All "À la carte🇩🇪 2008" game award winners & nominees in comparison 2025

Race for the Galaxy is a captivating card game that immerses players in the challenge of building galactic civilizations. In this race through the cosmos, players use game cards to represent worlds, technologies, and developments as they strive for supremacy. Let's delve into the gameplay and discover what makes Race for the Galaxy unique.

Felicity: The Cat in the Sack is a clever and engaging auction-style game where players aim to collect the most valuable cats while avoiding the less desirable ones. The game involves bluffing and strategic bidding, as players use their mice to bid for cats hidden in a sack.

Witch's Brew is a captivating card game that introduces players to a world of magic, potions, and strategic role selection. As the fourth installment in the Alea medium box series, this game by Andreas Pelikan challenges players to assume constantly changing roles, from the wise druid Drax to the diligent assistant Gemalher, navigating a dynamic play environment where timing and strategy are key.

Dissatisfaction reigns at court, leading to initial intrigues. The marshal confides in the treasurer, while the lady's attendant secretly whispers to the wizard. Players aim to play their cards so that each character appears only once in their display, as failing to do so allows others to gain favor with the king. The player with the most points at the end wins.

Cockroach Salad is a fast-paced card game where players work together to create a salad but not always truthfully. With 128 cards representing different vegetables and the dreaded "taboo" vegetables with cockroaches, the aim is to deceive your way to victory. The game becomes a test of quick thinking and deception as you navigate through the rules of when to tell the truth and when to lie about the vegetables you're adding to the salad.

Players collect goats in this trick-taking game. Each card displays a number from 1 to 50 and 1 to 5 goat heads, with each player starting with eight cards for a total of eight tricks. The player who wins a trick plays first in the next, while the player with the lowest card adds a part of the central hill to the game, which sets the goat limit players must not exceed to win.

Cold War: CIA vs. KGB is a strategic game that immerses players into the tense and intricate world of espionage and global manipulation in the aftermath of World War II. As the head of either the CIA or the KGB, players engage in a delicate dance of influence, using spies, double agents, and any means at their disposal to sway foreign governments towards their ideology. The game captures the essence of the Cold War, where indirect actions, influence, and subterfuge define the struggle for global supremacy rather than direct military engagements.

The 16th century marks the beginning of a new era. America is discovered, trade routes to India are established, and trade becomes simpler in Europe. Players assume the roles of powerful families like the Fugger, Welser, Voehlins, or Hoechstetter, aiming to maximize their income through strategic trade and the use of goods cards.

Ticket to Ride: The Card Game brings the excitement of the original board game into a compact card game format, complete with its own unique twists. Players collect train cards to fulfill destination tickets, which are routes between two cities. However, the twist of "train robbing" adds a layer of strategy, as players can lose cards to their opponents. The game includes 96 train car cards, 46 destination tickets, and 6 big city prize cards, making for a rich variety of play strategies.