Predictions

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. 🤓

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.

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.

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.

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 21.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.