Board game designers Reiner Knizia and Markus Slawitscheck both have a shot of completing an unprecedented series of wins at this year’s Spiel des Jahres – widely considered the highest profile awards in board gaming – after the 2026 nominations were unveiled earlier today.

The pair have already won two of the awards’ three categories in prior years – and the nominations of Slawitscheck’s Morty Sorty Magic Shop for the main prize, and Knizia’s Rebirth for the higher complexity Kennerspiel, could see either or both become the first designers in the awards’ 47-year history to complete the set.

Morty Sorty Magic Shop is up against Corey Konieczka’s Cozy Stickerville and Martin Ang’s Dito! – the German version of Jinxo – for this year’s Spiel des Jahres, while Rebirth is contending with Michael Palm and Lukas Zach design Boss Fighters QR and Donald X Vaccarino’s Moon Colony Bloodbath for the Kennerspiel.

This year’s children-focused Kinderspiel award will go to one of Boo Party, Mooki Island or Verflixt Verzaubert, the latter of which is also known as Mimose & Sam et le Voleur de Fruits.

Spiel des Jahres Association chairman Harald Schrapers said in a nominations livestream today that the jury looked at a record 571 games for this year’s awards, underscoring the sheer mass of games being released through retail.

The 440 titles reviewed across the Spiel and Kennerspiel categories was up 14% on last year, while the 92 games considered for the Kinderspiel marked a roughly 50% rise compared to the 61 from 2025. Another 39 titles were considered by judges across both the Spiel and Kinderspiel awards.

Despite those record numbers, Schrapers pointed out that just 2.3% of the games were from women designers, with male creators making up 94% of the cohort, and the rest being designed by mixed teams.

That figure has barely moved in recent years, having stood at 2% in 2025 and 2.6% in 2024 – an ongoing lack of diversity highlighted in great detail in this excellent feature by Wargamer’s Mollie Russell earlier this week.

Schrapers also emphasised that this year’s judging process had been a particularly frustrating one, with glaring flaws being present in even the standout designs.

He said, “It was a lot of fun, but there were also real shortcoming in many games.

“There are deficiencies in some games every year, of course – there are so many, not all of them are really good. Many are good, but as I said, not all of them.

But this time we noticed, especially with the outstanding games, i.e. the 10% best – I would say there were various games where there were various quite serious flaws. There were so many that I even wrote them down.”

He presented a list which included incomplete, ambiguous, and contradictory rules of the game, a lack of summaries, blatantly incorrect age information on boxes, and components which fail to function well in poor light or after a handful of games.

Schrapers said in a separate blog post about the process, “Despite these shortcomings, some titles made it onto the jury’s shortlist because the flaws were not so significant in relation to the outstanding gameplay.

“However, there were probably more than one work that failed to secure a majority in the jury vote due to such a deficiency.”

The livestream also drew attention to the nomination of Boss Fighters QR, and the long-listed design Toriki: The Castaway Island, as notable for requiring an app in order to play.

When asked by Spiel des Jahres deputy chairman Christoph Schlewinski whether that signified a growing trend within the hobby, Schrapers said, “No, I don’t think that’s a trend.

“They are two games that work very well with an app… the thing is that the app supports the analogue feeling in such a game. That’s why it’s an addition.”

He added, “I’m really sure that even in ten years, 90% or even more of all board games will work without a digital integration, because that’s exactly what people like.

“But an app also draws new people into this game. We notice it especially with young people that they often find this very , very good, it creates additional tension – and you can see that such a board game can also open up new audience groups.”

Hisashi Hayashi’s co-operative bomb disposal game Bomb Busters won last year’s Spiel des Jahres, beating the much-fancied push-your-luck card game Flip 7 to the high-profile award.

That victory meant the Spiel des Jahres has now been won by a co-operative game design in five out of the past seven years, following successes for Just One in 2019, MicroMacro: Crime City in 2021, Dorfromantik: The Board Game in 2023 and Sky Team last year.

Cozy Stickerville is the only nominee for the main prize this year which is a cooperative title.

Last year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres was won by Endeavor: Deep Sea – which also features a prominent co-op mode as a way to play the game – while the winner of the 2025 Kinderspiel was Wolfgang Warsch’s Topp die Torte.

Winning the Spiel des Jahres can explode sales by hundreds of thousands of copies for the winner – and by thousands of copies for the nominees.

While publishers tend to keep tight-lipped about actual sales figures, Pegasus Spiel co-founder Karsten Esser told BoardGameWire in a 2023 interview that winning the main prize can boost a game’s sales by 10x to 20x in the months following, due to a slew of exposure across mainstream German shopping outlets in the run-up to Christmas.

That kind of boost can be hugely impactful for publishers and designers alike – and is particularly important to smaller publishers in the fight to stand out amid an increasingly competitive industry which sees thousands of releases each year.

The winners of this year’s Spiel des Jahres awards are set to be announced on July 12.

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