All "Deutscher Spielepreis🇩🇪 1990" game award winners & nominees in comparison 2026

In A la carte, players don the hats of eccentric chefs embroiled in the culinary showdown of a lifetime. This lighthearted and quirky game, conceived by Karl-Heinz Schmiel, is as much about managing the chaos of a kitchen as it is about the precise art of cooking itself. Each chef is armed with a mini pan and a hotplate, competing not just against time but against each other's culinary shenanigans.

Players must come up with something that fits within a series of predefined categories. The game includes 220 cards with prompts like "needs fuel," "floats," or "can be used militarily." Players take turns adding cards from their hand until someone doubts the existence of a fitting item, resulting in penalties for the player whose claim is challenged or the doubter, depending on the outcome. The first player to run out of cards wins.

Favoriten is a simple racing game that incorporates an intriguing element of pressure, allowing players to test their luck. In three races involving five horses, players do not own any horses but have three betting chips each. Players take turns rolling a die to advance the horses, placing bets on them before rolling. The payout system rewards the first player to bet on the winning horse, and players must carefully decide when to place their bets to maximize their potential winnings.

Hoity Toity, a Spiel des Jahres winner in 1990 by Klaus Teuber, is a lighthearted board game about English noblemen collecting and flaunting antiques. This game is for 3 to 6 players and revolves around acquiring cards that represent various antique items. Players aim to build the largest and most valuable collection of these quirky treasures.

Anxious prospectors seek their fortune in gold by choosing claims that promise wealth, but they must beware of fool's gold. The player who outsmarts everyone else wins! The game was originally released as Goldrausch, later reissued as Gold Digger, and has since been revamped as Wapi, featuring a new theme and luxurious components.

Timberland is a family game focused on forest management in earlier times. The game unfolds across the four seasons, with fruits falling in autumn, wild boars foraging in winter, seeds sprouting into trees in spring and summer, and lumberjacks harvesting the trees afterwards. Players select cards and maneuver the wild boar and lumberjack to amass the largest contiguous forest.

Players own a farm with five fields and face challenges over several years, including crop rotation, market observation, over-fertilization, insects, weather, and more. The player with the healthiest fields and the highest profits at the end of the game wins.