Spiel des Jahres Week at The Opinionated Gamers reaches its midpoint today with our least favorite winners of the award.  At the OG we review games on a scale from “not for me” to “love it” so today are the “not for us” SdJ winners.  To create this list, 23 members of the OG voted on all 45 games that have ever won the Spiel des Jahres.  We each picked our 3 favorite games that had won the award and our 3 least favorite games that had won the award.  Yesterday we crowned Ticket to Ride as our most loved winner of the award.  Today we share which winners of the award are not quite so beloved.

No Downvotes

Before we get to our least favorite SdJ winners, we should start with the 18 games that were not the least favorites of anyone.  Those games are: Auf Achse, Azul, Carcassonne, Cascadia, Codenames, Elfenland, Enchanted Forest, Hare & Tortoise, Heimlich & Co., Adel Verpflichtet (aka Hoity Toity), Manhattan, Mississippi Queen, Pictures, Thurn & Taxis, Ticket to Ride, Tikal, Um Reifenbreite, and Drunter & Drüber (aka Wacky Wacky West).

Attentive readers will have noticed that 8 of these games also appeared on yesterday’s list of SdJ winners that were also nobody’s favorite: Auf Achse, Cascadia, Enchanted Forest, Heimlich & Co., Hoity Toity, Thurn & Taxis, Um Reifenbreite, and Wacky Wacky West.  These games have the dubious distinction of being nobody’s favorite or least favorite.  Given how little we seem to care about these games, I could not help but wonder what was going on with these 8 games.  First things first, we also captured whether folks had played the 45 games under consideration.  While Auf Achse had not been played by 12 of the 23 voters, and Enchanted Forest and Drunter & Druber had not been played by 11 voters, most of the games had been played by most of the voters, including games like Thurn & Taxis, Adel Verpflichtet, and Cascadia that had been played by all but a couple people.

So if we didn’t love or hate these games, did we at least like any of them?  Yes, Thurn & Taxis is enjoyed by 15 of the 23 voters, and Um Reifenbreite by 13 folks.  Among these 8 games, the three that folks felt the most “meh” about were Cascadia, Heimlich & Co., and Enchanted Forest, meaning that they had played the game, but did not like it or want to play it again.  At least none of them were anybody’s least favorite though.

• Dale Yu: Sagaland (Enchanted Forest) has always felt like a kids game to me – after all, it does carry an age rating of 4+.  It was my fourth choice; but there are simply other games that I like even less on this list, so it escaped the scarlet letter (as it were) on our ranking database.  Not sure what was going on that year, or maybe the focus of the jury was for games to be played by the ENTIRE family.  According to the research of resident OG SdJ Scholar Chris Wray:  In 1981, “it ultimately ranked eighth in the jury’s poll and lost to Focus. Sagaland was re-nominated in 1982 due to the small number of new releases that year, and this time it won. The game beat out eight other nominees in 1982, including Alex Randolph’s Ghosts and Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop.”

Mark Jackson: Cascadia escaped my “naughty” list by the thinnest of margins… and while I was enamored of Enchanted Forest back in the late 1980s (when it was first published in the U.S.), over time the take-that elements made it less interesting. (I do wonder if there is a difference in opinions between those of us who played the games closer to their original release – esp. pre-Catan [1995] – and those who didn’t come upon them until later. Sometimes, it’s easier to understand a nomination/award in the context of what else was being released – though Can’t Stop losing to Sagaland/Enchanted Forest seems like a crime.)

Tery Noseworthy:  I really enjoy Um Reifenbreite, although I am most likely to play its predecessor Homas Tour during our annual Tour de France game day, but both are excellent.  There is just enough luck mixed in with the strategy to keep things interesting, and every race is different. If you hate racing games you probably will really hate this one, but if not I definitely recommend it.

• Larry Levy:  Adel is definitely a “not for me” game; there are just other SdJ winners that I dislike more.  The whole game is based around bluffing and guessing what your opponents will simultaneously select.  Those are two of my least favorite mechanisms in gaming, so it’s not surprising it’s a game I avoid.  That isn’t to denigrate the choice as an SdJ winner; it’s one of the most important games ever published in Germany and was the first world-wide hit that was identified as being from Deutschland.  It’s just not a game that suits my tastes at all.

• Ben Bruckart: There were more games that I disliked than liked from this list. The one that I have enjoyed playing is Um Reifenbreite. The others, I don’t particular need to play again because there are so many better options.

• Fraser McHarg: Firstly I will admit to not getting around to voting, but of this list of Auf Achse, Cascadia, Enchanted Forest, Heimlich & Co., Hoity Toity, Thurn & Taxis, Um Reifenbreite, and Drunter & Drüber we own all of them except Cascadia and Heimlich & Co.  I could give Enchanted Forest a miss now that our children are technically adults, but would still play any of the others.

The Lone Dissenters

There are 10 games that have won the Spiel des Jahres that one member of the Opinionated Gamers picked as one of their least favorites.  One of those games is ironically Just One, and the other nine were: Dampfroß, El Grande, Focus, Keltis, Qwirkle, Scotland Yard, Sherlock Holmes Criminal-Cabinet, Torres, and Zooloretto.  These games are all successful and lauded winners of the biggest award in board gaming, but here we will tell you why they were “not for me” – at least for one of us.

• Talia Rosen: I feel like I’ve been railing against Zooloretto for over 15 years now, probably because I have.  This game has always struck me as the beginning of a reductive unfortunate trend, albeit an understandable one.  I think Michael Schacht’s original 2003 card game Coloretto is a phenomenal game.  I felt (and still feel) like remaking that game as a big box board game in 2007 with a cuddly panda bear on the cover was a marketing gimmick, not a Spiel des Jahres caliber game (especially not in a year when Yspahan, Notre Dame, Arkadia, and Vikings were all released).  This led of course to one of my favorite pieces of artwork in a game, which is the stuffed panda bear slung over the back of one of the camels in Sebastian Pauchon’s subsequent release of Jaipur.  While Yspahan may not hit the table a lot these days, it really did launch a wave of innovation in the use of dice (and pre-decision randomness ) in modern board games.  I do think that Zoloretto’s win fueled a wave of reimplementations with bigger boxes and cuter covers, doubling down across the hobby on tried and true designs and expansions, rather than risking new designs.  Apparently I’m the only one that holds a grudge against Zooloretto after all these years, but maybe I’ll go play Yspahan and Jaipur to celebrate.

Dale: I still own all of these except for Keltis. For whatever that’s worth.  I even own two different versions of SH:CD still.

Mark: I bought the original version of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (back when it came in a big notebook) in the early 80s… it’s not a game. It’s a puzzle – a tedious and sometimes frustrating puzzle. Our “Not For Me” rating isn’t quite strong enough to communicate my antipathy for this winner.

Larry:  None of these games made my least favorites list, but some of them came close.  Sherlock Holmes is very frustrating, a tedious game that requires extreme leaps of logic in order to solve.  I had great hopes for it back in the day, but after multiple cases that I didn’t come close to solving, I gave up in disgust.  I’ve already talked about my issues with El Grande.  The rest are okay and I quite like Just One and Scotland Yard.  And while I have no real desire to play Zooloretto again, I do think it’s better than Coloretto, which to me is a real snoozefest.

• Ben: Clearly not every game is for everyone but none of these are truly terrible games.

Not For (Some of) Us

There were 11 games that won the Spiel des Jahres that two or three of us ranked as among our least favorites.  Those 11 games are (with 2 votes each): Camel Up, Dominion, Dorfromantik, Kingdomino, and Settlers of Catan.  And with 3 votes each were:

• Alhambra
• Barbarossa und die Rätselmeister
• Café International
• Kingdom Builder
• Bluff (aka Perudo)
• Rummikub

Interestingly, this list ranges from the second ever winner of the award, Rummikub from 1980, all the way to the most recent winner of the award, Dorfromantik from 2023, so we do not appear to have a preference for older or newer winners.  In fact, if yesterday’s results are considered, it appears that the OG might have a soft spot for the 2001 to 2009 period (given the wins for Carcassonne, Dominion, and Ticket to Ride).

• Mark: I’ve ranted about how Alhambra took a perfectly good game (Stimmt So!) and gummed up the basic stock collecting mechanic with a tile-laying element that actively works against the game. No need to continue that here. (Don’t tempt me.)

• Dale: Catan? Really?!  Well, to each their own.  Other than that, I can definitely see reasons for all the rest of this list to make it as someone’s least liked…. Even my beloved Dominion.  I’m actually surprised to see that Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective didn’t end up here as it’s a pretty divisive game.  Some are too simple, some are too solo-game-ish, some are just not fun.  And, of course, don’t forget that people could only rate the games they had played, so someone’s “worst” vote might not really be the worst, just the worst one that rater had played.

Ben: I think Kingdom Builder is a bad game. I like the modular board and the idea of it but I hate the actual implementation and illusion of choices there. It could have been so much better.

Larry:  I have no strong beefs against any of these games, nor any real desire to play them.  I imagine the complaints against Cafe International are due to it’s strongly non-PC (which is to say, insulting and racist) artwork, which was eyebrow-raising even in the late 80’s and would be considered breathtakingly awful today.  The game itself is fairly innocuous.  And while Alhambra is nothing special to me (and is downright painful with more than 3 players), I still prefer it to Stimmt So!, since it adds a needed extra element and softens the latter’s focus on rewarding players who are fortunate enough to have the card with the exact correct cost.

• Nate Beeler: I get Settlers being someone’s least favorite, because it can be mean, political, and overlong. Revolutionary for its time, it was the correct choice then, and it would have been upsetting if it hadn’t won. But for me it hasn’t aged well.

• Ryan Post: All 3 of my votes are in this group, including the controversial Catan. I’ll start by reiterating what I said in the last article, which is that since I joined the hobby in 2012, I’ve only played 3 pre-Catan and only 26 total SdJ games. Most of the early crop have made no mark on the modern hobby, so I’ve never even seen them. I’m sure some of them would have been my vote instead had I suffered through the times when Catan was the high end of gaming. Like a lot of my generation of gamers, I had years of only playing Catan, roughly 50+ plays, before I knew board games were a full hobby with many other options. I look back at that time as my dark ages – like an anti-nostalgia filter. Too random for me, too long for the decision space, too many nothing turns, and quite often 1 person at the table that is pseudo-eliminated early. My least favorite rule though by far, is the card limit. To be fair, I did say in the earlier article that SH:CD still being released today is a sign of excellence. I gotta hand it to Catan who is still dominating the market and getting new versions even in 2024. It continues to be a titan beloved by many, including several that are part of this group. But for me, I think it has aged tremendously poorly and has too strong a connection to a time when I thought I knew love, but didn’t really know love at all. In a competitive field like SdJ games, I’d rather play most of the other 25 I’ve tried – except Bluff. I have never enjoyed games with even a hint of social deduction, so on personal tastes, Bluff never stood a chance.

Polarizing Trio

The next 3 games were each picked by 4 people as among their least favorite SdJ winners of all time, but they were also each picked by at least one person as among their favorites and by at least 7 or more people as a game they enjoy and want to play again.  Without further ado, the polarizing trio of Spiel des Jahres winners are:

• Dixit
• Hanabi
• Niagara

It’s not too surprising to see these games here because games like Dixit and Hanabi are very situational and group dependent.  Many of us have seen games of Dixit and Hanabi flop because the games can be brittle depending on who is at the table, while many of us have seen these games succeed incredibly because they are unique, accessible, and memorable.  But what is the oft-overlooked Niagara doing in the polarizing trio?

• Ben: If you find someone suggest to play Hanabi with you, run!

• Dale: I can safely say I will never play any of these three games ever again.  

• Mark: While I gladly own Niagara and I’d agree to play Dixit if asked, Hanabi left me cold.

• Tery: I am not a big fan of deduction games, unless we are talking about Hanabi, in which case I am a big fan because it is brilliant. Easy to teach, a lot to think about and enjoyable for multiple back to back plays.

• Nate: I own or have owned all three of these, and do still play Dixit occasionally.

Larry:  Two of these made my least favorite list.  Niagara just never seemed fun at all to me.  I’ve never understood its SdJ victory, particularly since one of the other nominees that year was a title that seemed perfect for the award, Around the World in 80 Days.  Dixit is a much better game, but I just don’t see the connections in those vague and confusing images.  Just a personal “not for me” game.  I haven’t played Hanabi that much, but I think I’d really like it if I did and would be intrigued to find a group that uses established conventions (as long as they’re not too involved).  My less than stellar memory would probably keep me from being too good a player, but it’s a really clever game and a worthwhile winner, IMO.

Simon Weinberg: Unfortunately I never enjoyed Hanabi despite my love of card games in general… I felt it won because it was novel rather than because it was great. Dixit is also not a favorite of mine but for a different reason – despite being good at reading people I always do terribly at it. So I’ll play it and resign myself to coming last. Finally, I’ve never played Niagara! Outrageous I know.

The Anti-Podium

Runners Up: 

Two games tied with the second most votes for being our collective least favorite winner of the Spiel des Jahres:

• Colt Express
• MicroMacro: Crime City

• Talia: I was definitely intrigued by MicroMacro when it came out, but I checked it out from the library and tried a couple scenarios.  It’s definitely a “not for me” game, even though I was always a fan of Where’s Waldo as a kid, and this seems like effectively Where’s Waldo: The Board Game.  The black-and-white illustrations were a turn off for me personally, and the vagueness of the scenarios that I tried was also disappointing.  I’m sure this is a favorite of many folks out there, but it’s not what I’m looking for in board games and definitely not my cup of tea.  Weirdly, despite spending an inordinate amount of time reading about board games, I somehow do not recall ever having even heard of Colt Express, but I suppose my kid was born in 2015, so it’s a bit of an outlier year for me board game-wise, although you’d think an SdJ winner would have enough staying power for me to see it out and about a couple years later.  Should I seek out Colt Express to try it?  The collective “wisdom” of the OG seems to be no…

• Dale: I love the idea in MicroMacro.  And I loved it as a solitaire game (my reasons for this mostly echo James Nathan’s ode to the game posted yesterday).  But, it wouldn’t make my list of best SdJ for that same reason. It’s a solo game, and that limits the game for me, especially in terms of wanting to play it with others.  And… Talia, I believe there is an anniversary Big Box version of Colt Express coming out in the very near future (or maybe already out?!) so you can try it in all of its glory…

• Tery: MicroMacro is my worst nightmare – look at this poster and try to find the hidden thing while other people interfere with your field of vision. I hate Where’s Waldo, and I can never find the hidden image, no matter what trick you tell me to try. I appreciate that other people enjoy it, but you definitely do not want to play it with me. I did try it once with only 2 players and I could briefly tolerate it. Colt Express I am pretty ambivalent about, but it can be fun with the right group of players.

• Brandon: If I wanted to play Where’s Waldo, I’d just buy a book. Micro Macro takes that easy, quick activity and stretches it out longer than it should and ultimately leaves you with aching eyes and a sense that you’ll never get that time back. Colt Express is programming and it’s natural that those games are not my cup of tea. One play of Colt Express was more than enough. 

• Simon: I like both of these! Colt Express is VERY popular at my club and Micro Macro was novel but good. We ended up playing it on the floor with my kids.

• Ben: While I have never played MicroMacro, I can tell you that Colt Express is an exercise in keeping you at the table, as well as from flipping it.

• Larry: I haven’t played either of these games, nor do I have any desire to try them out.

• Mark: Colt Express isn’t the best SdJ winner out there… but (caveat coming) with the right group of folks, it’s a lot of fun. It is chaotic (on purpose!) and has a pretty decent toy factor (what with all the cardboard 3-D trains). There are a plethora of expansions (yes, I own them) that allow you to “gamer-up” the base game… and one more coming to celebrate the 10th anniversary. 

“Winner”

The “winner” of the Opinionated Gamers least favorite winner of the Spiel des Jahres of all time is none other than Villa Paletti from 2003 with a dominant 6 votes, plus 7 more people that had played it and did not like it or want to play it again.  On the scoring system for tallying the points earned by each game through this voting process, which we will unveil in Friday’s finale post, you will see that Villa Paletti is in fact the only game (out of all 45 of the SdJ winners and all 13 winners of the Kennerspiel) to receive a negative score somehow.

• Talia: Condolences to Villa Paletti on this ignominious honor, but it should come as no surprise to anyone that has followed the history of this award, or Zoch, or knows what year Andreas Seyfarth’s masterpiece Alea #7 game came out.  The sad thing is how many phenomenal Zoch dexterity games do exist, such as Bausack, Hamsterolle, Bamboleo, and Gulo Gulo (not to mention fun dexterous audio games like Igloo Pop and Mord im Arosa).

• Mark: For a much better use of the same stacking system as Villa Paletti, check out the co-op game Menara.

• Tery: If I am going to play a dexterity game I am going to choose one of the many other more fun dexterity games out there; in addition to several of the ones Talia mentioned, Men at Work, Bamboleo, and Catch the Moon are all good.

• Larry:  Villa Paletti topped my list of least favorite SdJ winners.  First of all, let’s dispense with a bit of fiction–there was no way that Puerto Rico was going to win the award in 2002.  It’s way too involved a game, at a time when the jury was looking for games of the weight of, say, Carcassonne, and not El Grande.  TransAmerica (another game I dislike, but at least it’s better than Villa Paletti) was a far more likely winner.  So hating VP because it kept the beloved Puerto Rico from rightfully winning is not realistic. But, as the others have said, VP just isn’t a particularly good game and was a real outlier for the kind of games that were being rewarded at the time.  In addition to its other faults, the winner is the player who is fortunate enough to play before the klutzy player, who invariably knocks down all the pieces.  Bad design, bad game, and a real head-scratcher for why it was able to take the big prize.

• Nate: Villa Paletti’s win is the reason I stopped caring about the SdJ. The game shouldn’t even have been nominated (this is coming from a fan of good dexterity games). But for seemingly political and/or financial reasons the SdJ jury had it beat out the obvious choice, Puerto Rico (or at least a reasonable choice that someone could argue is better than PR). Looking at the award’s history since that year, the jury does occasionally get it right (e.g. Dominion). But more and more the best game or games aren’t even nominated. I would love to live in a world where a more sane award could find traction and become the de facto board gaming prize. As it is, I’m left to whinge about it or bite my tongue every year around this time.

To say that Puerto Rico could never win, as Larry claims above (and I have heard others say), is to me a bit of a retcon. It didn’t win, true. But only two and three years earlier Torres and Tikal did. Those games are to me every bit as complicated as PR is. Even Carcasonne, the previous year’s winner, doesn’t represent that much of a dip in complexity. It represents a deserving winner and arguably the game of the year, which until Villa Paletti I had thought was what they were trying to reward. Nothing at the time said it was an award for “light games targeted to specific German families, with other political and financial factors accounted for” until after VP’s win.

Check back tomorrow for Day #4 in the Opinionated Gamers Spiel des Jahres Week when we will take a detour and explore our collective thoughts on the 13 winners so far of the Kennerspiel des Jahres!