One of board gaming’s longest running and most prestigious awards, Germany’s Spiel Des Jahres (Game of the Year) cuts through the avalanche of releases to recognize unique, interesting, and generally accessible titles across three categories: Spiel Des Jahres, Kennerspiel Des Jahres (Expert Game of the Year), and Kinderspiel Des Jahres (Children’s Game of the Year). Below, we’ll look at the first two categories, excepting the Kinderspiel titles, which focuses on games for young children (though please click through and take a look at those if you have little ones at home, many of these games are brilliant).
So, to start, let’s look at the main Spiel Des Jahres category, which usually covers lighter euro-style games.
A Tile-Flipping Treasure Hunt
Tiles, pirates, and treasure. A simple recipe for a good gaming time, especially when cooked up by designers Paolo Mori and Remo Conzadori. Captain Flip sees you drawing tiles from a bag and deciding whether to keep the tile face-up as you drew it, gaining the crew or bonuses depicted, or flip it for something (hopefully) better. The trick is that you must keep the flipped side, a simple risky choice that nonetheless creates exciting turns with minimal rules grit.
Every player board, of which there are four different types, offers four columns to place these tiles. You’ll fill them up, which ends the game, but as you go about dropping these tiles, you’ll trigger neat abilities. You might steal a point-generating treasure map from your neighbor, or drop a monkey to flip back a tile you’ve already placed, hoping you remember what’s on the other side.
At the game’s end, you’ll compare points earned from treasure, tiles, and synergies. You’ll tally up those points, declare a winner, and then everyone else has to swab the deck (I’m pretty sure that’s in the rules…).
As a half hour game with speedy play and just enough interaction to keep everyone involved, Captain Flip is a fun, easy to teach choice to bring to the table with up to five players, though its style makes it a great two-player tile dueler too.
Just don’t let your partner get enough gunners to blow you out of the game.
Airplanes and Dice Make Co-Op Spice
Some board games treat the theme as an afterthought, a way to pick some artwork and little else. Not Sky Team (Luc Rémond). Putting you and a pal in the shoes of a passenger jet’s pilot and co-pilot, this tight co-op puts your mind meld to the test as you roll dice and react to one another’s placement all without talking. Sure, in between rolling rounds, you can shout about the need to close the flaps or radio air traffic control to get those other worthless planes out of the way, but once those dice hit the table, you’ll need to keep quiet and hope your worried eyes get the job done.
Sky Team has you placing those dice in various spots based on what you roll. The board offers up some shared elements—you can both drop dice to keep
the plane aligned, say—but each player has their own personal, required pieces too. The flaps, for example, are reserved for the co-pilot to handle, which drives tension. Looking across the table at your buddy’s roll, you might want to use that three to drop the landing gear just a bit more, but with straight sixes sitting on your buddy’s side, that three might be better spent keeping the plane from spinning sideways into some mountains.
Like Captain Flip, Sky Team plays fast. Half an hour or less will see you landing successfully or, you know, not. Because it’s a co-op game, Sky Team comes with tons of scenarios, increasing difficulty and adding side objectives, stretching your resources ever thinner. Despite its cheery art, Sky Team is a serious endeavor, one that requires you to plan ahead while working with the rolls you get (or use the funny coffee chips to tweak the dice) to land the plane.
Sky Team is a complete package. The component quality, box size, and tight scenario design make the game playable just about anytime, anywhere. The rules are simple to explain, with tons of depth. Going silent during the actual play kills the quarterbacking problem that always threatens co-op gaming, so you have to trust your partner (and they have to trust you) to get it right, just like a real pilot.
But if you crash here, at least, resetting the board for another try will take about ten seconds.
A Biologist’s Board Game
Continuing the ship and tile themes of Captain Flip comes the comparatively kinder In the Footsteps of Darwin (Grégory Grard, Matthieu Verdier). You and your fellow table mates take on the role of naturalists helping the famed scientist write On the Origin of Species, which you’ll do by picking tiles and guiding Darwin’s ship from island to island. The tiles you’ll be choosing go into your personal notebooks, scoring points and other bonuses depending on matching 
types, symbols, and other details. It’s set collection with neat animals and a side of science. After picking and scoring, The Beagle will sail along a few spots and give the next player their options.
If that all sounds rather pleasant, congratulations: you’re the target audience for this light, enjoyable game of combo scoring. If you want to add in a bit of evolution’s nastier tricks, you can certainly pick tiles with an eye towards sending The Beagle to a spot with nothing to offer the next player, but In the Footsteps of Darwin does its best to keep things congenial, giving guide tokens to get folks out of tough spots to the tiles they want.
For a game that won’t last more than an hour, though, In the Footsteps of Darwin gives you a pretty production, an enjoyable theme, and just enough puzzle-matching crunch to keep you engaged from start to finish. It’s an excellent choice to help onboard newer board gamers into the hobby, or for you and a partner to play on a nice night in.
Stopping Climate Change Together
The Kennerspiel category ups the complexity of its games—though we’re still talking more accessible titles here, the heaviest euros and war games need not apply—and kicks off with Matt Leacock’s Daybreak. Having achieved board game immortality after designing Pandemic, Leacock’s follow-up trades crippling disease for crippling climate change while keeping the co-op.
In Daybreak, you’re each controlling a world power struggling with their carbon emissions. You have people and they need power, and that energy comes
from clean and dirty sources. The more carbon you pump out every turn, the faster the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius, which means you (and your friends) all lose. To stop that awful fate, you have actions and cards to spend planting trees, developing clean energy tech, or drafting brilliant laws to keep pollution under wraps.
If you’ve played Pandemic and other cooperative games, Daybreak is going to feel familiar, but in a good way. You’ll try to create society-salving combos to grow population and supply energy, often meeting one by throwing the other out of balance, and thus have to adapt. There’s more randomness at play here too, with weather dictating dice and variable crisis cards, keeping quarterbacking at bay. It’s all wrapped in a beautiful production that eases people into playing with clear icons, bright colors, and helpful player aids.
In other words, if you’re looking for a fresh medium-weight cooperative game to bring to the table, Daybreak’s one to check out.
Expand, Explore, and Score
Ever play Catan? Did you build some roads in your game? What about a game, say, that revolves around building those roads? The Guild of Merchant Explorers (Matthew Dunstan, Brett J. Gilbert) takes Catan’s hexagon terrain and splits it between beautiful maps and a deck of cards, each one depicting terrain types. You and your opponents will be tasked with common objectives and a more global desire to build more cities, each of which will act as a starting point in future rounds, much like Catan’s towns.
See, when you flip a card depicting, say, a mountain, you and everyone else can expand your network by dropping a road on that mountain. If you aren’t adjacent to any mountains, though . . . Tough. Which is why it’s important to expand into varied terrain, especially as most common objectives require (and this is shocking, I know) exploring rather than staying put. At the end of every round, all those fresh routes are removed, leaving only the cities you founded as clear evidence of your expedition alacrity, or lack thereof.
There are other wrinkles here, like occasional special powers, but that’s the crux of the game. Simultaneous play, route building to preserve flexibility, and constant choices make The Guild of Merchant Explorers a good decision if you have some Ticket to Ride, Catan, or other line drawing lovers in your gaming group. There’s also a solid solo mode here, perfect for a bit of bite with your morning coffee.
Ticket to Ride, Supersized.
You either die a one shot or live long enough to become a campaign.
Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West grants the card-collecting, route building game a 12-round campaign, and brings in designers Rob Daviau (Risk Legacy) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Daybreak(!)) to work with the legendary Alan R. Moon (Ticket to Ride, among others). Unlike the standard Ticket to Ride games, with Legends of the West, you’ll be working your way across the North American continent, building routes from the east to west coasts. Every game brings your journey a little further west while adding new surprises, challenges, and the opportunity to cut your opponents off while cackling like a mad rail baron.
Beyond the changing boards, Legends of the West sprinkles mini-games, session-specific rules, and light powers around, letting each player grow into their role.
Scoring is also tweaked, removing the game-slowing point counting for every route completed into a simpler endgame. The narrative is slim, keeping you focused on the gameplay—as I’m not sure anyone asked for a Ticket to Ride novel, this is a smart move, particularly as Legends of the West is great for families where playing time is at a premium.
Each of the 12 sessions is around the length of a regular Ticket to Ride game, and the experience does require the same players throughout. This is, like many campaign games, best ventured into with a committed group. That said, it’s not Frosthaven. A holiday gift that could be played through over winter break, or a summer vacation story for rainy days, Legends of the West is a campaign sized for life. And, while the campaign itself isn’t replayable, at its conclusion you’ll have a custom Ticket to Ride board you can play on forevermore.
So if you’re looking for a family-friendly, lighter legacy experience and enjoy Ticket to Ride, Legends of the West ought to be at the top of your list.
An Award Worth Watching
In a hobby increasingly crowded with new releases and classics, the Spiel Des Jahres offers a discerning guide to anyone looking to expand their collection with solid, enjoyable titles largely played in an hour or two, even after learning the rules. The choices here make great gifts to new players, or those wanting innovative, quality additions to their shelf.
Just remember that getting nominated for the Spiel Des Jahres often drives a spike in sales, so if a title above catches your eye but isn’t in stock, add it to your want list and you’ll get notified the moment it returns. Don’t discount past Spiel Des Jahres nominees either if you’re looking for something new: the best board games never go out of style.
