Ein Dorf, das Sticker für Sticker wächst, Bewohner*innen mit eigenen Geschichten und zehn Jahre voller kleiner Entscheidungen: Cozy Stickerville ist für das Spiel des Jahres 2026 nominiert und stellt uns dabei vor eine ehrliche Frage: Muss ein Brettspiel eigentlich ein Spiel sein?
The people demand takes, so get ’em while they’re hot. We’re weighing in on some possibly bad, certainly edgy opinions, and deciding where we land (spoiler: we’re always right). Before we get heated, we talk about Diplomacy: The Golden Blade, and Cozy Stickerville.
If you don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Stitcher/Spotify, or add our RSS feed to your favourite app. Reviews and subscriptions really help us and would be greatly appreciated! To download the episode directly, click here.
If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
01:46 – Diplomacy: The Golden Blade 12:33 – Cozy Stickerville 25:41 – Hot takes! 26:11 – Co-op games are just single player games with an audience 32:01 – Catch Up mechanics ruin competitive integrity 37:39 – Legacy games are a predatory waste of money 41:22 – If a game takes more than 30 minutes to teach, it’s a bad design 45:56 – Player elimination is actually a good mechanism 47:36 – Hidden victory points are a cowardly design choice 51:38 – Gateway games Like Catan or Monopoly should be actively avoided 52:44 – House ruling a game means you bought the wrong game 53:10 – Theme is a myth 54:13 – Kickstarter deluxe editions are actively ruining the hobby
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
If you don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Stitcher/Spotify, or add our RSS feed to your favourite app. Reviews and subscriptions really help us and would be greatly appreciated! To download the episode directly, click here.
If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
01:46 – Diplomacy: The Golden Blade 12:33 – Cozy Stickerville 25:41 – Hot takes! 26:11 – Co-op games are just single player games with an audience 32:01 – Catch Up mechanics ruin competitive integrity 37:39 – Legacy games are a predatory waste of money 41:22 – If a game takes more than 30 minutes to teach, it’s a bad design 45:56 – Player elimination is actually a good mechanism 47:36 – Hidden victory points are a cowardly design choice 51:38 – Gateway games Like Catan or Monopoly should be actively avoided 52:44 – House ruling a game means you bought the wrong game 53:10 – Theme is a myth 54:13 – Kickstarter deluxe editions are actively ruining the hobby
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
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.
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.
Number of games reviewed in recent Spiel des Jahres years – red is Spiel and Kennerspiel, blue is Kinderspiel, and purple is games which span both segments
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.”
Spiel des Jahres deputy chairman Christoph Schlewinski, left, and chairman Harald Schrapers, right, with this year’s Spiel des Jahres nominees
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.
Shownotes
Redebedarf. Das Podcastformat ohne Format. Manchmal gibt es einfach Anlässe, Erfahrungen und Beobachtungen zur Spielszene die nur in einem kurzen Podcast untergebracht werden können. Das tun Georgios Panagiotidis und Peer Sylvester mit Redebedarf.
I think it’s fair to say that we crushed this last year (although some of us better than others), so it’s only correct and right that we should return to do it again. What are the best games of 2026 going to be? Well, only we know, but we’re willing to part with that information. Get your fat stacks ready. Before we set ourselves up for failure, we talk about Alibis, Mosaic: A Story of Civilization, and Cyclades: Legendary Edition.
If you don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Stitcher/Spotify, or add our RSS feed to your favourite app. Reviews and subscriptions really help us and would be greatly appreciated! To download the episode directly, click here.
If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
03:02 – Alibis 09:18 – Mosaic: A Story of Civilization 23:25 – Cyclades: Legendary Edition 36:27 – Anticipation Auction 2026 41:18 – The Game Makers 44:25 – Cozy Stickerville 46:39 – Brass: Pittsburgh 50:35 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – Trick-taking Game 54:04 – Revenant 56:21 – World Order 59:31 – Dark Pact 1:02:28 – The Great Library 1:03:56 – Spirited 1:05:25 – Realm of Reckoning 1:08:55 – Avalon: The Riven Veil 1:12:57 – La Pâtisserie Rococo 1:14:24 – Nippon: Zaibatsu 1:17:24 – Rewild: South America 1:18:44 – Movers & Shakers
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
Anmelden
Ein Dorf, das Sticker für Sticker wächst, Bewohner*innen mit eigenen Geschichten und zehn Jahre voller kleiner Entscheidungen: Cozy Stickerville ist für das Spiel des Jahres 2026 nominiert und stellt uns dabei vor eine ehrliche Frage: Muss ein Brettspiel eigentlich ein Spiel sein?
