I wouldn’t say I don’t follow board game awards at all, but they don’t really define my relationship with board games—nor my buying habits. Of course, Spiel des Jahres is the baseline, it’s good to stay up to date with it. Although honestly, I think anyone who follows it now should also be familiar with the winners from the ’80s, because it’s fascinating to see where board gaming started and how far it has come.

Looking at the past ten years, I realized there are actually two winners I’ve never played—simply because they never attracted me, and I never happened to run into them (Just One, Pictures). Then there are a couple I’ve played quite a lot but that never became true favorites (Colt Express, Codenames). And then there are the real gems for me: Kingdomino and Azul. These two I’ve played the most, and I also consider them professionally outstanding.

Of course, the occasion for this blog post is that this year’s winner has just been announced. But what’s really interesting for me right now is that our home gaming table has mostly been about the winners from two years ago and this year (Dorfromantik, Bomb Busters), so I’ve developed an opinion on both. (Last year, by the way, we also reflected a bit on Sky Team here on the blog.)

Let’s start with Dorfromantik, because we’ve already passed 10 plays and are making steady progress through the campaign. My 8-year-old daughter got really hooked on it—right away she compared it to Carcassonne, but what truly excited her was unlocking and opening the boxes, the whole campaign aspect. And with that, she basically summed up the entire game. Without any prompting, she came to the exact same conclusion I’ve felt all along: the game doesn’t benefit from getting more complex.

Personally, I don’t think anything should be compared to Carcassonne. That’s a classic, elegant design that we’ve admired and played for 25 years, one that has contributed a lot to the evolution of modern board games. But Dorfromantik illustrates really well that more, bigger, and more complex does not automatically mean better. As you progress, the game doesn’t become more exciting—it becomes more cumbersome. The ideas are clever, but they simply choke the fun out of the experience.

Of course, Dorfromantik tried to innovate with its campaign mode. It didn’t want to be just another tile-laying game, because in that department it didn’t bring much that was new. The novelty was meant to be in the layering and combining of mechanics, and since it’s all put together in such a polished way, it’s no wonder the game was a success and earned the award. And that’s completely understandable.

(Left hand doing rural development, right hand pushing the swing.)

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that aside from a couple of comfortable new elements, what the game really added was just more hassle—setup, gameplay, and scoring all became more cumbersome. We’re roughly halfway through the campaign now; at first we were playing 2–3 games a day, but by now it’s dropped to about once a week.

Buying Bomb Busters was a spur-of-the-moment decision.
I disliked the whole thing so much that I had to buy it. Sometimes it happens. After all, I work with board games, I can’t afford to be that prejudiced—there must have been a reason it won an award.

Still, neither the illustrations, nor the theme, nor the mechanics appealed to me. Obviously, that’s a tough starting point for a game, and not all walls could be broken down. With just two players, I really didn’t enjoy learning the game. For something so simple, the rulebook is surprisingly unintuitive. And for something so simple, the setup is surprisingly fiddly. On top of the artwork, the component quality drove me crazy too.

Here, my opinion is actually objective and professional: with the original trays, the game is practically unplayable. And while I’ve seen a lot of clever solutions from insert makers, it annoys me when I have to spend extra money on a game.

The gameplay itself was much more convincing with four players: smart, full of good ideas, and I’m sure it will come back to the table again—but it won’t become a favorite. I’m basically a fan of simplicity. I don’t feel the theme in the game, and to me the product development is just a series of missed shots. If this had been a simple, clever, good-looking card game, I would have loved it.

As it stands, I’m not sure where to place it on the Spiel des Jahres shelf. But hey, that happens sometimes.

(The kids are already asleep. Extra motivation not to blow ourselves up…)