All "Spiel des Jahres🇩🇪 2002" game award winners & nominees in comparison 2026

TransAmerica is a straightforward and engaging railway-themed board game where players work to connect a set of cities across the United States using rail lines. The game emphasizes strategic planning and efficient use of shared networks, offering a blend of individual strategy and interactive play.

Blokus is an abstract strategy game known for its simple rules and deep strategic gameplay. It features colorful Tetris-shaped pieces that players aim to place on the board.

Villa Paletti is an engaging and whimsical game designed for 2 to 4 players, aged 8 and up, that challenges budding architects to construct a towering structure. Set in a land of blooming lemons, players follow in the footsteps of the sage "Paletti" who sought to complete his grandfather's unfinished castle in the sky. The twist in Paletti's plan is to reuse old columns from the lower levels of the castle to build higher floors, creating a daring and precarious architectural marvel – the Villa Paletti.

In each round, players spin the spinner on the board. If it points to one of the eight ladybugs, the player can move that ladybug to visit others. Each ladybug figure has a magnet in its nose, allowing them to swap places if they "like" each other. If they do not get along, the turn ends. Once a ladybug collects five different colored points, it is ready for the ball and is removed from the game. Players win when all ladybugs are ready. If the spinner lands on a smaller leaf, the player cannot move ladybugs and must advance ants instead. If all seven ants board the ship, the players lose.

Bruno the Bear is desperately hungry and tends to grab jars of honey carelessly while heading into the woods. Players help Bruno, represented by a wooden bear, navigate a series of meadow markers, moving him based on a dice roll while balancing jars on his tray without touching them. If a jar falls during movement, the player loses one of their two honey drops, and the game ends when a player loses both, with the one holding the most honey drops declared the winner.

A card game with an unusual scoring system involves players using sets of animal cards to knock over opponents' bucket pyramids. Each player starts with 12 cards from five colors, numbered 1-8, and must strategically attack or defend against opponents' moves.

Players envision witches or wizards buying ingredients for their potions. They move their game piece around a grid of cards and collect ingredients to form sets of four matching types while managing their score. The game includes a memory element, as players can only see the last ingredient they picked, and it ends when one row of cards is empty, leading to a scoring phase based on the collected ingredients.

Puerto Rico is a strategy game where players become colonial governors in Puerto Rico, aiming to earn victory points through trade and construction.

DVONN is a strategic board game that is part of the renowned Project GIPF series of abstract games. The game is played on a unique hexagonal board and involves a mix of piece placement, movement, and stacking, with an aim to control the tallest stack by the end of the game.

Cocotaki is a card game in the style of Uno, where players must match the animal or color of the top card on the discard pile to play their card. Players are required to make the corresponding animal sound when playing; forgetting to do so results in penalty cards. The first player to run out of cards wins, with many additional advanced rules included.

Detectives hunt for a thief hiding in the park. The board tilts, causing both detectives and the thief to move to one side until they hit an obstacle. The objective is to position your detective next to the thief to capture him.

The first player to get one of their bunnies to the top of the hill wins. Players take turns drawing a card to either move one of their bunnies or rotate the carrot on the board, which opens and closes holes. Any bunny that lands on an open hole or has one beneath it falls off the board, and a player is out of the game if they lose all four of their bunnies.

This is a remake of Premiere and Queen Games' Show Manager by db Spiele. The theme has been changed to a cruise, where players travel by sea, while the mechanics remain almost identical.

Players take on the role of kings or queens competing for the services of six famous explorers: Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus, Francisco Pizarro, Vasco da Gama, James Cook, and Marco Polo. As the game progresses, competition intensifies for these explorers, as fewer expeditions become available for investment. Players bid on explorer cards in a series of rounds, striving to balance the acquisition of money with the pursuit of victory points.

Floating markets in Asia are vibrant with life. Traders and their apprentices navigate narrow wooden walkways between boats filled with exotic goods from around the world. Timing and coordination of actions are crucial to becoming one of the most respected merchants in Asia.

The first German Lord of the Rings film game is a small card game about the Fellowship of the Ring, though it is quite abstract. The rules are relatively simple, with some German text on the cards, which may require a cheat sheet for those less familiar with the language. This game was later rebranded as King's Gate.

Large hexagonal tiles serve as the game board, with each tile divided into three sections of different colors. Players place game pieces on the board while ensuring no adjacent pieces share a color. During their turn, players can add a marker to claim a colored spot, with the objective of placing towers once four adjacent markers of different colors are achieved. The game ends when no more towers can be placed or when a player places all ten of their towers, and the winner is the one with the most towers placed.

The game features 24 wooden discs, each decorated on one side with images like a cat, flashlight, owl, and mouse-spider. Players choose one of two illustrated boards depicting a shoreline with a boat and part of a garden, which allows for 6 to 24 potential hiding spots for the markers.

Players must guess where the pelican will fish by placing one of their tokens. The pelican is then positioned, and those who guess correctly will receive a fish for that spot. If no one guesses correctly, the pelican claims the catch. The goal is to collect the most fish through clever deductions.