Co-op designs continue to dominate board gaming’s biggest prize as Bomb Busters seals Spiel des Jahres win -

Co-operative bomb disposal game Bomb Busters has won this year’s Spiel des Jahres, beating the much-fancied push-your-luck card game Flip 7 to the high-profile award.

The win marks the first Spiel des Jahres triumph for an Asian designer – Japan’s Hisashi Hayashi – in the prize’s 46-year history, underscoring the huge rise in tabletop designs making their way across from Asia to Europe and North America in the past decade.

Bomb Busters is a reworking of Hayashi’s 2020 design Bomb Squad, which tasks players to collaboratively ‘cut wires’ represented by tiles in front of each of them, which only that player can see, in the correct order to avoid ‘the bomb exploding’ and the game being lost.

The updated design featuring 66 different ‘missions’ was released internationally by Cocktail Games, which partnered with Pegasus Spiele for the German release reviewed by the Spiel des Jahres jury.

Spiel des Jahres Association chairman Harald Schrapers said the jury of German-speaking board game critics whittled down a record 385 games this year to reach the shortlist of nominees – up 10% on 2024, which was itself a 20% rise compared to the previous year.

Bomb Busters triumphed amid strong competition from Eric Olsen design Flip 7, which has won or been nominated for a string of other high-profile awards this year.

Flip 7 has been top of BoardGameGeek’s weekly bestsellers chart for the last 12 weeks, fighting off ongoing competition from other strong sellers this year including Harmonies and Sky Team, the winner of the 2024 Spiel des Jahres.

Krakel Orakel, described as a co-operative drawing game for people who can’t draw, was also among the three Spiel des Jahres finalists for 2025.

Bomb Busters designer Hayashi said he was inspired by traditional Japanese card game Babanuki in creating his design, in which he adapted the premise of that game into a co-operative experience.

His victory means the Spiel des Jahres has now been won by a co-operative game design in five out of the past seven years, following successes for Just One in 2019, MicroMacro: Crime City in 2021, Dorfromantik: The Board Game in 2023 and Sky Team last year.

This year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres, which is awarded to slightly more complex games than the main Spiel des Jahres prize, was won by Endeavor: Deep Sea – which also features a prominent co-op mode as a way to play the game.

Endeavor: Deep Sea designers Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray celebrate the game winning this year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres

The game, from New Zealand designers Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray, is a reimplementation of their 2009 release Endeavor – itself a Spiel des Jahres recommended title.

Gray said after accepting this year’s award, “The game lends itself to that cooperative feeling – yes, when you play it competitively you actually can share spaces and get these rewards together.

“And then the big idea of the game is you’re actually trying to help preserve the ocean, and so working co-operatively together to do that, to achieve these goals just made sense. So we really wanted to push that as something… we wanted players to play it that way.”

The original Endeavor, known as Magister Navis in Germany, was themed around colonial nations conquering new lands for their empires, whereas Endeavor: Deep Sea reimagines the game as marine researchers exploring the ocean and developing sustainability projects.

Schrapers pointed out in May that there were almost 100 variants and revisions of existing games in this year’s pile of entries.

He said of Endeavor: Deep Sea at the time, “This is now a really massive revision and not just a redesign. And what was originally an issue at the time, of the colonialists, has now been turned into something that thematically appeals much more.”

Endeavor: Deep Sea picked up the Kennerspiel prize ahead of Looot and Faraway. The game was published by Burnt Island Games, with Frosted Games and Board Game Circus partnering for the title’s German release.

Wolfgang Warsch with his prize for Topp die Torte winning this year’s Kinderspiel des Jahres

This year’s winner of the children-focused Kinderspiel was Wolfgang Warsch’s Topp die Torte, which was published by Schmidt Spiele. The game was up against Die Mausebande and Cascadia Junior in the final.

Christoph Schlewinski, who co-ordinates the Kinderspiel des Jahres jury, urged publishers while onstage at this year’s awards ceremony to put out more children’s games, saying there had been a dramatic drop in releases eligible for the Kinderspiel.

He said, ” Ever since the pandemic the number of new releases has been going down. So why is that? Why are less and less children’s games being released?

“Why don’t the publishers publish more children’s games? It’s not like we don’t know which ones to nominate, but we would like to see more games to choose from. Why are there less publications? Dear publishers: look at the situation!

“There were years in which we looked at 150 games for the children’s games, and this year we only looked at 80 new releases.

“That had us thinking ‘well, it would have been nicer to choose from more games’.”

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 a 2023 interview that winning the main prize can boost a game’s sales by 10x to 20x in the months following, due to a slew of exposure across mainstream German 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 publishers in the fight to stand out amid an increasingly competitive industry which sees thousands of releases each year.

The 2025 Spiel des Jahres Awards longlists:

Spiel des Jahres

Winner: Bomb Busters by Hisashi Hayashi, published by Cocktail Games (Pegasus Spiele in Germany)

Finalist: Flip 7 Eric Olsen, The Op Games (KOSMOS in Germany)

Finalist: Krakel Orakel Die 7 Bazis – Topp

Foxy, David Spada, Gate On Games

Agent Avenue Christian and Laura Kudahl, Nerdlab Games

The Animals of Baker Street David Neale Clementine

Castle Combo, Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel – Catch Up Games

Cities Phil Walker-Harding, Steve Finn, Devir

Perfect Words, Paul-Henri Argiot, Tiki Editions

Kennerspiel des Jahres