With the announcement yesterday of the Meeples Choice Awards results, the last of the 2020 primary and secondary Game of the Year awards have now been set. So this seems like a good time to summarize which titles have been honored by the various awards over the course of the year.

• SdJ Family:
  • Spiel des Jahres – MicroMacro: Crime City
  • Kennerspiel – Paleo
  • Kinderspiel – Dragomino

• DSP – Lost Ruins of Arnak

• IGA Family:
  • Multiplayer – Lost Ruins of Arnak
  • Two Player – My City
  • Solo – Under Falling Skies

• a la carte (best card game) – Fantasy Realms

• Golden Geek Family:
  • Light Game – MicroMacro: Crime City
  • Medium Game – Lost Ruins of Arnak
  • Heavy Game – Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

• Dice Tower – The Crew

• Meeples Choice Awards:
  • Beyond the Sun
  • Lost Ruins of Arnak
  • Dune: Imperium

Clearly, the most honored game of the year was Lost Ruins of Arnak. It took two major awards (the DSP and IGA), got an SdJ nomination, and also won the Golden Geek and MCA awards. In addition, it won the Dice Tower Best Strategy game category, giving it very close to a clean sweep. Congratulations to designers Michaela Stachova and Michal Stach, as well as the entire creative team of publisher CGE, for coming up with a game that delighted so many of us.

Every year, Fairplay magazine conducts the a la carte award, in which their readers choose their favorite card game of the year.  This is a very good award, which consistently rewards excellent games.  The results for 2020 were recently announced and the winner is Fantasy Realms.  Even though this game was originally released by WizKids in 2017 in the English speaking world, this isn’t really a surprising result.  Strohmann Games released the game in Germany last October, and it’s been a big success since then.  It was a finalist for the Kennerspiel award and finished in the top 10 for the DSP award, so it was clearly one of the leading card games of the year.

The a la carte winner from 2019 was The Crew and the game’s sequel, The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, finished second this year.  So Thomas Sing and Kosmos almost had back to back titles with this series.

Here are the top ten finishers for the a la carte, together with the game’s designers.  More so than usual, there are a number of games that were released earlier than 2020 in the English speaking world that are honored this year for their German editions.  This is probably a trend that we’ll continue to see in future years.

1. Fantasy Realms (Bruce Glassco)
2. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea (Thomas Sing)
3. Point Salad (Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich)
4. The 7^th Continent (Ludovic Roudy, Bruno Sautter)
5. Riftforce (Carlo Bortolini)
6. Wild Space (Joachim Thome)
7. The Fox in the Forest (Joshua Buergel)
8. Kompromat (Rob Fisher, Adam Porter)
9. Spirits of the Wild (Nick Hayes)
10. Spukstaben (Moritz Dressler)