The Japan Boardgame Prize is an annual award sponsored by U-more, an organization whose goal is to spread the culture of board games in Japan. There are two different awards each year. The “U-more award” is chosen by a jury from the organization and is aimed at more introductory games, while the “Voting award” is based on the picks from the general public, who can vote for their favorites on the U-more website.
This year, for some strange reason, many of the winning and nominated games were originally released outside of Japan many years ago. The preponderance of them in one year appears to be purely coincidental, but is interesting nonetheless.
The winner of the U-more award is Wild Vikings, a children’s bidding game that was originally released as Wilde Wikinger by Haba in 2008. It was designed by Wolfgang Dirscherl, a veteran designer of kid’s games. Among the other nominated games is Mister Diamond, a Gunter Baars memory game which was first published in 1993!
The results in the Voting award were extremely close, with aiue battle, which is kind of a multiplayer Hangman game by Kazunari Yonemitsu, just edging out Harmonies, Faraway, Rikka, and Slay the Spire. Sixth place went to Dorado, a Rudi Hoffman game first released in 1974! And finishing ninth is the Japanese version of Acquire!!!
Here are the winning and nominated games, together with their designers. Congratulations to all concerned!
U-MORE AWARD
- Winner: Wild Vikings (Wolfgang Dirscherl)
- Nominated: aiue battle (Yonemitsu Kazunari)
- Nominated: Mister Diamond (Gunter Baars)
- Nominated: Rikka (Hashimoto Atsushi)
VOTING AWARD
- aiue battle (Yonemitsu Kazunari) – 52 points
- Harmonies (Johan Benvenuto) – 51 points
- Faraway (Corentin Lebrat, Johannes Goupy) – 49 points
- Rikka (Hashimoto Atsushi) – 47 points
- Slay the Spire (Gary Dworetsky, Anthony Giovannetti, Casey Yano) – 46 points
- Dorado (Rudi Hoffman)
- Coffee Rush (Euijin Han)
- Sky Team (Luc Remond)
- Acquire (Sid Sackson)
- Mister Diamond (Gunter Baars)
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Trick-Taking Week 2025: Most Beautiful
This is the continuation of Trick-Taking Week 2025, where I’ll be posting trick-taking related content all week. We here at The Opinionated Gamers love trick-taking games, and as I wrote two years ago, many of the writers in this group have contributed to the growth in the mechanic’s popularity in recent years.
The showpiece this year is a set of four different top 10 lists, which I assembled by gathering votes from OG writers and various trick-taking designers, publishers, convention hosts, and content creators.
Today’s list is of ten “beautiful” games of the trick-taking genre. To me, artists and publishers deserve more credit than they often get in this side of the hobby, so I wanted to highlight beautiful productions.
I posted a greatest hits list on Sunday, and the “hidden gems” list yesterday. The last list — the “most innovative” list — will be published tomorrow.
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