Spiel Des Jahres 2025

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…)

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.