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
When we last left our intrepid hero (aka me), he was sharing his exhaustive list of his 100 favorite games circa early 2024. (If you read all of Friday’s post, you’ll realize that “exhaustive” doesn’t quite cover it.)
Our protagonist (again, me) invited the rest of the Opinionated Gamers team to weigh in on the list… and they did! Thirty-four O.G. writers used the standard O.G. rating system:
I love it!
I like it
Neutral
Not for me
…to register their agreement, acquiescence, and/or disagreement with the choices.
I will now stop writing in the third person as it is as exhausting for me as it is irritating for you, gentle reader.
Not Everyone Plays The Same Games
This should not have been a surprise to me, but I was struck about how many of the O.G. team had missed out on playing a big chunk of my beloved games. Only about a third of the group had played 70 or more of the games on the list… and another third had played less than half.
In fairness, I’ve been in the hobby a long time – though it doesn’t show up much in my current list, I cut my “gamer” teeth on Avalon Hill/SPI wargames and AD&D. In the mid 1990s, I was an enthusiastic participant on rec.games.board (Usenet) and devoured the content Ken Tidwell was uploading to The Game Cabinet. (Fun fact: this month is the 30th anniversary of The Game Cabinet – one of the earliest sites on the Web and probably the earliest site specifically dedicated to board gaming.)
That means that there are a number of games in my top 100 that wouldn’t be easily accessible to someone who started into the board gaming hobby in the last decade or so:
The Island of Misfit Games
So, what games had the least exposure? I’ll list the top (ahem, bottom) ten here… and attempt explanations for each of them.
Monopoly: Tropical Tycoon DVD Game – 6% (published in 2007)
Even though this version of Monopoly is designed by Rob Daviau, it has two things that keep it from hitting most tables: (1) it’s DVD-driven [and the animation/humor is very dated], and (2) it’s Monopoly. As I’m not a Monopoly hater, that isn’t a problem – but I am working on creating a non-DVD version of the game so we can continue to enjoy this.
Dungeon Alliance – 12% (published in 2018)
I’m guessing that this low placement is a combination of theme (dungeon crawl) and crunchiness (it’s a long game with lots of think-y decisions)… and the fact that the game came from a smaller publisher.
Wildlands – 12% (published in 2018)
This Martin Wallace design does not feel like Brass or Tinner’s Trail… and the miniatures/art are less inviting to some groups of gamers.
Cape May – 15% (published in 2021)
A city-building game from a publisher primarily known for its fantasy games (the Roll Player universe).
Armageddon – 18% (published in 2016)
A criminally under-publicized release from Queen Games and a theme that could be off-putting for some (post-apocalyptic survival).
Im Reich der Wüstensöhne – 21% (published in 2008)
Only published in Germany with no official translated rules. (BTW, this used to be a MUCH more common practice… causing me to become experienced with Babelfish & Google Translate to supplement my fading memories of high school German class.)
Undaunted: Normandy – 24% (published in 2019)
A two-player wargame (yes, there are rules for 4 player games in the Reinforcements expansion… but it’s really a two-player game).
Harry’s Grand Slam Baseball Game – 24% (published in 1962, re-published in 2004)
Sports-themed + twenty years since it was last in print.
Voidfall – 24% (published in 2023)
Voidfall is relatively new (the KS just delivered in the fall of 2023)… but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It has a pretty massive set-up time and three rulebooks (well, two rulebooks and one glossary).
Nemo’s War – 26% (published in 2017)
It’s a solo game… and has definite ‘old skool’ wargame vibes.
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Six games on my top 100 list had been played by all of the O.G. folks:
7 Wonders
Catan
Ra
Race for the Galaxy
The Quacks of Quedlinberg
Ticket to Ride
And five more were played by all but one writer:
Can’t Stop
Innovation
Lost Cities
The Princes of Florence
Zooloretto
The Cool Kids Table
I devised a decidedly un-scientific way to convert the O.G. rating system to points in order to “rank” these responses… the details aren’t important, but the top seven games clearly stood out from the rest. If I was hosting an O.G. game night, these would go over really well:
Can’t Stop
Showmanager
Ra
Ticket to Ride
Lost Cities
Return to Dark Tower
Great Western Trail: New Zealand
The Outcasts
On the other hand, the bottom six games would not be welcome on O.G. game night:
Wildlands
CloudAge
Imperium: Classics
Core Worlds
Monopoly: Tropical Tycoon DVD Game
The Dragon & Flagon
And Then…
…there are the games that the group found (shall we say?) polarizing.
Ark Nova
Fresco
Innovation
Race for the Galaxy
Suburbia
Terraforming Mars
The Really Good News
I won’t go into specific detail about O.G. team member answers here – but I do want to note that some of the gamers I most enjoy sitting across the table from (and make a pilgrimage to spend time with on a regular basis) rated the absolute lowest in matching my top 100 tastes.
Here’s what that says to me – we enjoy playing together more than we obsess about playing exactly the right game. We find that games or styles of games we don’t particularly enjoy can be delightful when you’re playing with friends.
That’s why I love this hobby – at its best, it’s a chance not only to play some brilliantly designed games, it’s a chance to hang out with some (as our British friends would say) brilliant people.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I took a couple of local gamer friends with me to Gulf Games 3. We had an amazing time… and as we got in the car to drive home, my friend Buster looked at me and said: “You guys like to win, but you love to play.”
All these years later, that’s still the way I roll.
Thoughts From Other Opinionated Gamers
Talia Rosen: It was really fun to look through Mark’s Top 100 games and rate them on the O.G. scale, but the thing I was personally most struck by was how many of his Top 100 games I had never played. Of course there were the classics like Can’t Stop and Princes of Florence that I had played many times, but then there were many seemingly oddball games like the Monopoly DVD game that I’ve never even seen, let alone played. I suppose it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since my own Top 100 has lots of games that almost all other O.G. members do not like (such as Dominant Species, War of the Ring, and Before the Wind). My biggest takeaway from Mark’s list is that I want to try a bunch of these games with him! That’s the way I fell in love with War of the Ring, Through the Ages, and Antiquity… by playing them with fans of those games. I’m sure if I had an opportunity to learn Monopoly DVD or any of those other “misfit” games from Mark that it would be an absolute blast. What a fun and fascinating list!
Larry: Mark and I always joke about how different our tastes in games are. I like heavier games, whereas he goes by the monitor “Fluff Daddy” (because, at least in the past, he tended to prefer lighter stuff). So I wasn’t sure if I would match up too well with his favorites, but I was pleasantly surprised that we really weren’t at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Of his top 100, 9 were “Loves” for me, while only 3 rated as “Not for Me”, so that’s pretty good. Most of the games are somewhere in the middle, but that’s due more to my rating style–I don’t give very high or very low ratings to too many games. One thing that I’ll note–the top 7 games he cites as the ones that the OGers like the most are, at least in some cases, the ones that are the least objectionable. From my point of view, I’m always up for Can’t Stop and while I haven’t played GWT: New Zealand yet, I’d love to learn it. But of the others, they’re “sure, I can play that”, but I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about any of them. Again, with the exception of GWT, these are pretty light games, so that’s part of it. But for the games that I really love, I’m probably better off with a subset of the OGers, rather than the whole group. And that’s fine; I like playing with all these guys, so it’s always fun, regardless of the game. Well, maybe not Rum & Pirates! ;-)
Mary: I enjoyed going through Mark’s list of games – some brought back memories and/or reminded me how much I need to dig out and play old favorites. There were quite a few that I had played but it was so long ago that I didn’t remember if I liked them or not (I rated them “never played” since they would basically be new to me if I tried them again). I love half of the polarizing games; I think I was neutral on two and didn’t care for one. The outcasts were either not for me or I hadn’t played.
It wasn’t all a dream… there’s really more Heroscape coming.
Yes, I’ve already told you all about the stuff that’s coming in August 2024 (just 2 short months away!!!) – and now we know something about the plans of the good folks at Renegade Game Studios past that initial splash.
And while there aren’t any new master sets (yet), there’s still some nifty things on the way in October 2024. RenegadeCon (a virtual press conference about Renegade’s upcoming games) was held yesterday – and Jordan Gaeta & Lee Houoff shared all about the next wave!
Mark’s 100 vs The Opinionated Gamers
When we last left our intrepid hero (aka me), he was sharing his exhaustive list of his 100 favorite games circa early 2024. (If you read all of Friday’s post, you’ll realize that “exhaustive” doesn’t quite cover it.)
Our protagonist (again, me) invited the rest of the Opinionated Gamers team to weigh in on the list… and they did! Thirty-four O.G. writers used the standard O.G. rating system:
…to register their agreement, acquiescence, and/or disagreement with the choices.
I will now stop writing in the third person as it is as exhausting for me as it is irritating for you, gentle reader.
Not Everyone Plays The Same Games
This should not have been a surprise to me, but I was struck about how many of the O.G. team had missed out on playing a big chunk of my beloved games. Only about a third of the group had played 70 or more of the games on the list… and another third had played less than half.
In fairness, I’ve been in the hobby a long time – though it doesn’t show up much in my current list, I cut my “gamer” teeth on Avalon Hill/SPI wargames and AD&D. In the mid 1990s, I was an enthusiastic participant on rec.games.board (Usenet) and devoured the content Ken Tidwell was uploading to The Game Cabinet. (Fun fact: this month is the 30th anniversary of The Game Cabinet – one of the earliest sites on the Web and probably the earliest site specifically dedicated to board gaming.)
That means that there are a number of games in my top 100 that wouldn’t be easily accessible to someone who started into the board gaming hobby in the last decade or so:
The Island of Misfit Games
So, what games had the least exposure? I’ll list the top (ahem, bottom) ten here… and attempt explanations for each of them.
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Six games on my top 100 list had been played by all of the O.G. folks:
And five more were played by all but one writer:
The Cool Kids Table
I devised a decidedly un-scientific way to convert the O.G. rating system to points in order to “rank” these responses… the details aren’t important, but the top seven games clearly stood out from the rest. If I was hosting an O.G. game night, these would go over really well:
The Outcasts
On the other hand, the bottom six games would not be welcome on O.G. game night:
And Then…
…there are the games that the group found (shall we say?) polarizing.
The Really Good News
I won’t go into specific detail about O.G. team member answers here – but I do want to note that some of the gamers I most enjoy sitting across the table from (and make a pilgrimage to spend time with on a regular basis) rated the absolute lowest in matching my top 100 tastes.
Here’s what that says to me – we enjoy playing together more than we obsess about playing exactly the right game. We find that games or styles of games we don’t particularly enjoy can be delightful when you’re playing with friends.
That’s why I love this hobby – at its best, it’s a chance not only to play some brilliantly designed games, it’s a chance to hang out with some (as our British friends would say) brilliant people.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I took a couple of local gamer friends with me to Gulf Games 3. We had an amazing time… and as we got in the car to drive home, my friend Buster looked at me and said: “You guys like to win, but you love to play.”
All these years later, that’s still the way I roll.
Thoughts From Other Opinionated Gamers
Talia Rosen: It was really fun to look through Mark’s Top 100 games and rate them on the O.G. scale, but the thing I was personally most struck by was how many of his Top 100 games I had never played. Of course there were the classics like Can’t Stop and Princes of Florence that I had played many times, but then there were many seemingly oddball games like the Monopoly DVD game that I’ve never even seen, let alone played. I suppose it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since my own Top 100 has lots of games that almost all other O.G. members do not like (such as Dominant Species, War of the Ring, and Before the Wind). My biggest takeaway from Mark’s list is that I want to try a bunch of these games with him! That’s the way I fell in love with War of the Ring, Through the Ages, and Antiquity… by playing them with fans of those games. I’m sure if I had an opportunity to learn Monopoly DVD or any of those other “misfit” games from Mark that it would be an absolute blast. What a fun and fascinating list!
Larry: Mark and I always joke about how different our tastes in games are. I like heavier games, whereas he goes by the monitor “Fluff Daddy” (because, at least in the past, he tended to prefer lighter stuff). So I wasn’t sure if I would match up too well with his favorites, but I was pleasantly surprised that we really weren’t at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Of his top 100, 9 were “Loves” for me, while only 3 rated as “Not for Me”, so that’s pretty good. Most of the games are somewhere in the middle, but that’s due more to my rating style–I don’t give very high or very low ratings to too many games. One thing that I’ll note–the top 7 games he cites as the ones that the OGers like the most are, at least in some cases, the ones that are the least objectionable. From my point of view, I’m always up for Can’t Stop and while I haven’t played GWT: New Zealand yet, I’d love to learn it. But of the others, they’re “sure, I can play that”, but I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about any of them. Again, with the exception of GWT, these are pretty light games, so that’s part of it. But for the games that I really love, I’m probably better off with a subset of the OGers, rather than the whole group. And that’s fine; I like playing with all these guys, so it’s always fun, regardless of the game. Well, maybe not Rum & Pirates! ;-)
Mary: I enjoyed going through Mark’s list of games – some brought back memories and/or reminded me how much I need to dig out and play old favorites. There were quite a few that I had played but it was so long ago that I didn’t remember if I liked them or not (I rated them “never played” since they would basically be new to me if I tried them again). I love half of the polarizing games; I think I was neutral on two and didn’t care for one. The outcasts were either not for me or I hadn’t played.
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