Do you like lasagna?  I imagine most people do.  If I asked you what your favorite lasagna is, would you base it on the one that has the most flavorful cheese on top, or maybe with the best cooked noodles?  Or are you like me, who wants the best combination of noodles, meat, sauce, and cheese, all stacked up in one perfect bite?  Do you want to focus on just one element of the dish or the entire package?

That’s a somewhat fanciful (but delicious) lead in to what the Designer of the Year awards are all about.  The idea is not to recognize what the best game of the year is (lots of awards do that), but to honor the game designer who had the best overall body of work over the previous calendar year.  I’ve been handing out those citations for over 20 years and folks seem to like them, so let’s do it again for 2024.

Okay, let’s start with the rules (we’re gamers, after all).  What games are covered?  Just about any title that comes in a box.  Boardgames, card games, dexterity games, Euros, thematic titles—toss ‘em all in.  The one type of game I leave out are children’s games, since their criteria for success is pretty different than games for adults or older kids.  And expansions are also excluded—I want to focus on original designs.  But I do include spinoffs, standalone expansions, and redesigns of previously published games, although they’re not weighted as heavily as original titles.

One thing I want to do is to make this as objective a process as possible and not based on my personal likes and dislikes.  My own tastes have no more validity than anyone else’s and besides, there’s a ton of games I’ll be considering that I’ve never played.  So to facilitate that, I’ve come up with a ranking method for each of a designer’s games that’s based on the following three criteria:

• Popularity.  How well liked is the game?  I base this on the game’s average rating (and number of votes) on the Geek.  Is this a perfect measure of a game’s popularity?  Probably not—there’s a lot of built-in biases there.  Is it the best data I have access to for measuring that?  Almost certainly, so that’s what I use.
• Award performance.  There’s a permanence to awards that I think is significant, particularly if you’re looking at the rankings years from now.  It’s also provides a different look at a game’s impact that’s separate from ratings.  So how well has the game done (and how well do I think it will do) with the annual game awards?  I give the most weight to the major awards (SdJ, Kennerspiel, DSP, and IGA), but each game’s performance with some of the other notable awards are a factor as well.  Naturally, wins are worth more than mere nominations, but I still think the latter are meaningful (and much more numerous, of course).  Games which came out during the latter part of last year won’t be eligible for many of the awards until later this year, so I’ve had to project the performance of some of these designs.  That’s not ideal, but the object is to get an estimate for award performance, rather than a precise value, and I’ve found my projections usually aren’t too far off base.
• Buzz.  The third, and least significant, criterion is how much “buzz” the game is generating, where I consider buzz to be the attention a game is getting above and beyond its popularity.  A great example of a game that got positive buzz recently was Ticket to Ride Legacy, which got a lot of gamers very excited when it was announced.  Additions due to buzz are rare, but they do happen now and then and are a good way of handling highly newsworthy games.

Those are the factors I base my designer rankings on.  My goal is to have an objective methodology that considers multiple aspects, that allows me to come to a balanced decision, so that’s what I’ve come up with.

By the way, I make no distinction if a game has a single designer or if two or more individuals get design credit.  It’s impossible to determine who was responsible for what when there are multiple designers and anyone who’s ever been part of a collaborative effort can tell you that being part of a successful team is a skill of its own.  So anyone who is listed as a designer of a game gets full credit for it.  It just seems to me to be the most sensible and practical way to approach things.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been writing these articles for over 20 years.  But the last time I checked, they were making games even before then, so due to an unhealthy amount of free time, I’ve put in the work to extend the awards all the way back to 1955!  That’s like, pre-me!!!  In case you’re interested, you can find a Geeklist summarizing the results here:  http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/170779.  I’ve included some gaming history for many of the years, to go along with the commentary about the designers, so hopefully you’ll find it informative and maybe even a little bit entertaining.

Last year’s winner was Simone Luciani and I think it’s still pretty clear he was 2023’s dominant designer.  Nucleum won the IGA and Meeples Choice awards, got three other nominations, and still has an excellent Geek rating of over 8.0.  Darwin’s Journey has jumped into the top 100 games on the Geek and also grabbed a bunch of nominations.  Three of his other four games that year still have solid ratings, so I have no qualms about my decision.  I wish they were all that easy.

As it happened, 2024 was not a particularly strong year for designers.  Oh, there were some great games released, but they tended to be spread out among many creators, rather than having them be clustered.  That’s just the way it works some times.  But there was still plenty of good stuff out there, so after crunching the numbers, I was able to come up the following 11 individuals that had the strongest collections of games published last year.  They’re all listed here, along with the titles they released.  Letters in parentheses after the game indicate that it’s gotten some recognition from the annual awards that have already been announced.  Most of the awards will come later this year, but an “s” indicates an SdJ nomination, a “G” shows a victory in the Golden Geek awards, and a “g” is a Golden Geek nomination.  Some of the games are listed in italics; that indicates that it’s a redesign or spinoff of a title released previously by that designer, which means it carries less weight than fully original designs.

Okay, that’s enough of a setup.  Here, then, in alphabetical order, are the finalists for the 2024 Designer of the Year award.

Scott Almes:

• Conservas
• A Nice Cuppa
• The Last Lighthouse
• Tiny Epic Cthulhu
• Thingstead

Almes, a former DotY winner, has evidently discovered the joys of solitude, as his top three titles from last year are all strictly solitaire games, highlighted by Conservas, which tasks you with tinning fish without harming the ecosystem.  All three of the solo games have solid ratings.  He adds yet another Tiny Epic title (a cooperative in which the players battle the Great Old Ones) and a 2-player Viking battler.  There’s not enough here for Scott to contend for his second award, but it’s good to see him continue his appearances on the DotY pages.

Antoine Bauza

• The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth (g)
• Dead Cells
• Gold’n Crash
• Takenokolor
• Chateau Adventure: La Suite
• Kado

Bauza won the DotY in 2010, but this is only his second appearance on these pages since then.  The principal reason he made it this year is the success of two of his games.  Duel for Middle-Earth is the wildly popular redesign of 7 Wonders Duel.  It sports a sky-high rating of 8.4, has already cracked the Geek’s top 40, and its Golden Geek nomination is no doubt the first of many.  Antoine also scored with Dead Cells, a cooperative dungeon-crawler based on an older video game.  His other four designs don’t add much to his portfolio, so he won’t be contending for the big prize, but it’s nice to see him nominated after such a long absence.

Rob Daviau

• Cthulhu: Death May Die – Fear of the Unknown
• Heroscape Master Set: Age of Annihilation
• Unmatched: Slings and Arrows
• Unmatched: Sun’s Origin
• Heroscape: Age of Annihilation – Battle for the Wellspring
• Crossbows and Catapults: Fortress War
• Ziggurat
• Crossbows and Catapults: Castle Battle

Daviau, a regular visitor to these pages, has a hugely impressive portfolio, with 8 games that have extremely high ratings.  The catch is that all of them are redesigns or sequels to established games.  Even so, it’s quite a list.  It starts with the sequel to Cthulhu: Death May Die and the upgraded version of the 20-year-old Heroscape.  Both have ridiculously high ratings of 8.8!  I know that redesigns have a self-selection bias built in, but those ratings are still insanely good.  The two latest entries in the Unmatched series also have excellent ratings, as does Battle for the Wellspring, the introductory entry to the latest Heroscape.  Redesigns don’t get full weight from our jury of one, but when the games are this highly rated, it may not matter.  Might this collection be good enough to give Rob his second Designer of the Year award?

Matthew Dunstan

• 52 Realms: Adventures
• Next Station: Paris
• Minecraft Explorers
• Perspectives Blue
• Adventure Games: Family – Dimension Funf-Sieben
• Happy Home
• Monumental Duel: Exploration
• Monumental Duel: Trade
• Monumental Duel: Espionage
• Tree Society
• echoes: Das Orakel

Dunstan won the DotY award the year before last and he’s back with another large and varied collection of games.  52 Realms is a solo dungeon crawler played with an ordinary deck of cards.  Paris is the next Next Station.  Minecraft Explorers is a co-op based in a Minecraft-like world.  The three Monumental Duel games are 2-player interchangeable spinoffs of Dunstan’s earlier title, Monumental.  Their Geek ratings are low, but that’s mostly due to displeasure with the publisher, who took forever to deliver one of Monumental’s expansions; I’ve tried to adjust for this.  Despite the large portfolio, there aren’t any real hits here, so no second award for Matthew, but given his track record, I’d be a bit surprised if he wasn’t here again next year.

Stefan Feld

• Civolution (g)
• Kathmandu
• Nassau

Hmm, we’re starting to see a trend with the nominees:  previous Designer of the Year winners who released good, but not great collections of games in 2024.  Feld, a 3 time DotY winner, is another example.  The highlight of his portfolio is the monster quasi-Civ game Civolution, which sports an 8.2 rating, some glowing reviews, and a Golden Geek nomination (with, undoubtedly, more to come).  It’s probably Feld’s biggest hit since Castles of Burgundy.  Kathmandu is an original City Collection game, in which the players use dice to backpack through Nepal; it’s been fairly well received.  Nassau, his third game, is an extensive redesign of his earlier Rum & Pirates that has a solid rating.  It’s good stuff, but not quite enough to earn Stefan his fourth DotY win.

Hisashi Hayashi

• Bomb Busters (s,g)
• The Rail on the Hill
• Merchant of Goldfish
• Cavy ‘n’ Cavy
• Kichi Kichi Kitchen
• Giraffe Raffe

Hayashi is a veteran Japanese designer who’s been cranking out hit games for over 15 years.  This is actually his second DotY nomination, but I think it’s fair to say this one is much more impactful than his first one.  That’s because Bomb Busters, a cooperative game in which the players are trying to defuse bombs via deduction, not only received an SdJ nomination, but is considered the frontrunner to win the most important gaming award in the world.  Should it win, it would not only boost the value of his portfolio, but the intense exposure would make it considerably more likely that it will do well in other awards.  So this is huge.  Hisashi released some other designs last year, including The Rail on the Hill, a card placement train game with a nice rating, but Busters is obviously the big one.  Assuming it wins, will that be enough to make Hayashi the first Japanese Designer of the Year?  And wouldn’t that be something if it did happen?

Tomas Holek

• SETI (G)
• Galileo Galilei
• Tea Garden

Every once in a great while, a previously unknown designer bursts onto the gaming world with a collection that blows everybody away.  Wolfgang Warsch did it in 2018 and he rode it to the Designer of the Year award.  Holek hopes to have similar success with his 2024 collection and it’s a mighty impressive debut.  SETI has players searching the skies for extra-terrestrials (and finding them!); it has a very high 8.4 rating, has already won the Golden Geek award, and figures to win and compete for quite a few more.  It’s arguably one of the biggest hits of the year.  Galileo also has a stargazing theme, while Tea Garden keeps things on Mother Earth, but both have very healthy ratings.  It’s a great start to what will hopefully be a great career, but will it be enough to get Tomas to that big DotY award case in the sky?

Reiner Knizia

• Rebirth (g)
• MLEM: Space Agency (g)
• Cascadero
• Einfach Genial 3D
• HIT! Extreme
• Huang
• Cat Blues: The Big Gig
• Conic
• Glifos
• Pipeline
• Pick a Pen: Hackers
• Cascadito
• L.A.M.A. Kadabra
• Capybara Cookie Club
• Amazonia Park
• Manekinecollection
• Kniffel 7
• Glitches
• Cordoba
• Lux Nova
• Plus 5 other titles

Knizia’s success with the Designer of the Year awards is unparalleled.  Not only has he won it 7 times, more than any other designer, he’s also been the runner-up 7 times, which is also the most.  Just amazing.  Reiner is 67, but he shows no sign of slowing down.  However, his 2024 portfolio was not an easy collection to analyze, with many different pros and cons, so it required a deeper dive than I usually have to do.

On the plus side is Reiner’s usual enormous collection of published titles.  Even after culling out his children’s games and straight remakes, there were 25 separate games, which is mind-boggling.  Another positive is, unlike some of Knizia’s other years, there were some genuine hits here.  Rebirth is highly rated, has gotten a lot of love from a bunch of reviewers, and got a Golden Geek nomination.  It’s the latest of a long line of token-laying evergreens from Reiner.  MLEM, a push-your-luck game about spacefaring felines, isn’t quite as well rated, but it’s also been popular and received a GG nomination.  Cascadero, another abstract with a hexagonal grid, is a further highlight.  So there’s a sound foundation of original titles this year for the Good Doctor.

However, a glance at Reiner’s portfolio will reveal that most of the rest of his ’24 titles are redesigns.  The question is, are the bulk of these merely redressed older titles with a new theme slapped on, or are they truly original updates with tangible differences from their earlier antecedents?  Let’s check out some of the leading efforts.  In Einfach Genial 3D, the concepts are the same as the original game, but you can build upward as well as outward and this appears to affect strategy in a major way; several fans of the game series report that this is their favorite way of playing.  HIT! Extreme is based on Cheeky Monkey, but includes special abilities which change things up quite a bit.  Huang is pretty much a repackaged Yellow & Yangtze, but at least it includes a new expansion.  Cat Blues contains quite a few new features from the original Katzenjammer Blues.  And yes, Conic is a redesign of an earlier game called Caterna, but that came out in 1992 and hardly anyone remembers it.  So for most of these games, Knizia added real design work to the titles he had published earlier, allowing him to take a reasonable amount of credit for them when I start adding up his contributions for this year’s award.

Will that be enough to earn Reiner DotY #8?  That remains to be seen, but I did want to take you through my reasoning process, since you might have looked at all the redesigns in his collection and wondered, as I did, if these were mostly empty achievements due to his marketing wizardry and not so much for new work.  It appears the answer to that concern is “no”.  Knizia always releases a ton of games each year, but he usually just misses the top spot for my award.  Will this year be different?

Eric Lang

• Marvel United: Multiverse
• Cthulhu: Death May Die – Fear of the Unknown
• Wrath of Fire Mountain
• Life in Reterra
• Mass Effect: The Board Game
• I Heart Manatees
• Let’s Hit Each Other with Fake Swords
• Zombie Burrito

Lang is another former DotY winner who used to make regular appearances on these pages.  He’s back, and while some things have changed, including some more accessible titles (who could have imagined a Lang game called “I Heart Manatees” a few years ago???), some things are the same, including a large collection featuring highly rated thematic designs.  Marvel United: Multiverse has ties to his previous Marvel United game, but this version includes new heroes, new villains, and some new mechanics.  Fear of the Unknown is a standalone sequel to Cthulhu: Death May Die.  Both have exceedingly high ratings.  Wrath of Fire Mountain shows Lang’s other designing side, as it’s a caveman-themed, dice-rolling family game with a solid rating.  It’s a numerous and varied collection, featuring both heavy and lighter titles.  But is this mix of Yin and Yang enough to earn Eric his second DotY award?

Shem Phillips

• Ezra and Nehemiah (g)
• Inventors of the South Tigris (g)
• Shipwrights of the North Sea: Redux

Phillips is a New Zealander who has proven to be a reliable designer of middleweight and heavyweight games.  His specialty is designing games in threes, based upon their time period and location, if not necessarily on their mechanics.  He has two examples of this in his 2024 portfolio, as Inventors is the third South Tigris game (it’s a dice worker placement game, in which you try to build ingenious inventions in ninth century Baghdad) and the new Shipwrights (where we’re all Viking shipbuilders) is a thorough redesign of the first North Sea title.  But his biggest hit last year was Ezra and Nehemiah, which, in a bit of a departure, is a biblically themed design about rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem.  E&N has an 8.2 rating on the Geek and, like Inventors, earned a Golden Geek nomination.  It’s probably Shem’s strongest year yet and it’s a good bet that he will continue to appear on the DotY pages in years to come.

SJ Macdonald

• Ezra and Nehemiah (g)
• Inventors of the South Tigris (g)

Macdonald is Shem Phillip’s frequent co-designer and worked with him on both Ezra and Inventors.  That’s impressive enough to earn him a Designer of the Year nomination, but naturally, he won’t be competing for the award since Phillip’s third game gives him a leg up.  But it was still a fine year for Sam and it’s great to see him earn his first DotY mention.

So that’s the full list.  Some years, I have a good idea going into the preparation for the article who is likely to win (although it doesn’t always play out that way after I finish up my research).  This year, though, I had no clue who the leading contenders would be.  In the end, even though I had to analyze things more closely than I usually do, I was able to identify a clear winner.  So it is with great pleasure that I announce that the Designer of the Year for 2024 is…

REINER KNIZIA

I knew Knizia had his usual enormous collection of games, but his large number of redesigns made me question whether it truly was a great year for him.  My detailed write-up for him is a reflection of the somewhat tortured process I went through to convince myself that, even with those recycled titles, there was an awful lot of good design work that went into them.  Not to mention the highly rated original designs that have already earned some award attention.  When you produce more than two dozen games, and they include well regarded originals and quality redesigns, that’s a strong indicator you’re the year’s best designer.

So congratulations to the Good Doctor who, as it turns out, somewhat easily wins his eighth DotY award, which is simply a breathtaking achievement.  Second place goes to Tomas Holek, for his terrific debut of SETI and two other solid games.  Rob Daviau finishes third, for his excellent collection of redesigns and spinoffs.  Lang finishes fourth, fifth place goes to Hayashi (based on my assumption that Bomb Busters will win the SdJ and maybe a few other awards), and the sixth spot goes to Phillips.

Thanks for tuning in.  I’m already thinking about how 2025 is shaping up.  You know Knizia will once again have a huge portfolio—will it be enough to give him win #9!!??  Will someone else from this year beat him out?  Or will it be another new designer, who comes out of nowhere to capture our hearts and earn lasting immortality?  If you’re curious, check with us again next year and find out!