The Spiel des Jahres nominees for 2025 have just been announced, and some of us are feeling vindicated, as the board games we’ve been shouting about to anyone who’d listen, or through letterboxes and into drainpipes when all else failed, are getting some much-deserved recognition.
The prestigious board game award comes round annually to pick out the best board games released in Germany over the previous year. It has a particular focus on family board games: you typically won’t find any war games or tabletop RPGs here.
Below you’ll find the full longlist for the main Spiel des Jahres award and the slightly more complex Kennerspiel category, along with a brief description of each one.
Spiel des Jahres
- Foxy – An extremely cute, extremely quick memory game about spotting different animals.
- Flip 7 – A push your luck card game, and Mollie Russell’s new favorite budget game.
- Agent Avenue – A game themed around anthropomorphic secret agent animals, the core of this game is an “I split you choose” mechanic where you pick two cards, place one face up, one face down, and your opponent gets to select one – an agonizing decision for the both of you.
- The Animals of Baker Street – More animals with jobs? This one’s an investigative, narrative-based game with cute critters. Think Consulting Detective if it was less of a complete bastard in a box.
- Krakel Orakel – In this drawing game, players are given dry-erase boards full of random squiggles, and can only complete their prompt by drawing along the already-existing lines.
- Bomb Busters – A cooperative deduction game about guessing the values of different wires to defuse a bomb. With 66 different missions, it packs tons of replay value.
- Castle Combo – A drafting, tableau-building game where you collect peasants and nobles to score the most points.
- Cities – A particularly gorgeous addition to the city-building genre.
- Perfect Words – This game is about crafting a shared crossword puzzle and then, through Codenames-style word association, trying to get the same answers.
Kennerspiel des Jahres
- Faraway – An innovative game where you lay out a series of eight cards, building a fantasy landscape, then adventure back through it, scoring in reverse order.
- Zenith – A strategy board game about gaining control of the Solar System through politics not war, playing tug of war with your influence over different planets.
- The Gang – A stylish heist-themed game about playing Poker hands in the correct order. This is another one Wargamer has been pushing to get more love.
- Looot – A viking themed game with two board types – a shared one where exploration takes place and resources are gathered, and a personal board where each player builds up their own village.
- Medical Mysteries, New York Emergency Room – This game places you as the main characters in a medical drama, deciphering clues to figure out a patient’s mystery diagnosis. A really neat recontextualization of the popular deduction genre.
- Kauri – An asymmetric wargame (rare for Spiel des Jahres) where two of the factions are the Māori and the English, and the other two are Kiwis and Possums. Yes, the animals. Overall, the game looks a bit like a simplified version of Root.
- Endeavor: Deep Sea – A co-op or solo worker placement game about completing research missions under the sea – with adorable little submarine pieces.
Which game do you think deserves to be number one? Share your views on our Discord. And for more great recommendations, check out the best couples board games and best kids’ board games.
Source: Wargamer
