Sky Team crowned Spiel des Jahres winner for 2024, Daybreak takes Kennerspiel prize

Sky Team has won the coveted Spiel des Jahres for 2024, pipping fellow nominees Captain Flip and In the Footsteps of Darwin to the German game of the year prize.

The co-op design from Luc Remond and Scorpion Masque is the first two-player-only game to win the prize in the Spiel des Jahres’ 45-year history. Targi was nominated for the prize in 2012, seven years after the only other two-player-only nominee, Jambo.

Sky Team’s win marks the second time in three years a game published in Germany by Kosmos has won the top prize, following the success of Cascadia in 2022.

Kosmos-published games have previously won the Spiel des Jahres on three other occasions, with Keltis by Reiner Knizia triumphing in 2008, Settlers of Catan winning in 1995 and Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective clinching the prize in 1985.

A statement from the Spiel des Jahres jury said, “Sky Team is convincing in terms of gameplay, atmosphere and theme across the board. The short games are highly rewarding if you’re successful, and if you fail, you’ll want to try again straight away.”

Sky Team’s win means the Spiel des Jahres has been won by a co-operative game design in four out of the past six years, following successes for Just One in 2019, MicroMacro: Crime City in 2021 and Dorfromantik: The Board Game last year (this excellent stat was spotted by Eric Martin at BoardGameGeek, not me – thanks Eric!).

This year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres prize for more complex games was also won by a co-op, with climate action-focused Daybreak (which has the much slicker name e-mission in Germany) by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace clinching the win.

Leacock – who was also co-designer on fellow Kennerspiel nominee Ticket to Ride Legacy – Legends of the West – had never previously managed to win either the Spiel des Jahres or Kennerspiel despite a string of nominations.

He was previously in the running with Pandemic in 2009, Roll Through The Ages in 2010 and Forbidden Island in 2011, and was nominated for Pandemic Legacy – Season One in the Kennerspiel competition in 2016. He did win a ‘special prize’ at the awards in 2018 for Pandemic Legacy – Season Two.

Leacock said in his acceptance speech, “This has been an incredible journey.

“I don’t know how long ago we started – three and a half, four years ago – a lot of ups and downs. It was a pretty dark journey at the very beginning. Read any climate book and it’s kind of dark at the beginning.

“But we pushed our way through and not only did we find a game, we found a lot of hope along the way.”

Ticket to Ride Legacy – which was also co-designed by Rob Daviau and Alan R Moon – and The Guild of Traveling Merchants, by Matthew Dunstan and Brett J Gilbert, were the Kennerspiel nominees this year.

Daybreak is published by CMYK Games, and Schmidt Spiele in Germany.

This year’s Kinderspiel des Jahres – focused on children’s games – was won by Die magischen Schlüssel (The Magic Keys) from Markus Slawitscheck and Arno Steinwender.

The winners fought off competition from a total of 475 games released in Germany in the 12 months before the end of March deadline.

The number of games considered for the main Spiel des Jahres prize was up 22% this year, to 351, according to SdJ chairman Harald Schrapers.

This year’s awards underlined how international board gaming has become, with no German-speaking designers nominated for either the Spiel or Kennerspiel for the second time in three years.

That is a marked difference from the late 1990s and 2000s, in which German-speaking designers dominated the nominations despite wins for games such as Ticket to Ride in 2004 and Dominion in 2009.

Winning the Spiel des Jahres can explode sales by hundreds of thousands of copies for the winner – and by thousands of copies for the nominees.

While publishers tend to keep tight-lipped about actual sales figures, Pegasus Spiel co-founder Karsten Esser told BoardGameWire in an interview last year that winning the SdJ can boost a game’s sales by 10x to 20x in the months following, due to a slew of exposure across mainstream shopping outlets in the run-up to Christmas.

That kind of boost can be hugely impactful for publishers and designers alike – and is particularly important to smaller outlets in the fight to stand out amid an increasingly competitive industry which sees thousands of releases each year.

This years awards creates a dispiriting run of consecutive years in which no women were nominated for the Spiel des Jahres prize.

Research by Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave which she shared on BlueSky showed that of the 142 designers nominated across 112 games in the Spiel des Jahres since 1979, just seven were women.

Hargrave said in the post, “My annual caveat: this is a problem at the level of what the games industry is putting out, not an accusation of bias in the SdJ organization.

“And at least *part* of the problem at the industry level is the pipeline of women even getting into design.”

Schrapers said that 95% of the more than 350 games considered for the Spiel des Jahres prize this year were from male designers, with just 2.6% designed by women.

He said, “Unfortunately the proportion of female authors is stagnating at a low level.”