Speculate on Spiel des Jahres, Vote for Deutscher Spiele Preis, and Keep The Strong Strong | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Now that I’m finally caught up on submissions to BGG’s Game Market Spring 2025 Preview — mere hours before that show opens, mind you — let me run through a few items on the plate before I get back to business as usual:

▪️ The Spiel des Jahres nominations for 2025 will be announced on Tuesday, May 20, with jurors Christoph Schlewinski and Harald Schrapers hosting a livestream starting at 16:00 German time (UTC+2).

I’ll confess that I’ve not thought about the SdJ noms, other than to speculate that Hisashi Hayashi‘s Bomb Busters is a lock for one of the main award’s three slots. That said, I have no idea how good Pegasus Spiele‘s German rules are and “rulebook quality” is one of the criteria that a game must ace to nab a nom.

Keep in mind that a game must be available on the German market by the end of March 2025 in order to be considered. KOSMOS released the German edition of Castle Combo on March 24, for example, so I’ll pick that for my second choice. What should be the third?

▪️ Speaking of that award, in June 2025 Austrian publisher Piatnik will release Das moderne Brettspiel: Die unglaubliche Entwicklung von 1950 bis 2000 (The Modern Board Game: The Incredible Development from 1950 to 2000), a 256-page book from Tom Werneck, who co-founded the Spiel des Jahres award and served on the jury for decades.

Interestingly, this book is an abridged version — “stripped of scholarly ballast”, in Piatnik’s words — of Werneck’s 500-page dissertation on the development of the German game industry, a dissertation that has earned Werneck a doctorate for his scientific examination of the modern board game just ahead of his 86th birthday.

▪️ Voting for the 2025 Deutscher Spiele Preis opened on May 1, 2025, and you can submit votes through the end of July 2025.

More specifically, you can vote for up five games from this list of eligible titles. Your first place game receives 5 points, your next one 4 points, etc., and the ten games with the most points will be announced at SPIEL Essen 25, with creators of the top three games receiving statues. (In 2024, the top three games were Forest Shuffle, Sky Team, and The White Castle.)

Children’s games, by contrast, allow for one title to be nominated, and whichever one receives the most votes wins.

▪️ Two days ahead of the United States temporarily lowering tariffs on goods from China to 30%, Sebastian J. Bae‘s 2023 game Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific was featured in a Business Insider article titled “A new board game simulates how a US-China war would be fought“, which describes Bae’s creation as “a board game that depicts combat between American and Chinese forces around 2040”.

In the article, Bae says, “The game at its very deepest core is about the F2T2EA [find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess] process, whether kinetic capabilities such as missiles and drones, or non-kinetic capabilities such as electronic warfare and cyber.” Another excerpt:

▪️ The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York has issued a fundraising request after learning that “two of our federal grants — one from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the other from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) — were terminated by Executive Orders associated with shifting federal spending priorities.”

As a result, “These sudden terminations have left the museum with an unprecedented half million-dollar shortfall for projects designed to serve children, families, researchers, and scholars — including a critical collections care initiative and a new, one-of-a-kind exhibit dedicated to exploring the history and cultural impact of game shows.”

Should you wish to donate to The Strong, a not-for-profit museum that’s been open since 1982, you can do so via the museum’s website.