Spiel des Jahres Week at The Opinionated Gamers ends today with our final ranking of the 45 games that have ever won the most impactful award in board gaming. 24 members of the OG voted with each person picking their 3 favorite games, 3 least favorite games, and any number of other SDJ winners that they enjoyed and would like to play again in the future. You’ve heard about our favorites and least favorites this week, but for the finale we developed a scoring system to rank all 45 games.
We awarded 3 points for each favorite game, plus 1 point for each game that was enjoyed, and minus 1 point for each least favorite vote. We broke ties based on how many people had played the game and did not want to play it again (which is short-handed below as a “meh” vote) and further ties based on how many people had tried the game. This resulted in one clear winner, only one game receiving a negative score, and our collective ranking of the SDJ awardees to date as we prepare ourselves to find out in the coming weeks which game will be crowned as the 46th recipient of the Spiel des Jahres.
Spiel des Jahres Week at The Opinionated Gamers takes a detour on this penultimate day of the week to explore and rank the 13 winners of the Kennerspiel des Jahres. The Kennerspiel debuted in 2011 to honor Antoine Bauza and 7 Wonders as the new “connoisseur” or “expert” game of the year. This formalized an occasional practice of honoring more complicated games, like the Special Award for “Complex Game” for Caylus (2005) and Agricola (2008). The Spiel des Jahres jury has indicated that the Kennerspiel award honors games that present more of a challenge and that are meant for a more experienced audience. 22 members of the Opinionated Gamers voted to select our favorite KdJ winner, our least favorite KdJ winner, and any other KdJ winners that we enjoyed and would like to play again.
Most Loved
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
Runners Up:
Quacks of Quedlinburg
Istanbul
7 Wonders
The Crew from 2019 emerged victorious in a tight race with 4 votes as the most beloved Kennerspiel winner, followed closely by 3 votes for each of Quacks of Quedlinburg, Istanbul, and 7 Wonders. Challengers netted 2 votes as the best KdJ game, followed by a single vote for each of Exit, Isle of Skye, Legends of Andor, and Village. There were zero votes for Broom Service, Living Forest, Wingspan, or Paleo.
Talia Rosen: Given how much my fellow Opinionated Gamers seem to talk about trick-taking (and climbing) card games, I’m not surprised to see The Crew emerge victorious. And I do love playing The Crew repeatedly with a good group, although I’d always rather play Karl Heinz-Schmiel’s brilliant Was Sticht or Stefan Dorra’s criminally-underrated Njet. That being said, a cooperative trick-taking game is an unsurprising breakout star and an entirely reasonable game to crown as the collective OG favorite among the 13 Kennerspiel winners. Personally, I voted for Village (although I strongly considered voting for Living Forest or Wingspan). I think the worker aging mechanism in Village is very clever and ahead of its time, and I just have a soft spot for Inka and Markus Brand designs (especially the phenomenal La Boca).
James Nathan: One of the trick-taking crew here. Just chiming in to say that I did not vote for The Crew as my most loved – though certainly one I’d happily play anytime. Also, if given the option to vote for Agricola as one of the proto-KdJ winners – I would have! I adore that game. I did, though, vote for Legends of Andor. I think my reputation for playing quirky, lighter, indie card games might not cause you to think I’d be the Andor guy, but I’m an evangelist for this game. For me, it’s at such a sweet spot of mixing logistics puzzle, monster fighting, and whimsy. I cannot imagine the last time I owned another “roll dice and fight monsters” game, but I also think that’s just a veneer here. To overview, Legends of Andor is a cooperative game based on scenarios. Your cohort generally has around 14 turns to beat the current setup, with each round being a letter of the alphabet (beginning on A and ending on N). Certain events are seeded at different letters; when the timer gets to E, reveal this card, and when it gets to H, reveal this here other card. Maybe that E card is 1 of 3 chosen at random. Sometimes that E card is “here’s a bunch of new monsters” but sometimes it is “this farmer wants you to deliver this letter to the forest before turn K”. I love going on these sidequests! But one of the places it shines is that you can’t simply kill all the monsters, as it affects the timing. Each monster you kill knocks 1 turn off of the length of the game – giving you less time to get your letter delivered. So you need to be judicious. Oh, and roll well. Oh, and if you don’t kill some, they’ll overrun the castle. I think the game’s appearance leads you to think it’s 90% battling monsters, but for me it’s 70% logistics puzzle and 30% battling monsters, and I love it so much.
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.”
Spiel des Jahres Week at The Opinionated Gamers continues today with discussion of our favorite winners of the award of all time. Since the first SdJ was awarded to Hare & Tortoise in 1979, there have been 45 games to win the award so far. To evaluate those games, 23 members of the OG each picked our three favorite games to have ever won the award. We present to you our most loved SdJ winners:
However, to complicate the picture, while we only let each person pick their three favorite SdJ winners of all time, we also let each person pick as many other games that they liked or enjoyed and would like to play again sometime. A few of these games that were nobody’s favorite, were in fact enjoyed by many folks who want to play them again in the future. In fact, Alhambra and Thurn & Taxis each received 15 votes, meaning over 65 percent of voters are fans of these two games. Not far behind were Keltis and Um Reifenbreite (13 votes each), Kingdomino (12), Cascadia (11), and Bluff, Adel Verpflichtet, and Scotland Yard (10).
Talia Rosen: My favorite of these 21 least loved SdJ winners is definitely Cascadia, followed by Alhambra, Kingdomino, and Um Reifenbreite. I held off on even trying Cascadia for a while because of all the criticism I heard, but I eventually checked it out from my local public library and really enjoyed it. I think the decisions on each turn of which tile and animal to take are interesting and often difficult. I’m looking for games with challenging and meaningful decisions, and I think this game delivers that remarkably well. None of these are my all-time favorite SdJ winners, but I think they are solid games that I’m happy to own and play from time to time.
Dale Yu: My favorite of the unloved would be Scotland Yard, but I think that is a lot of nostalgia as it was one of my first “euro-games”. Well, when I first got the game, I had no idea what Euro-games were; this was an American version. Of the rest, Thurn and Taxis would be my pick, narrowly missing my top 3 choices.
Welcome to Spiel des Jahres Week here at the Opinionated Gamers! We will be celebrating and discussing the biggest award in board gaming all week long. Today, we will start with the new 2024 nominees that were just announced a few days ago. The winners will be announced next month on July 21, but in the meantime, we took a quick poll among OG members to predict the outcome. Today we’ll share our predictions for which games will win, as well as our favorites among the nominees and a bit of commentary on the 2024 Spiel des Jahres.
Check back tomorrow for the results from a poll conducted across 23 members of the Opinionated Gamers to determine our favorite SDJ winners of all time. The award has been given to 45 games since its inception in 1979, and we’ll share our collective favorites from among those winners tomorrow. Later in the week, we will discuss our “not for me” games among all of the award’s recipients, as well as a special focus on the Kennerspiel on Thursday, and we will close out the week on Friday with a grand finale ranking that you won’t want to miss. So stick with the Opinionated Gamers for Spiel des Jahres Week!
Spiel des Jahres Nominees
Captain Flip – 10 votes
Sky Team – 6 votes
In the Footsteps of Darwin – 0 votes
Captain Flip is the overwhelming favorite among OG members to win the 2024 Spiel de Jahres next month! With over 62% of the votes, we are collectively projecting that Paolo Mori and Remo Conzadori’s design for PlayPunk will snag board gaming’s grand prize this year. As you’ll see below, the big debate is over whether a two-player game (Sky Team) can win Germany’s family game award. While Sky Team has received rave reviews from several of the SDJ jury members, the game cannot be played together by a family, so it will be fascinating to see if it can emerge victorious next month. Most OG members think not, but a few brave souls are predicting a win for Sky Team. Are their personal preferences coloring their predictions? We also took a poll to determine OG members’ personal favorite among the nominees and Sky Team won in a landslide followed by In the Footsteps of Darwin. So while we collectively expect Captain Flip to win the award, we collectively rank it last among our favorites of the nominees.
Well, it’s June, which means it’s time for the beginning of summer, Father’s Day, and…board game award nominations! The latest to announce its finalists is the Jogo do Ano, the Portuguese Game of the Year award, as determined by the game club Spiel Portugal. This award, which goes back to 2006, tends to focus exclusively on heavier games, which distinguishes it from most of the other annual game awards, which often feature lighter designs. Five games have been nominated; here they are, together with their designers and publishers:
Evacuation (Vladimir Suchy) – Delicious Games
Hegemony (Vangelis Bagiartakis, Varnavas Timotheou) – Hegemonic Project Games
