult awards straddled the line between Spiel and Kennerspiel: My City, Nova Luna, Cartographers, and The Crew could all have landed in either category. Jury member Udo Bartsch wrote a very interesting essay about the very topic of this article, giving some insight into the reasoning behind the jury’s decision. Basically, the distinction isn’t so much about complexity or depth of play, but approachability. How many people can take the hurdles that are in the way before playing a particular game? According to Mr Bartsch, this question doesn’t have a simple answer:

Which game is a game for everyone and which is not is unfortunately not recognised by generally applicable, precisely measurable characteristics, but only when playing with as many different people as possible.

Challenge accepted! Who needs humans when we can just deal with data instead? 🤓

Let’s look at the data

Since the introduction of Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2011 there were a total of 90 games on the longlist for Spiel des Jahres and 64 games for Kennerspiel¹. It’s not a large amount of data to make any inferences on, but we’ll try anyways.

The first step is always to familiarise yourself with the task and data at hand. With BoardGameGeek collecting all sorts of data about games, we know features of those jury recommendations like complexity, player age and count, play time, mechanics, themes, …

Why don’t we start simple and plot the games by their complexity (also known as weight) and minimum age?

You see the jury’s favourites of the past decade lining up from simple (left) to complex (right), and from child friendly (bottom) to more mature (top). Unsurprisingly, the red Spiel des Jahres recommendations generally cluster in the bottom left, while the anthracite Kennerspiel games tend towards the top right. The dotted line is the one that best² separates Spiel from Kennerspiel.

However, there is some significant overlap. In particular, a lot of games of either award can be found around the 10 year / complexity 2 (medium light) intersect. I’ve marked games with squares that fall on the “wrong” side of the line. Some notable outliers are:

Game	Year	Complexity	Age	Award	🤔
Libertalia	2013	2.2	14+	S	❌
The Quacks of Quedlinburg	2018	1.9	10+	K	❌
That’s Pretty Clever!	2018	1.9	8+	K	❌
Cartographers	2020	1.9	10+	K	❌
The Crew	2020	2.0	10+	K	❌
My City	2020	2.1	10+	S	❌
Kitchen Rush	2020	2.2	12+	S	❌

So by all means, 2020 did contain a lot of games just on the border of the two awards.

Generally, this works pretty well for such a simple model (a linear function in two variables is first semester kind of stuff). But some games seem to really push far into the other side, e.g., That’s Pretty Clever! and Kitchen Rush. Are there some other characteristics of those games that explain the jury’s classification?

Can we do better?

Complexity and minimum age make a pretty powerful pair, but the only reason I picked two features is because we can nicely visualise everything in 2D. I don’t know about you, but my brain can only handle three dimensions – on a good day…

Mathematics to the rescue! Higher dimensions pose no challenge to our old friend, and we can throw as many variables at it as we want. So let’s add some more features to our model:³

complexity (weight between 1 and 5),
minimum age (between 6 and 16 years),
minimum and maximum play time (between 1 minute 🏃 and 3 hours),
player count (between 1 and 100 👀 players),
cooperative or competitive game,
types (e.g., family, strategy, or party game),
categories (e.g., card, economic, or medieval game), and
mechanics (e.g., hand management, set collection, or worker placement).

Using the same set of games, but incorporating all those values, we can go through the same process that produced the separating line in the plot above (multivariate logistic regression, in case you’re curious). This time, that dividing line would rather be a hyperplane in high dimensional space, but don’t worry about that. In fact, we can do better that just a yes/no classification: We can estimate our confidence that a certain game is in fact a Kennerspiel.

This model classifies a whooping 150 out of 154 games correctly as either Spiel or Kennerspiel – that’s 97.4% accurate. 🤯 So much for not being measurable, Mr Bartsch!

So, let’s take a look back at our problem games from before and check how much confidence our model has that the respective game is for connoisseurs:

Game	Year	Award	Kennerspiel?	🤔
Libertalia	2013	S	91.2%	🤬
The Quacks of Quedlinburg	2018	K	65.3%	✅
That’s Pretty Clever!	2018	K	51.8%	✅
Cartographers	2020	K	84.7%	✅
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine	2020	K	41.7%	😕
My City	2020	S	36.0%	✅
Kitchen Rush	2020	S	37.4%	✅

You can find the full results list here.

This picture certainly has improved, and we’re even classifying games like That’s Pretty Clever! (just about) and Kitchen Rush right that caused us a lot of headaches before. However, The Crew still eludes correct classification, and Libertalia is so far off that I’d argue the jury simply got that one wrong…

But how does the model work?

Our model takes the different features of a game as described above as input, multiplies each with a certain weight it learned by looking at all the games from previous year, sums those values up, and then yields a prediction in the form of a confidence (0–100%) score.

To make things a little more concret, let’s look at the ten most important features and how they impact the outcome:

You can find the full plot of all features here.

As you can see, the complexity is the most important feature: the higher the value (blue = 1, red = 5), the higher our confidence that the game in question is a Kennerspiel. This makes a lot of sense. Likewise, the next features are equally intuitive: the higher play time and minimum age are, the more likely it is we’re dealing with a games for experts. And of course, in a way strategy games are much more frequently found in the Kennerspiel column. (Here, red means strategy game, blue means not.)

Somewhat more confusing is the player count though. Pay close attention to whether a game is playable with five or six players. Again, red means that game is playable with that head count, while blue means it is not. So a game that is playable with five players is more likely to be a Kennerspiel, while a game for six players is less likely. This certainly is a little confusing, and might well be an artifact of our small sample size. Still, there’s a system to this madness: whilst the vast majority of games accomodate three and four players, Spiel candidates often either stop at that count to keep components and costs down, or are for a much larger audience anyways and really shine with six, eight, or even more players. A Kennerspiel on the other hand can be a little more luxurious, and hence often includes components for a fifth player by default, but their more strategic nature limits the scalability beyond that point.

Lastly, we have some mechanics in the top 10. While it’s probably no surprise that solo modes are more common amongst more strategic games, the other mechanics are less intuitive. As it turns out, rolling dice is more prevalent in a Kennerspiel, whilst hand management and worker placement are indicative of a lighter Spiel. But of course, all those different features and weights interact with each other in a little more subtle ways and often balance each other out.

Let’s make things more concret and visualise how our model scored some of those difficult to classify games above, starting from My City:

This so called force plot shows how some values push the score up, while some pull it down. In this case, complexity, strategy, and player count push the score towards Kennerspiel, while a tile laying game playable in 30 minutes pull it towards Spiel. In the sum, our model and the jury agree: this game falls on the red side of the line.

We contrast this with That’s Pretty Clever! Again, its play time of 30 minutes with players from 8 years old smell like a lighter game, but soloable dice rolling clearly push the needle (very narrowly) over the line of a Kennerspiel.

In the end, our evidence is a little thin – even after a decade of Kennerspiel winners and nominees, the patterns aren’t very clear, and of course the jury’s fickle opinion might drift over time as well. So while I’m pretty confident in the predictions our model makes, they still need to be taken with a grain of salt.

“Not so fast!”, you might say. “Aren’t you simply overfitting here?” Why, yes, you’re right. The dataset is so small that there’s a high risk of fine tuning the model too much for the data we’re seeing. And of course, it’s bad bad bad to assess your model’s performance with items it was trained on – that’s just cheating. So let’s test the model on some games it hadn’t seen yet!

What about old games?

Pre-2011 Spiel des Jahres winners and nominees make a marvellous test set for this model. A lot of those games would be considered a Kennerspiel by today’s standards, so let’s find out which ones.

Again, we’ll start with the simple model that takes the two input variables complexity and minimum age. We can then plot those 70 games and check what side of the line they fall on:

We observe a pretty similar spread along those two axes as in the plot above, so apparently the jury covered games of a broad variety already before 2011, but under the single Spiel des Jahres brand.

Let’s dive deeper and check what Kennerspiel scores our more complex model assigns to some of the more noteworthy Spiel des Jahres winners and nominees:

Game	Year	Kennerspiel?
El Grande	1996	100.0%
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective	1985	99.9%
Catan	1995	99.7%
Tikal	1999	96.4%
Dominion	2009	87.2%
Thurn and Taxis	2006	77.0%
Pandemic	2009	69.4%
Alhambra	2003	24.8%
Ticket to Ride	2004	12.0%
Carcassonne	2001	8.6%
Dixit	2010	0.1%

You can find the full results list here.

On the one hand, it’s weird to see games like Catan and Pandemic so firmly in the Kennerspiel column when they are considered some of the quintessential modern gateway games. On the other hand, their complexity clearly does exceed by far what the jury demands of the average gamer these days. It’s also worth observing that Catan did pave the way for some pretty complex games in the second half of the 90s, when the euro revolution was in full swing.

As far as validating the model goes: I’d agree with every single one of the model’s assessments, though I’m a little surprised that Citadels got a score of 95.3%. I see good reasons for putting this one into the Kennerspiel camp, but would do so with far more uncertainty.

Overall, according to our model, 9 out of 32 Spiel des Jahres winners between 1979 and 2010 should really be considered a Kennerspiel now. I wonder how many people trusted the red meeple, bought what they thought to be a welcoming game, only to get frustrated by 12 densely filled A4 pages⁴ of El Grande rules? Or did people really have much longer attention spans in the pre-smartphone era? We might never know…

(Kenner-)Spiel des Jahres 2021

I’ll send you off with a teaser for Spiel des Jahres 2021. I’ve taken some of the hottest contenders for the 2021 awards (as of the time of writing), and sort them by their Kennerspiel score for your convenience.

Game	Kennerspiel?
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion	100.0%
Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers	80.5%
Paleo	77.5%
New York Zoo	63.0%
The Castles of Tuscany	39.3%
Divvy Dice	4.7%
Mysterium Park	2.8%
MicroMacro: Crime City	1.4%
The Key: Raub in der Cliffrock Villa	0.9%
Krazy Pix	0.8%

I think this makes a pretty interesting early list of six candidates for Spiel des Jahres 2021 and four candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2021, don’t you think? Stay tuned!

In 2011, there was no separate recommendation list for the two awards, so I only included the nominees for 2011. I also added the special award winners Caylus, Agricola, World Without End, and Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 to the Kennerspiel list. ↩︎
Using logistic regression with F1–score as target metric. Other definitions of “best line” of course might yield different results. ↩︎
It’s worth noticing that some of those values can be unreliable. Complexity and game type depend on user votes which often only a handful of contributors. Even more so, categories and mechanics are quite wonky taxonomies which are frequently applied inconsistently. Finally, player count and age as well as play time are taken from the publishers who do not hesitate to lie about these things if it helps sell their games. ↩︎
Yes, I did pull out my old copy and counted. You’re welcome. 🤓 ↩︎

And the Spiel des Jahres 2020 goes to… Part 4!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 14:42:00 +0300

After months of waiting, we finally know what games won this year’s Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres! Without further ado, I’ll present the winners along with a comment on how the predictions went.

Spiel des Jahres 2020

Pictures

Reading through the comments on the interweb most players seem surprised about the winner of the red meeple. Not me! It was on my list from the very beginning as probably the strongest contender. Despite nominating the fairly complex My City and Nova Luna along with Pictures, in the end the jury went – again – for the super simple and approachable game.

Inevitable, there are those who complain that one year after Just One there’s yet another party game taking home the main award. I really think the BoardGameGeek crowd needs to rethink their definition of a party (and probably why they’re never invited to any). Not every “light” game is automatically a party game, and I believe neither this nor last year’s winner would be considered party games by the average gamer. At the end of the day, if you’re hanging out on board gaming sites all day long, you’re not the target audience of Spiel des Jahres. The award is meant to guide people who might purchase one game a year to have a good time with a quick and approachable experience.

By all accounts, Pictures seems to fit that description perfectly, so I say congratulations to Daniela and Christian Stöhr for winning the most prestigious award in board gaming with their first (or second) design!

Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

Unlike the winner of the red meeple, virtually everybody agreed that The Crew will win an award, though not necessarily which one. I’ve discussed at length in the previous articles why I agree with the jury’s classification of The Crew as a Kennerspiel.

One last thing to mention is that The Crew’s predictable win wasn’t down to a lack of competition. By all accounts, both Cartographers and King’s Dilemma are highly regarded and would have deserved the award. As gamers, we can be excited that it’s not only the quantity of games being released that’s rising, but also the quality, throughout the spectrum.

Conclusion

The jury explicitly pointed out the quality of this year’s games in all of this hobby’s facets. When you look back through the different games discussed in this series, I’m sure you’ll agree with them, and it’ll get you excited for all the games yet to be published.

I certainly had a ton of fun reading reviews, following discussions, crunching numbers, and distilling everything into my predictions. The outcome makes me quite proud and I’m already thinking about next year’s awards, so be sure to check back in for Spiel des Jahres 2021!

And the Spiel des Jahres 2020 goes to… Part 3!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Sat, 18 Jul 2020 10:15:00 +0300

Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres winners are due to be announced on Monday, July 20. I promised last time I’d be back with more detailed analyses and predictions. So here we go!

Out of hundreds of games published in 2019 and 2020, the jury selected a total of fifteen games they recommend, six of which they nominated for the two main awards. But who is the favourite? Who is the dark horse? Let’s find out!

Spiel or Kennerspiel?

One of the main conclusions of my original article was that Spiel des Jahres winners tend to be ever lighter and faster. Concretely, no red meeple was pinned on a game whose complexity exceeded 2 on BoardGameGeek’s complexity scale (medium light) since 2012, so I drew a hard line and claimed that no game would be nominated if it broke that pattern.

I was wrong.

Out of the six nominees, four could have been nominated for either award. Jury member Udo Bartsch wrote an interesting article explaining why the jury decided one way or another. I think the main takeaway is that BGG’s complexity rating is just too crude a measure. To their credit, they admit as much and only make a half-hearted attempt in defining what they even mean by weight or complexity. In essence, the tension lies between how hard it is to learn a game vs how hard it is to master it.¹ The ancient game of Go provides an excellent example: while the rules are very quickly explained, playing the game well easily fills a lifetime. Consequently, the complexity ratings spread over the whole scale from 1 through 5.

Back in 2020, we still are no closer to quantifying what games qualify for Spiel des Jahres or Kennerspiel. According to Udo Bartsch, it’s about the barrier that needs to be taken to immerse oneself in the experience. It’s about that Aha! moment when the penny finally drops and the game behind all the cardboard shines through. I’m not sure we’ll ever find an objective measure for that.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres

I already introduced the nominees in the previous article, along with their characteristics and a brief assessment of their respective chances of winning an award, so here I’ll focus on the pros and cons why that game might win the red meeple.

My City

Pros

Reiner Knizia is en vogue again.
Legacy / campaign format allows players to ease into the experience.
Highest average rating on BGG (7.55).
Has been consistently highly recommended to the S_d_J bot

Cons

Still very complex (2.14) for a Spiel des Jahres.
That’s it, really…

Nova Luna

Pros

Uwe Rosenberg has always been en vogue.
The fan favourite so far with the highest geek rating (6.34) and leading in this poll.

Cons

Fairly abstract.
On the heavy side of Spiel des Jahres.

Pictures

Pros

Super simple and quick.
Typical Spiel des Jahres material.
Highly recommended to the S_d_J bot sometimes – the recommendations tend to be rather volatile.

Cons

With Just One we had a somewhat similar winner last year.
In its simplicity, it might not have the same staying power as the other nominees.

Who will win?

Honestly, the numbers don’t yield any clear favourite. If I had to make a guess, I’d still put my money on the quick and simple Pictures ahead of the legacy game My City, with the abstract Nova Luna further behind. But overall, the field really seems open. We’ll know more on Monday!

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres

Same procedure, let’s assess each game’s chances of winning the award!

Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale

Pros

Roll and write games have been on the rise for some time, with Qwixx and That’s Pretty Clever receiving nominations.
The highest rated game in the Recommend.Games ranking.

Cons

It might not have enough meat for a Kennerspiel in the end.
While there are lots of positive opinions, none seem to be excited.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

Pros

Already on its way into the BGG top 100 (#124 at the time of writing).
Consistently and by far the highest recommendation to the S_d_J bot.
Runaway leader in the poll I quoted above.

Cons

Too obvious choice?

King’s Dilemma

Pros

Probably the most innovative game on the list with lots of hype from the community.
Highest average rating on BGG (8.12).

Cons

Can you imagine a game about intrigue and backstabbing being played around the Christmas tree?
Very lowly ranked in the recommendations for the S_d_J bot.

Who will win?

Hands down, The Crew is the high favourite, and any other outcome would be a big surprise. This game seems to appeal to reviewers, the community, and the wider market alike. Cartographers just doesn’t have the same pull, and King’s Dilemma seems too specific for an award that’s supposed to reach hundreds of thousands of German average gamers.

I hope you’re as excited as I am about Monday’s announcements. We’ll be back with the final conclusions for Spiel des Jahres 2020!

This is one of the many things the BoardGameGeek competitor Board Game Atlas gets right: they measure both learning and strategy complexity. ↩︎

And the Spiel des Jahres 2020 goes to… Part 2!

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Thu, 21 May 2020 18:31:00 +0300

With Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres nominations out (setting aside the Kinderspiel again), it’s time to look at the nominees and to check how I did in my predictions.

Nominated for Spiel des Jahres

As every year, the jury nominated three games for the main award, one of which will receive the red meeple in July. In addition to that, there are six games the jury recommends. Do these games match the criteria I stipulated last time? Let’s see!

My City

First off, congratulation to Reiner Knizia for the third Spiel nomination in four years! Looks like he shows no sign of slowing down…

This title completely slipped under my radar. Not like it wasn’t on my mind (sure, anyone can claim that), but its complexity is rated at 2.44, heavier than any of the three Kennerspiel nominees. Granted, there aren’t all that many votes for many of the nominees yet (9 in this particular case), but even with wider opinions, it seems unlikely to end up under the magical mark of 2 I drew as a hard line for Spiel des Jahres.

Of course, the jury just doesn’t take to BoardGameGeek to classify a game for either Spiel or Kennerspiel, but of course draws their own conclusions. Still, it’s a notable outlier. How come?

The best explaination I’ve got is the game’s legacy / campaign format. The advantage this genre has is that it can build up its narrative and unfold the rules as the players progress. This can significantly improve a game’s accessibility, which of course is the real feature the jury is after.

Nova Luna

This one was on my shortlist, albeit for Kennerspiel. Its complexity is just short of 2, so it did technically meet that criterion, but the jury’s draw towards the very light games put Nova Luna rather outside the sphere of Spiel des Jahres for me. Further, the maximum playing time is stated at 60 minutes, another break of pattern. As I mentioned before, the jury hates to be predictable…

Pictures

The one nominee for the main award I got dead right. Everything about this game looks and feels like a typical Spiel des Jahres. For these reasons and the rather unusual competitors, Pictures should be an early favourite to take home the coveted red meeple.

Spiel des Jahres recommendations

In addition to the three nominees, there’s also six games on the jury’s long list or recommendation list.

Colour Brain: One of those latecomers to Germany, it doesn’t seem to have had an impact outside of it either…
The Fox in the Forest: Another latecomer, yet I’m annoyed at myself for missing it since there’s been some excellent reviews by jury members. The only two-player-game mentioned, as expected.
Draftosaurus: As predicted recommended, but not nominated.
Little Town: Another latecomer, another game above the medium light complexity. Maybe the jury does want to highlight more complex games this year, who knows…
Kitchen Rush: I called this one, but again for the wrong award due to its complexity. I’ll admit I was a little surprised to see it on the list in the end as there were some pretty negative reviews by some jury members.
Spicy: What’s going on with this game’s complexity rating? Is it an easy to learn, hard to master situation that makes this a light game for two thirds, and a heavy game for the other third of the players? Or is it trolling?

How good were the predictions?

Time to compare the predictions with reality! As mentioned, I called two out of three nominations, though one for the wrong award. Depending on how strict you are, this makes for a 50% or even 66% success rate, which I am really proud of, given the jury’s infamous unpredictability.

However, when looking at the long list of nominations plus recommendations, I only called four out of its nine titles (two of them on the wrong list). I’ll try better next year…

Nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres

Again, there’s three nominations, along with three recommendations, so we’ll take a look at each of them.

Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale

Another correctly called, but incorrectly classified. I very much had Cartographers as “probably nominated, but dunno what list”, so it ended up nominated for Kennerspiel. I cannot offer any insights as to why it is a Kennerspiel with a complexity of 1.9, while Nova Luna at 2.0 and My City at 2.4 are on the Spiel list.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

While I was confident about the nomination for this one, I had some doubts about the classification as Kennerspiel. Its complexity says so, but then again this metric doesn’t seem to predict the jury’s classification very well. Also, as a campaign game it can ease the player into the game (cf My City), and traditional trick-taking games are very common in Germany, the land of Skat and Doppelkopf, so I might have been wrong again. As it stands, The Crew seems to be the favourite to win Kennerspiel des Jahres.

King’s Dilemma

I’ll be honest, I’m probably more excited about this nomination that any other, and the community seems to agree, judging by their reactions. I kinda excluded King’s Dilemma for no good reason other than having a high age recommendation (and even higher when asking the community). It’s great to see a more demanding game on the list, but I will say that the jury nominated (relative) heavyweights like Heaven & Ale and Terraforming Mars in the past, but didn’t give them the award in the end, so I’d think this one will be an also-ran as well.

Kennerspiel des Jahres recommendations

There’s three more games that didn’t make the cut, but that received a recommendation.

Paladins of the West Kingdom: I was confident that this one would receive a recommendation because of Udo Bartsch’s glowing review, but also confident it’s too complex for a nomination.
Res Arcana: One of the hottest candidate, no surprise to see it on the list.
Underwater Cities: This one slipped under my radar as a release from the previous year. Also pretty heavy, so a recommendation is the best possible outcome.

How good were the predictions?

I was pretty happy about my predictions for Spiel des Jahres, I am very happy with how the Kennerspiel des Jahres turned out. Of the six title on the long list, I missed only one, and I (pretty much) called all three nominations, even though one on the wrong list, and one for a recommendation, not nomination. Still, this is a good outcome, both for my predictions, and for the hobby gaming in general because I think the jury made a fine selection of games that showcase so much of what games have to offer to new players.

This concludes the discussion of this year’s nominations for Spiel des Jahres and Kennerspiel des Jahres. I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope so did you. I’ll be back in July with more detailed analyses of the nominees and predictions for the winners!

And the Spiel des Jahres 2020 goes to…

contact@recommend.games (Recommend.Games) — Fri, 15 May 2020 15:35:00 +0300

For the impatient: If you don’t care about the analysis of previous winners and all you’re interested in are the candidates for this year’s awards, jump straight to the list…

It’s that time of year again when the whole board game scene takes a deep look into their crystal balls: On Monday, May 18, the jury Spiel des Jahres will announce the nominees for the game of the year award in Germany. There’s a myriad of awards in tabletop gaming, but the red meeple is the one everbody is really after. Even international publishers often prioritise releasing their game in Germany before their home country just so it’d be eligible for Spiel des Jahres. It is that important!

Consequently, there are many lists floating all around the Internet trying to predict this year’s nominees. And this is one of them! Most lists are based on the author’s experience and taste, but here we try to take a data driven approach: We’ll look at the previous winners, try to derive the jury’s (implicit or explicit) criteria, and check what current games that meet those criteria have been rated highly.

You’ll actually get two for the price of one: since 2011, in addition to the traditional main award Spiel des Jahres that is targeted at casual gamers, there is also the Kennerspiel des Jahres for those who are ready for a (little) more complex game, i.e., “connoisseur gamers”. There’s also a third award Kinderspiel des Jahres for children’s games, but since the author of these lines doesn’t know the first thing about this sector (give it another four or five years), we won’t talk further about it.

This is a drama in three acts: First, we’ll take a look at previous winners in order to understand what kind of games the jury likes to honour. Second, we use those criteria to find candidates for this year’s Spiel des Jahres. And lastly, we’ll do the same for the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Let’s go!

Analysis of past winners

It’s worth recalling what the mission statement of Spiel des Jahres is. The target audience are people that buy maybe one game a year which ends up under the Christmas tree and is meant to be played that very evening with the family. This means a game hoping to decorate itself with the red meeple needs to be accessible in every possible way: affordable price point, short rules, quick play time, yet fun for grandchildren and grandparents alike. Luckily for us, BoardGameGeek quantifies about every aspect of games, so let’s look in more details into previous winners and how they scored in those criteria.

Does the community like Spiel des Jahres winners?

First, there’s the question if the community at BoardGameGeek and the jury Spiel des Jahres are aligned at all. After all, the former is full of mostly US-centric hardcore gamers, while the latter is exclusively concerned with casual gamers in Germany. Still, when we look at how the BGG crowd has rated the award winners over the last years, the jury seems to have done a good job:

While not every single game was a hit with the geeks, many Spiel des Jahres winners score highly, and particularly there’s a clear upwards trend visible over the past decade or so. Granted, this is also the case with recent releases in general, but the point remains that German families and American geeks might agree on some games after all.

With that out of the way, let’s examine some of our candidates’ particular features.

How difficult can it be?

BoardGameGeek quantifies a game’s weight or complexity on a scale from 1 (light) to 5 (heavy). Naturally, the accessibility of a Spiel des Jahres pushes them towards the lighter side, though over the years, the jury selected some more complex games as well:

However, recent years have seen a strong trend towards the very light games. In fact, since the introduction of Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2011, only 2012’s winner Kingdom Builder exceeded a complexity rating of 2 (medium light) – by 0.07 points. Even said Kennerspiel, whose first few winners hovered around a weight of 3 (medium), is drawn more and more towards the 2 mark.

From this we can conclude that the Spiel des Jahres 2020 will have a complexity rating below 2, whilst the Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020 will not exceed 3 in its compexity, or let’s say 3.5, in case the jury wants to go experimental.

How long can it take?

In addition to short rules (start quickly), a Spiel des Jahres should also have a short playing time (play quickly). Again, the data confirm this perception:

Here, the bands indicate the span of the playing time indicated on the games’ boxes, while the dashed lines denotes the mean. Playing times are tricky because publishers always lie about them. I suppose they simply don’t want to scare away people whose attention spans become ever shorter (thanks for still being with me by the way) with the prospect of sitting through an hour of some ultra nerdy activity. But since everybody lies the same way, we can at least compare games with each other. And again, it becomes obvious how import immediate accessibility is to the jury: The last winner that admitted to having a playing time of more than 45 minutes was 2006’s Thurn and Taxis, and none has exceeded the hour mark since 1999’s Tikal.

On the other hand, the jury seems to have no problem with longer playing times for a Kennerspiel. The sweet spot still seems to be around 60 minutes, but even 90 or 120 minutes on the box do not exclude a game from the connoisseurs’ award.

In conclusion, the Spiel des Jahres 2020 will be playable in under 1 hour, probably even 45 minutes, whilst the Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020 might take up to 2 hours.

How many players can take part?

The Spiel’s character as a family or rather group activity becomes obvious when looking at the supported player counts:

Every single winner of either award was playable with 3 and 4 players. It’s just what a typical German family looks like, so there’s no way the jury will deviate from this pattern. In fact, there’s only two games that were even nominated with a different player count, both pure 2-player-games: Targi in 2012 and Jambo in 2005.

Therefore, without a doubt, both Spiel des Jahres 2020 and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020 will have to be playable with 3 and 4 players. (Of course, it’s a bonus if a game also works with lower or higher player counts, but 3 and 4 are a must.)

How old do they have to be?

As I mentioned above, a Spiel des Jahres should bring together children with their grandparents, yet, somewhat surprisingly, publishers don’t always seem to trust their games with the younger audience:

Here the solid line is what’s printed on the box, whilst the dotted line is what the community thinks. Similar to playing time, age recommendations are tricky and publishers often have a different opinion on it than players, but usually in the other direction. (It’s worth noticing though that often there aren’t all that many players that “vote” on the age recommendations, so take them with a pinch of salt.)

What stands out in this graphic is that Spiel des Jahres winners often have a recommended age of 12+. Notably, 2016’s winner Codenames has 14+ printed on the box, while the community thinks it’s fine to play with children from 10 years of age. Unsurprisingly, the more complex Kennerspiel often has a slightly higher age recommendation, although all winners so far stay below the mark of 12 years.

All of this makes it hard to draw a conclusion. Spiel des Jahres winners can typically be played with 8 to 10 year old children, while a Kennerspiel can usually be found in the age range from 10 to 12 years. But because of the somewhat erratic age recommendations, we only stipulate a limit of 14 years for both Spiel des Jahres 2020 and Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020. Still, one can confidently exclude any game that includes adult topics or themes that might put off the younger or older audience.

Summary of criteria

OK, now we’ve got an understanding of what a game needs to look like if it hopes to win the coveted awards. A Spiel des Jahres needs to

have a complexity rating of 2 (medium light) or less and
be playable in under 60 minutes (better 45 minutes)
by (at least) 3 to 4 players
with a minimum age of at most 14 years old (better yet 12 or even 10 years old).

A Kennerspiel des Jahres needs to

have a complexity rating of 3.5 (medium), better 2.5 or less and
be playable in under 120 minutes (better 90 minutes)
by (at least) 3 to 4 players
with a minimum age of at most 14 years old (better yet 12).

Further, we need to talk about a game’s release date. It’s actually not that easy to exactly pinpoint which games are eligible for the award as the jury would generally consider games that were released between April 2019 and March 2020¹ into wider German distribution. BoardGameGeek keeps record of the year of first release, which could be a limited first print run in a different market. A game that was released years ago in its homecountry might be nominated for Spiel des Jahres years later when it hits the German market. This happened with Werewords which was first released in 2017, but saw a German edition only in early 2019 and was nominated that year. So by simply filtering on the year in the BGG database we might miss some releases, but c’est la vie…

Without further ado, let’s find some games that meet all those criteria!

Candidates for Spiel des Jahres

Gamers’ choices

First, we’ll look at games released in 2019 and 2020, sorted by their rating on BoardGameGeek. When you click on that link, the list you’ll see might be very different from what I worked with if some time has passed, so don’t be confused if the names you read here are very different. Also, I’ll skip any games that are ineligible for one reason or another.

Note that you get essentially the same list when looking at the Recommend.Games ratings.

Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale

A roll and write game that can be found on pretty much every list, hence a strong candidate for a nomination. However, its complexity is similar to That’s Pretty Clever, so this one might end up on the Kennerspiel list instead.

Wavelength

As a simple and immediate party game, this one is right up the jury’s alley when we look at the past years. Some say that a game targeted at large gatherings might be a tough sell while COVID–19 continues to rage, but on the other hand, Wavelength has proven itself something of a darling for playing via video chat, so I wouldn’t discard it. Interestingly, this is another game where the publisher and the players can’t agree on the age: the former recommends the game to player of 14 years and up, while the latter believe it’s fine for 8-year-olds!

Silver & Gold

I don’t have much information on this one, but theme, weight, and play time all seem very compatible with a Spiel des Jahres.

Draftosaurus

As with Silver & Gold, this game seems almost designed with Spiel des Jahres in mind. Antoine Bauza certainly has quite a collection of big wooden meeples already!

Obscurio

This looks very much like Mysterium with a traitor. Both this twist and it’s fairly high complexity make it somewhat of a dark horse in the running.

Recommended to the jury

Instead of looking at the community at large, we really want to know what games specifically fit the jury’s taste. The best way to achieve this is to feed previous winners, special awards, nominees, and recommendations into Recommend.Games’s engine and see what falls out of this black box! Note that in the list below I skip those games that we already covered above.

Pictures

This game sounds almost like a sandbox full of toys that could engage the whole family. Definitely Spiel des Jahres material!

Miyabi

I got very little on this one, but Michael Kiesling sure knows how to design a Spiel des Jahres, so why not?

Deep Blue

Publisher Days of Wonders can pride themselves with one of the most iconic winners: Ticket to Ride. This game could mark their return to the nomination list.

One Key

From the same team as Obscurio, this one might be a little lighter, a little faster, a little more different, i.e., a stronger contender.

Similo

Another quick and easy game, in this case also very afforable and portable. Overall this could make it a very welcoming introduction into the wonderful world of board games.

My two cents

I tried to be as objective as possible with the selection above and let the data do the talking. But let me conclude this list with the three games that I personally think have the highest chance of receiving a nomination for Spiel des Jahres 2020:

So, those were the ten (plus three) games that, according to the data, should be the most likely to receive a nomination for Spiel des Jahres. Will the jury be this predictable? We will find out soon! For now, let’s move on to the connoisseurs’ games.

Candidates for Kennerspiel des Jahres

Gamers’ choices

As for the main award, we find the community’s favourites by looking at the BoardGameGeek and Recommend.Games ratings, which yield similar results.

Res Arcana

While fantasy isn’t necessarily the jury’s favourite theme, it didn’t stop them from giving the award to Legends of Andor in 2013. Reviewers hold Res Arcana in high regard, so this is one to watch.

The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine

This cooperative trick-taking game is pretty much on every list, but usually for Spiel des Jahres. However, its complexity clocks in at at 2.2, well beyond what the jury would generally consider for the main award. I believe most experienced gamers underestimate how difficult the concept of trick-taking is to new players, so this game has much higher chances to win Kennerspiel des Jahres.

Tiny Towns

Another game that appears to be on everybody’s mind. Play time and complexity certainly qualify it for Kennerspiel. Bonus: the characters on the cover practice exemplary social distancing! ²

Hadara

Game studio Hans im Glück sure won their share of Spiel des Jahres awards. Could this be their first Kennerspiel?

Villagers

I don’t have much to say about this game either, but the fact that Kosmos recently released a German edition won’t harm its chances for Kennerspiel.

Recommended to the jury

Now let’s look at games recommended to the jury based on their previous choices, again skipping those that were already mentioned above.

Letter Jam

This is a tricky one. While it’s been lauded as an innovative word game, its many rules and details push its complexity into the realm of Kennerspiel des Jahres, while the word / party game genre clearly belongs with Spiel des Jahres (where it’s arguably over-represented).

Fast Sloths

The jury clearly is a fan of designer Friedemann Friese’s work as evident but many recommendations, but didn’t find a game worthy of the big meeple yet. Could this pick me up and deliver me game change their mind?

Nova Luna

Uwe Rosenberg is another favourite designer for both the community and the jury. Agricola kinda won Kennerspiel before it even existed (special award “Complex Game” in 2008), but he’s been waiting for a main award ever since. Nova Luna could be his shot, though abstract games tend to have a hard time with the jury.

Kitchen Rush

A real time cooperative worker placement game sounds like a winning combination right from the start, so this is another one to watch. However, theme and premise seem to fit better with Spiel des Jahres, but for that it’s just too complex.

Adventure Games: The Dungeon / Monochrome Inc.

Everything about this pair reminds us of the Exit Game Series that won Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017. Hard to tell if that’s to the games’ advantage or disadvantage…

My two cents

Again, let’s wrap this up with my personal daring prediction of the three nominees for Kennerspiel des Jahres 2020:

To be honest, I think Cartographers also seems to be a very strong contender, I just cannot decide for which list!

This concludes our list of ten candidates for both awards. I’m truly excited to see what we got right and where the jury will surprise us. What games do you think we missed? Is there a very recently released game that might fly under everyone’s radar? Let us know and discuss in the comments below!

Read Part 2 for the actual nominations and how I did with my predictions. Read Part 3 for analyses of the nominees and my predictions for the winners. Read Part 4 for the winners and conclusion.

PS: You can find the notebook I used for the graphs and most of the analysis I did above on Kaggle.

Honourable mentions

I’ll leave you with few games that didn’t make it to the lists above for one reason or another, but are still worth keeping an eye on. Some might show up in the recommendations, some in next year’s edition. Stay tuned!

Latecomers

Games that were release just before the deadline last year. They might get a second chance (see what I did there?) this year if the year is short on other candidates due to COVID–19.

Late to Germany

Like I said, it’s hard to include in our analysis games that were released earlier, but just arrived to Germany. One sticks out though:

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Just outside the criteria

Here I mention some games that didn’t make the cut because they are outside one or more of the jury’s (hypothetical) criteria. These might still end up on the recommendation lists.

Too “special”

Cthulhu: Death May Die: very expensive, plus the horror theme doesn’t strike well with the jury
King’s Dilemma: 16+ according to the community, just a little too mature
TEAM3 GREEN and PINK: not quite a general interest game, but already received a favourable mention on the jury’s website

Too complex

Two player only

Comebacks

While the jury has awarded games before that were reimplementations of previously published games (e.g., Alhambra in 2003), it still feels less likely, particularly when the new version is very close to the previous release, or it has been on the recommendation list already. But then again, the jury does like a surprise…

Azul: Summer Pavilion (reimplements Azul)
Corinth (reimplements Yspahan)
Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North (reimplements Imperial Settlers)
Noch mal so gut! (reimplements Encore!)

Too late

There’s many games that already stirred quite some interest internationally and can be found on many prediction lists, but that haven’t had a German release in time, so won’t be eligible this year. It’s worth keeping an eye on them for next year though!

The jury has stated that the COVID–19 pandemic does not alter the schedule for this year’s awards. However, they may not be able to thoroughly test some games that were released close to the March deadline, so those might be considered for Spiel des Jahres 2021 instead. ↩︎
This joke was stolen from Udo Bartsch. It was too good to be omitted! ↩︎