Our predictions for the Winners of the Spiel des Jahres🇩🇪 2022 Award 2026

SCOUT is an innovative card game that blends elements of hand management and ladder-climbing mechanics. The unique twist in this game is the dual-indexed cards and the restriction on rearranging your hand, creating a challenging and strategic gameplay experience.

So Clover! is a cooperative word-association game that challenges players to think creatively and work together. The essence of the game is to generate and guess keywords based on shared features, aiming to achieve the highest possible team score.

Cascadia is a tile-laying and token-drafting board game that features the rich habitats and diverse wildlife of the Pacific Northwest. It combines strategic tile placement with wildlife conservation themes.

Top Ten is a lively party game that challenges players to creatively rank responses based on humorous or bizarre scenarios. Each player’s task is to align their answer with a secret number they are assigned, ranging from worst (1) to best (10), according to the theme provided by the round's chief. The game combines elements of comedy, strategy, and social deduction as players try to guess and assign the correct rankings to each other's answers.

7 Wonders: Architects invites 2-7 players into a fast-paced race to leave a lasting legacy in the ancient world by constructing an architectural marvel. Each player starts with an unconstructed wonder and embarks on a journey to gather resources, develop their society, and achieve greatness.

It's race day in Quedlinburg, and with the right mix of food and luck, you ride your mount to victory and win the golden cauldron. Players build their own bag of tiles throughout the game, drawing them to advance on the race track. They will collect resources, gain bonuses, and strategize until someone crosses the finish line first.

Dune: Imperium is a strategic deck-building game inspired by the iconic Dune universe, incorporating elements from both the recent film adaptation and the classic novels. Players lead one of the Great Houses in the interstellar political landscape of the Landsraad.

Diamonds, gemstones, and gold are hidden deep in the cave of My Gold Mine, and every dwarf player is eager to dig for gold nuggets. However, the mountain guardian, a fire-breathing dragon, is on your tail. Players must find the most nuggets while avoiding being too greedy and getting caught by the dragon.

Players aim to pull the apprentices down the mountain before the witches reach the bottom. They place supports on the board to raise the starting area and set up their pieces. By drawing colored will-o'-the-wisps and moving figures along the path, strategic decisions come into play to either advance their apprentices or delay the witches. Winning requires getting four apprentices down the mountain before three witches do, with options to adjust the game's difficulty for more variation.

The magic show is about to begin, but chaos reigns behind the curtain with rabbits hopping everywhere and hats rolling on the floor. Players must work together within a limited time to collect the rabbits and hats in ascending order.

Collect balloons, gifts, candles, and mountains of sweets at the birthday party. Players roll dice and select their desired items while others take what's left over. Each color coded area on their scoring sheets has different rules for checking off items, and completing sections will earn them rainbow stars. The game ends once a player marks all items in an area, and the player with the most stars wins.

Cryptid is a deduction board game centered around the intriguing theme of cryptozoology. Players take on the roles of cryptozoologists trying to locate an elusive creature known as the Cryptid, using a mix of clever deduction and strategic misdirection.

Players engage in a dice and writing game with progressive difficulty levels. They aim to create chains of consecutive numbers from 0 to 12 and areas with the same number to score points.

The objective is to arrange the cards in numerical order to get rid of the entire row. The deck includes cards numbered 1-8, with six of each number, four frogs, and eight waste cards. Players take turns drawing from the deck or the discard pile, placing cards in the correct order while uncovering hidden cards, and using frogs as wildcards. The game continues until a player completes a single-card row with a 1 or a frog, winning the round.

Players fly from flower to flower, collecting nectar to create delicious honey. Nectars are dropped into tubes under each flower, and players must remember how much nectar each flower contains. They will gather the nectar while listening for auditory clues about the tulips, racing to fill their honey jars first to win the game.

Ark Nova is a strategic board game where players take on the role of zoo planners, aiming to build and manage the most successful modern zoo.

Living Forest is a captivating board game where players become nature spirits, striving to protect a sacred forest and its tree from the destructive flames of Onibi. With the help of animal guardians, players work to save the forest through a combination of strategy, luck, and cooperation.

The spirit of a young girl haunts a Scottish mansion, and the echoes of the past hide the secret of her death. Players collaborate using a free app to listen to mysterious sounds and voices associated with the game components. Their task is to piece together 24 parts of the story in the correct order, using objects and the corresponding echoes to uncover clues and solve the mystery.

Witchstone offers a rich blend of strategic depth and thematic magic as players step into the roles of powerful wizards gathering around the mystical Witchstone. This board game combines elements of area control, tile placement, and action optimization, creating a complex and engaging gameplay experience.

Khôra: Rise of an Empire immerses players in the role of leaders of burgeoning city-states in the classical era of Ancient Greece. The game is a strategic exploration of governance, military might, cultural development, and economic management, all rolled into an engaging board game experience. Players must navigate the complexities of statecraft through a combination of strategic planning and adaptation to the outcomes of their dice rolls.

Can you bring the trio of rabbits to the Golden Egg inn before the fox catches them? Players win or lose together by mixing and revealing track cards to create a path from the inn to the fox. Players roll the dice to move the correctly colored rabbit along the path, revealing cards that can either advance them or move the fox closer. If the fox lands on a rabbit, it's game over, but if a rabbit reaches the inn first, everyone is safe!

The grand vampire festival takes place every 99 years in an abandoned villa. Players assume the role of young vampires, using three vampire bats to maneuver garlic bulbs into the appropriate graves to awaken the ancient vampires. The challenge lies in locating the wealthy vampires that will provide valuable vampire points.