The German branch of high IQ society Mensa has unveiled its full slate of nominees for this year’s MinD Spielepreis.
Mensa in Deutschland has run the awards contest since 2009, and has operated a ‘shorter games’ category for more than a decade and lighter two-player games prize since 2019.
This year’s ‘shorter games’ category will be fought over by titles including 2025 Spiel des Jahres nominee Krakel Orakel, as well as Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel’s design Zenith and Take Time from Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière.
Word chaining game Next by Verena Wiechens and Lukas Setzke is also up for the shorter game prize – which focuses on titles that play in well under an hour – as is Maldón’s design El Camarero (published in Germany as Chaosteria), and Wilmot’s Warehouse from David King, Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg.
In the two-player games category, Bruno Cathala’s design Kamon is up against Niwashi, from Gautier de Cottreau and Baptiste Laurent, Junghee Choi’s Orapa and Tobias Tesar’s Perfect Murder.
Playball, designed by David Florsch, will also compete in that category, as will Strategeti by Ignasi Ferré and Suna Valo, designed by Andreas Odendahl (who goes by ode.).
Jochen Tierbach, who has been organising the MinD Game Award for 16 years, said at the time, “There are already various awards and prizes for family and connoisseur games.
“But for expert games, the really tough ones, there is no such thing in Germany yet. And we feel that the industry wants it.”
The long list of more than 20 expert-level titles was whittled down to six challengers for the complex games award this year: Galactic Cruise, Luthier, Shackleton Base, Speakeasy, Thebai and Thesauros, all of which have been released in Germany since Spiel Essen last October.
Last year’s MinD award for complex games saw Tomáš Holek’s space exploration eurogame SETI add to its array of prizes, while Simone Luciani and Dávid Turczi’s Nucleum triumphed in 2024.
Co-operative puzzle challenge game Take Time has triumphed in this year’s Swiss Gamers Award, which is voted on by members of board game clubs, game and toy libraries and gaming associations from across the country.
Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière’s design sealed top spot above Eric Olsen’s Flip 7 – which won the separate family game prize – and also finished in third place in the family-weight category.
The win is the second year in a row a game from Asmodee studio Libellud has won the Swiss Gamers Award, following last year’s success for nature-themed tile-laying game Harmonies.
Take Time, designed by Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière
The game fought off tough competition in the family game category this year from titles including Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini’s Toy Battle, the winner of the 2026 As d’Or.
This year’s Swiss Gamers Award featured an expert game category for the first time, which was won by Yeom Cheolwoong’s design Wondrous Creatures – a strategy title based around players building fantasy animal reserves.
Wondrous Creatures, designed by Yeom Cheolwoong || Photo Credit: Bad Comet
The Swiss Gamers Award has been held every year since 2010, following the demise of the Schweizer Spielepreis in 2006.
Although the award is given by gamers living in Switzerland, all games published in the prior year can be nominated, regardless of the nationality of their authors and publishers.
This year’s award marked the third in a row presented to a relatively light game, following Harmonies last year and Faraway in the 2023 awards (presented in 2024).
The far more heavyweight Ark Nova triumphed in 2022, and mid-weight euro The Lost Ruins of Arnak won in 2021.
The award is organised by Ludesco, Switzerland’s biggest board game festival, in partnership with the Swiss Federation of Toy Libraries and the Swiss Game Museum.
Swiss Gamers Awards full results 2025
Main Award Winner: Take Time, designed by Alexi Piovesan, Julien Prothière (Published by Libellud) 2nd Place: Flip 7, Eric Olsen (Catch Up Games, Kosmos) 3rd Place: Zenith, Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel (PlayPunk)
Family Award Winner: Flip 7, Eric Olsen (Catch Up Games, Kosmos) 2nd Place: Toy Battle, Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini (Repos Productions) 3rd Place: Take Time, Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière (Libellud)
Expert Award Winner: Wondrous Creatures, Yeom Cheolwoong (Super Meeple, Strohmann Games) 2nd Place: Endeavor: Deep Sea, Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray (Super Meeple, Board Game Circus) 3rd Place: Eternal Decks, Hiroken (Pixie Games, Strohmann Games)
Die Stunde hat geschlagen! Bei Take Time dreht sich alles um Uhren. Gemeinsam versuchen zwei bis vier Spielende, die Rätsel der insgesamt 40 verschiedenen Uhren zu lösen. Damit das nicht zu einfach wird, gibt es allerdings zahlreiche Hindernisse, die zusammen überwunden werden müssen.
Sich anzuschweigen kann so viel sagen. Wer wüsste das besser als Spieler, die einmal bei kooperativen Spielen wie The Mind, The Gang, Magic Maze oder ähnlichen Spielen zusammensaßen und sich…
The consensus on Take Time, the abstract teamwork game by Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière, seems to be that it’s Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind but Even More, which means, mercifully, that it’s marginally less likely to spur tedious arguments over the difference between an activity and a game.
As an enjoyer of The Mind, at least in moderation, I figured I should take a look. Here’s my professional diagnosis: It’s The Mind but Even More. Even the hivemind’s broken clock is right twice a day.
Pretty!
Speaking of broken clocks, Take Time is fashioned as the very same, an analog clock with six segments instead of twelve, and an especially illegible one at that, but one that’s perfectly suited to counting cards and staring apprehensively at one’s fellow players.
Like The Mind, Take Time is all about ordering cards into their correct sequence, although in this case the question is more cerebral and less about marching in time to a shared internal metronome. Your primary tool is a deck of cards. There are two suits, both of which show ranks from 1 to 12. Some number of these cards will be distributed to your team, and it’s your task to arrange them around the clock according to a few simple rules that naturally turn out to be anything but simple to execute.
There are three cardinal placement rules. Rule the First: Each of the clock’s six segments must have at least one card next to it. Rule the Second: The sum of each segment’s cards must match or exceed the tally that came before it. Rule the Third: None of these sums may break twenty-four.
That last rule is the really crucial one. No surprise, but it’s what keeps Take Time from feeling trivial. Sure, you could make a plan to dump everybody’s low cards onto the clock’s lowest hours and then build to the higher segments. But (1) you’re only dealt half of the deck in any given session, which means you can’t count on any given rank appearing to solve the problem, and (2) because you can’t bust twenty-four, it quickly becomes necessary to spread out your cards a little more smartly.
In addition to the game’s cardinal rules, each clock offers its own variations. Early on, these are familiar enough. Perhaps a segment will only hold white cards (rude), or require exactly a pair, or have the closest sum to 12, or be the recipient of the first two cards played to the table, or only be laid face-down.
Ah, that’s right, facing. Most cards must be played face-down. But depending on the player count — and successive failures — a certain number can be visible. Take Time is often about signaling. A face-down card to indicate you have a segment handled, a face-up one to ask for help. An exploratory digit here or there. Clearing your throat and displaying your color-coded card backs for all to see.
Some of the cards.
At a mechanical level, none of this is all that proximate to The Mind. Even the shared notion of playing cards in sequence is fundamentally distinct. Here, there’s nothing preventing you from playing your middle cards first, provided the eventual sum on the clock is ascending. At least until you reach the envelope where all the clocks demand you play in a certain order, anyway.
But comparisons to The Mind are apt because the sensation both games produce are largely similar. This is a low-communication game — not zero communication, although it bills itself that way — that likes to dwell somewhere in the pit of your stomach. It’s contentious in the same way as Warsch’s card game, everyone quick to lay blame at their peers’ feet, although its expanded scope and duration make it even tougher to take in stride. “What the heck were you doing with that one placement?” is a regular tally-ender.
The game’s secret weapon is its overarching format. Rather than focusing on a single play, the clocks in Take Time are divided between twelve envelopes. Each has four clocks, and — this is important — you’re meant to tackle them in sequence. This is a bit more formal than The Mind, but it’s geared toward the same end. Where The Mind was so brief and so simple that it demanded multiple plays, Take Time could easily be misconstrued as a straightforward scenario game, with shades of The Crew or those Lord of the Rings trick-takers. By asking players to progress through four clocks, including any do-overs for flubbed hands, it engenders that woo-woo telepathic sensation that was so familiar to The Mind. The group squabbles, points fingers, grouses, but gradually comes together. They learn one another’s tells and tics. They become a team.
Here’s an example. Anyone who’s played way too much of The Mind might recall the moment when the game asks you to play all the cards face-down. I remember the first time we were asked to do that. We figured we would try on a lark. We’d already been plugging away at those cards for an hour. What was one more try? And then we made it through something like six full rounds of face-down cards, our counts improbably perfect, our internal metronomes almost perfectly in sync.
Take Time pulls that same trick! On the second envelope’s final clock, after being trained to play more and more cards face-down, suddenly it insists that the entire clock will be handled blind. It’s a rug-pull moment, and it’s safe to say we were demoralized at the mere prospect. And then, of course, we nailed it on our second try. That Take Time is more puzzle and less, y’know, quietly counting, only makes these little coups all the more satisfying.
Placing the hand.
Again, though, I don’t want my enthusiasm to go misconstrued. Take Time is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow. Where The Mind presented itself as a parlor trick, there’s no mistaking the function of this particular plaything. It wants you to strain at every little detail. It wants you to make plans and then adapt them on the fly. It insists on locking you into a sequence until you get it right. Sure, it will throw you a bone every now and then. The more you fail, the more face-up cards you’re afforded. But only to a point. Eventually, your group either learns to function together or the frustration mounts.
I think I like it. But it’s also a game I can only stomach in small doses. An envelope here or there, not a spree. And it’s also one of those games that swiftly identifies the players it shouldn’t be shared with.
But hey, at least everybody seems to agree that it’s a game. And with the right people, in the right mood, during the right portion of the evening, it’s a fascinating thing to behold for many of the same reasons that The Mind was fascinating to behold. When everything finally slips into place, it feels like magic. The hard part is all the grunt work that comes before the flourish.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)
Anmelden
