In case you missed the news over the weekend, the winners of Spiel des Jahres—the prestigious German Game of the Year award—were announced on Sunday, July 21. There are three prizes awarded every year: the Spiel des Jahres is an overall game of the year, the Kennerspiel is the “connoisseur’s game of the year,” and the Kinderspiel is the children’s game of the year.
The winner of the 2024 Spiel des Jarhes is Sky Team, a 2-player cooperative game by Luc Rémond from Scorpion Masqué about landing a plane. Alex Hart reviewed it back in November, giving it our GeekDad Approved seal. It’s a challenging game where you must get several systems switched on to the correct settings so that your plane reaches the ground at the same time it reaches the airport. There are several airports to play with increasingly challenging approaches.
Other nominations for the award were In the Footsteps of Darwin (which I reviewed earlier this year) and Captain Flip (which I hope to review soon.) In the Footsteps of Darwin is a set-collection game about recording different animal species in your journal. Captain Flip is a press-your-luck game about arranging various pirate characters on your board.
The SdJ jury also includes some “recommended” titles (think of them as runner-ups), and I noted a few others that we’ve reviewed here: Phantom Ink, Trekking Through History, and Trio.
The winner of the Kennerspiel des Jahres is Daybreak, a cooperative game by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace from CMYK. The goal is to work together to reach carbon drawdown before the global temperature increases too much. Players build card tableaus that rely on things like technologies, community efforts, and policies to reduce carbon emissions, while also managing various crises caused by climate change. This is another title on my list to review but I’ve enjoyed playing it and I like the message behind the game.
The other Kennerspiel nominations were Guild of Merchant Explorers and Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West. Guild of Merchant Explorers is a map-making game that has a little bit of the feel of a flip-and-write, as you create paths to various regions on your board. Ticket to Ride Legacy is, as the title implies, a legacy version of the classic train-building game, where you gradually expand across the United States and introduce new game rules as you go. I just recently finished playing through the campaign and have been gathering my thoughts about it.
Finally, the winner of the Kinderspiel is Magic Keys by Markus Slawitschek and Arno Steinwender from Happy Baobab, about trying to find the right keys to open the treasure chest and collect the gems. I’ll confess that I haven’t played any of the games in the children’s category myself, so I can’t say much more about them. The nominated games were Große kleine Edelsteine (Big Little Gems) and Taco Kitten Pizza.
Congrats to all of the winners—definitely some great titles to check out if you’re looking for something for your next game night!
