Time to finish out the week with yet another look at our favorite games from some leading designers. Today, we shine the spotlight on Matt Leacock, Michael Schacht, and the team of Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga—aka, the Splotter designers. A total of 58 people participated in the voting.

Matt Leacock
The first significant design released by Leacock (in 2008) was a little game I like to call Pandemic. Its massive popularity ensured that cooperative games were here to stay. Matt has released dozens of well regarded games since then, both co-ops and competitive titles, and he’s as popular as ever today.

The big grouping question with Leacock was what to do with the many Pandemic spinoffs, including titles like Iberia and Fall of Rome. I decided to keep them separate. Just as I did with Rob Daviau, I grouped the three Pandemic Legacy games together. Here are his top 10 games:

1. Pandemic – 25
1. Pandemic Legacy (all) – 25
3. LotR: Fate of the Fellowship – 21
3. Roll Through the Ages (both) – 21
5. Daybreak – 14
6. Forbidden Island – 9
7. Ticket to Ride Legacy – 5
8. Pandemic: Rising Tide – 4
8. Thunderbirds – 4
10. Era – 3
10. Iberia – 3

Lots to look at here. First are the base results, where Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy finished in a dead heat. Next, Matt’s top 4 games all received over 20 votes; he’s the first designer in our exercise to achieve that (or even come particularly close). Fate of the Fellowship is last year’s highest rated game, so I’m not too surprised to see the support it received. I didn’t necessarily expect to see Roll Through the Ages there, even though it’s a very clever design. But, obviously, the voting is very top-heavy—the top 4 games got almost two thirds of all of the votes and the top 6 got over 80%, which is pretty crazy.

Leacock has probably done as much to popularize cooperative games as any designer and that shows in our rankings. 7 of his top 9 games are co-ops and over three quarters of our votes went toward cooperatives. Overall, more than 55% of our votes went to Pandemic or games inspired by it. (His other big series, the Forbidden games, got less than 10% of the votes.) Roll Through the Ages shows that there’s more than one arrow in Matt’s quiver, but co-ops are clearly his bread and butter.

Overall, 17 of Leacock’s games got at least one vote. His designs got a total of 142 votes from our participants.

Michael Schacht
Next up is Michael Schacht. He came to prominence with a series of lighter games in the late 90’s, with his first significant hit being Web of Power in 2000. He’s continued to release games, but, to be honest, most of his output from the past 15 years or so has been mild redesigns of his earlier stuff.

There was considerable debate about how to handle the various versions of Web of Power. Eventually, we decided to group together all of them: WoP, China, Han, and Iwari. These games were released over a 20 year period, but we decided they were basically versions of the same system. With that decided, here are Schacht’s top 10 games:

1. Web of Power/China/Han/Iwari – 39
2. Coloretto – 26
3. Hansa – 16
4. Zooloretto – 15
5. Valdora – 6
6. Magna Grecia – 5
7. Don – 4
7. Richelieu/Spirits of the Forest – 4
9. Africana – 3
9. Industria – 3
9. Shanghaien – 3

The Web of Power group is easily our favorite Schacht, with 50% more votes than the second place game, Coloretto. Just as with Leacock, there are four games which are head and shoulders above the rest. A lot of his games got some support though, as 22 titles got at least one vote.

Since we grouped together all the Web of Power games, it’s not unreasonable to look at all the games influenced by his classic Coloretto. Three games in the “-retto” family were mentioned (Aquaretto was the third one, with only one vote) and they got just about 30% of all of our votes, 3 votes more than was cast for the WoP games. It’s also clear that we greatly prefer Schacht’s lighter titles. I would include Hansa, Magna Grecia, Industria, and Dschunke as Michael’s meatier games and they only got about one sixth of the votes—in fact, Dschunke got shut out.

A lot of Schacht’s games got light support. 22 of his games got a mention and exactly half of those received only 1 or 2 votes. That seems to be indicative of a designer with a small number of hits, but with a bunch of other games that appeal to at least some gamers. His titles received a total of 142 votes.

Among my personal Schacht favorites (other than Web of Power, which I knew would do well), I was pleased to see Hansa get a healthy vote total. I was also happy that Don, Industria, Shanghaien, and Mogul (which just missed the top 10) get some support. I wasn’t too shocked that Dschunke missed out (it’s a very opaque game and that’s not to everyone’s tastes), but I was a little surprised that no one voted for Crazy Chicken. It’s light, but quite clever and fun to play and has been reprinted and rethemed several times.

Splotter
Finally, let’s look at the games of one of the truly niche publishers, Splotter Spellen. We included all of the games produced by them, but the vast majority of them are Doumen and Wiersinga working solely together. The only exceptions that got votes are Pandemic: Rising Tide (a joint design between Doumen and Matt Leacock) and D’raf (which was created by Wiersinga and Herman Haverkort, one of the original Splotter partners).

Jeroen and Joris have only designed about 20 games, so it isn’t too surprising that we gave votes to just a dozen of them, with a total of 128 votes between them all. Here are all the Splotter games which received votes:

1. Roads & Boats – 22
2. Food Chain Magnate – 21
2. Indonesia – 21
4. Bus – 20
5. Antiquity – 17
6. The Great Zimbabwe – 14
7. Pandemic: Rising Tide – 5
8. Cannes – 4
9. D’raf – 1
9. Duck Dealer – 1
9. Horseless Carriage – 1
9. Ur: 1830 BC – 1

Amazingly, we once again have an election where the top four games each got at least 20 votes. There was probably more concentration for the Splotter titles than for any other poll we’ve conducted so far. Six games received double digits vote totals, and yet the difference between 1 and 6 was only eight votes. Roads & Boats, their first big hit, barely came out on top. FCM and Indonesia was no surprise, but I didn’t expect to see Bus right behind them; I’m pretty sure the new edition that came out a couple of years ago helped with that. There was a sharp dropoff between the top sextet and the rest of their designs.

There’s not much else to say about the voting. We obviously greatly prefer the very heavy games that Splotter is best known for, as opposed to their occasional lighter games (most of which came very early in their output). There was one surprising result: Horseless Carriage only got 1 vote. I realize it’s the most recent Splotter game (well, other than Bailiff of Biscoop, which hasn’t been released yet), but it did come out three years ago, which you’d think would have given people enough time to try it. I don’t know, maybe it takes time for such detailed designs to gain a following. I’m also a bit surprised that Food Chain Magnate, which is far and away their top ranked game on the Geek, didn’t wind up on top. It obviously did well, but I would have expected something better than what was virtually a 4-way tie for first place. Taking these two data points together, it does seem as if our voters have a slightly stronger preference for the older Splotter games than the gamers weighing in on the Geek.

I’ve already shown all of the Splotter games that got votes, so I’ll finish with a complete listing for both Leacock and Schacht. We’ll be back on Monday, when we detail our favorites from Bruno Cathala, Friedemann Friese, and Tom Lehmann!

Matt Leacock
1. Pandemic – 25
1. Pandemic Legacy (all) – 25
3. LotR: Fate of the Fellowship – 21
3. Roll Through the Ages (both) – 21
5. Daybreak – 14
6. Forbidden Island – 9
7. Ticket to Ride Legacy – 5
8. Pandemic: Rising Tide – 4
8. Thunderbirds – 4
10. Era – 3
10. Iberia – 3
12. Chariot Race – 2
12. Forbidden Desert – 2
14. Fall of Rome – 1
14. Forbidden Jungle – 1
14. Lunatix Loop – 1
14. Pandemic: The Cure – 1

Michael Schacht
1. Web of Power/China/Han/Iwari – 39
2. Coloretto – 26
3. Hansa – 16
4. Zooloretto – 15
5. Valdora – 6
6. Magna Grecia – 5
7. Don – 4
7. Richelieu/Spirits of the Forest – 4
9. Africana – 3
9. Industria – 3
9. Shanghaien – 3
12. Bull in a China Shop – 2
12. Fist of Dragonstones – 2
12. Kardinal & Konig: Das Kartenspiel – 2
12. Lucky Numbers – 2
12. Mogul – 2
12. Mondo – 2
12. Paris Paris – 2
19. Aquaretto – 1
19. InterUrban – 1
19. Patrician – 1
19. The Golden City – 1