EXIT: The Gate Between Worlds

• Designers: Inka Brand, Markus Brand, Ralph Querfurth
• Publisher: KOSMOS
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12 min
• Time: 1-2 hrs on box, 44 minutes IRL for 3 players
• Played with review copy provided by Thames&Kosmos

The EXIT series was one of the original puzzle-game franchises to hit the market when the escape room game craze took off a few years ago. To date, my family and I have been able to play all of the ones released here in the US, and this is a series that we continue to look forward to future installments. While there are many worthy competitors in the genre, the EXIT series is possibly the best known of the bunch – due in part to the initial set of games being awarded the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.

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You don’t need me to tell you how difficult a year 2020 was for most of us.  In addition to the health and financial issues so many had to deal with, it also affected our day to day activities in many ways, including gaming.  With lockdowns restricting face-to-face gaming for so many, the number of games released last year were less than usual and fewer of them got played regularly.  Still, games were published and each one of them had a designer.  So it should come as no surprise to you that no mere pandemic will keep us from bestowing our Designer of the Year Award for 2020!

The Designer of the Year (DotY) has been a regular feature on OG since we launched.  The idea is simple:  there are several jillion awards each year which honor the best game of the year, but not a single one that recognizes which designer had the best year.  So I’m here to fill that void—that’s me, a big void-filler.  This article will cite which designers I feel had the best calendar year in 2020 and I’ll select one of them as my DotY.  I usually post this in the February/March timeframe, but I decided to delay things a few months since the lockdown meant there was so little data to go on earlier in the year.  To be honest, there are still fewer ratings than usual (no surprise there), but I didn’t want to stall too long and I’m pretty confident that the data we do have is giving us an accurate picture of how popular last year’s games were.

Well, that’s all well and good, I can hear you saying (I have very sharp hearing), but what kind of games are we talking about?  Just about all of them.  Children’s games are excluded, as that’s a whole different set of designers, and I’m not that familiar with them anyway.  But just about everything else—boardgames, card games, dexterity games, Euros, thematic titles—is eligible.  I do exclude expansions, since they’re not really complete designs (although spinoffs, standalone expansions, and redesigns of previously published titles are included, albeit at a reduced weight).  But everything else a designer produces gets tossed into the pot and affects the final decision.

Mass Transit

• Designers: Chris Leder and Kevin Rodgers
• Publisher: Calliope Games
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Times played: 3, with review copy provided by Calliope Games

I will admit that one of my “holy grails” is finding a great transportation game.  One of the first games that I truly loved as a kid was Scotland Yard, and I fell in love with the idea of moving around the board using different modes of transport, etc.  Later, I tried to find and then later design the perfect cabbie game, moving around a city, picking up passengers and dropping them off at various different locations.  On the Underground was another game that I adored though you only walk and ride the Tube in that one…

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