Every year, Fairplay magazine conducts the a la carte award, in which their readers choose their favorite card game of the year. It’s one of my favorite of the gaming awards, as they’ve consistently rewarded excellent designs over the last 30 years. The results for 2022 were just announced and the winner is Scout. It’s been a very good award season for Kei Kajino’s excellent climbing game. The game was originally released in Japan by One More Game! in 2019, but the multilingual version from Oink Games had its worldwide release in October of 2021 and made an immediate impact. It received an SdJ nomination, finished in the top 10 in the DSP award, and also got a recommendation from the IGA’s. And now, it has an a la carte win to add to its trophy case.  Congratulations!
Here are the top 10 finishers in the voting, together with each game’s designer:
- Scout (Kei Kajino)
- Jekyll vs. Hyde (Geonil)
- 7 Wonders Architects (Antoine Bauza)
- Top Ten (Aurelien Picolet)
- Canopy (Tim Eisner)
- Imperium: Classics (Nigel Buckle, David Turczi)
- Voll verplant (Hisashi Hayashi)
- 7 Seas (Arve Fuhler)
- Kings & Creatures (Nicko Bohnke)
- Fort (Grant Rodiek)
The a la carte is the last of the 7 gaming awards that I follow closely to be announced, so let’s summarize the results from the past few months.
- SdJ Family:
- Spiel des Jahres – Cascadia
- Kennerspiel – Living Forest
- Kinderspiel – Magic Mountain
- DSP Family:
- Game of the Year – Ark Nova
- Best Children’s Game – Quacks & Co.
- IGA Family:
- Multiplayer – Carnegie
- Two Player – Ark Nova
- Solo – Cascadia
- Golden Geek Family:
- Light Game – Cascadia
- Medium Game – The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
- Heavy Game – Ark Nova
- Meeples Choice Awards:
- Ark Nova
- Cascadia
- The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
As you can see, the two dominant titles of the year are Ark Nova and Cascadia. Both feature animals, but other than that, they are about as different as two games can be!
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Mark’s Bundle of 2022 Essen Game Thoughts
Unless otherwise noted, these are FIRST impressions… I only had the opportunity to play most of these games a single time with a physical copy and four of my Opinionated Gamer friends. I’ve left out the older (read: non-2022) games we played to keep this Essen- and Tokyo Game Market-focused and noted where I was able to play a game more than once.
If you’re interested in my Essen (well, post-Essen) impressions from 2018, 2019, and 2020, you can find them at the following links. (I’m not sure why I didn’t do one of these in 2021.)
For those of you who haven’t read a lot of my reviews, they may give you a better insight into my board game tastes and what I’m likely to enjoy. (Which, of course, may or may not line up with your choices. Your mileage may vary.) I’m also linking to OG articles about the games when they are available.
After Playing 51 Different Games in 4.5 Days…
…I have some thoughts. Well, rules, I guess.
- 1. Publishers should have their rulebook and components blind playtested before approving for print.
- 2. Good iconography and clean presentation are more important than being artsy… not everyone has perfect eyesight and/or hi-tech lighting around their state of the art gaming table.
- 3. If your game is going to take 2+ hours of my life, it needs to tell a story and/or help me tell a story. I do not want to do mechanical stuff over and over to harvest points for that long.
- 4. If you’re not going to tell me a story, at the very least make sure your game has an arc to the game progression… rather than a flatline.
- 5. Stupid and fun is still worth playing.
- 6. Don’t be creepy. (I’m looking at you, Girl Glasses Collection.)
- 7. I will excuse a lot of weird design choices and even unclear rules if I’m having fun. If I’m not having fun, I don’t feel particularly charitable.
- 8. More people should take the chance to play with folks like Dale, John, Ryan, and James. It was a great weekend.
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