Every year, Fairplay magazine conducts the a la carte award, in which their readers choose their favorite card game of the year. This is a very good award, which consistently rewards excellent games. The results for 2020 were recently announced and the winner is Fantasy Realms. Even though this game was originally released by WizKids in 2017 in the English speaking world, this isn’t really a surprising result. Strohmann Games released the game in Germany last October, and it’s been a big success since then. It was a finalist for the Kennerspiel award and finished in the top 10 for the DSP award, so it was clearly one of the leading card games of the year.
The a la carte winner from 2019 was The Crew and the game’s sequel, The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, finished second this year. So Thomas Sing and Kosmos almost had back to back titles with this series.
Here are the top ten finishers for the a la carte, together with the game’s designers. More so than usual, there are a number of games that were released earlier than 2020 in the English speaking world that are honored this year for their German editions. This is probably a trend that we’ll continue to see in future years.
- Fantasy Realms (Bruce Glassco)
- The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Thomas Sing)
- Point Salad (Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich)
- The 7th Continent (Ludovic Roudy, Bruno Sautter)
- Riftforce (Carlo Bortolini)
- Wild Space (Joachim Thome)
- The Fox in the Forest (Joshua Buergel)
- Kompromat (Rob Fisher, Adam Porter)
- Spirits of the Wild (Nick Hayes)
- Spukstaben (Moritz Dressler)
