Railway Boom beats Fate of the Fellowship, Take Time to win International Gamers Award

Bomb Busters designer Hisashi Hayashi has followed up last year’s Spiel des Jahres triumph with another significant award win, after Railway Boom was named the International Gamers Awards’ best multiplayer game for 2026.

The Arclight Games title is a reworking of Hayashi’s 2022 Japanese release of the same name, with Barrage and Darwin’s Journey co-designer Simone Luciani acting as a developer for the new version.

That result means Luciani has been involved in three IGA multiplayer category winners in the last six years, having previously scooped the award for his co-designs Barrage (with Tommaso Battista) in 2020 and Nucleum (with Dávid Turczi) in 2024. He also won with Daniele Tascini co-design The Voyages of Marco Polo in 2015.

Hayashi was also in the running for the IGA multiplayer award last year with Bomb Busters, but missed out to Tomáš Holek’s SETI. His design Yokohama was also a multiplayer finalist back in 2017.

Railway Boom saw off competition from a heavyweight field including Matt Leacock’s The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, huge-selling Asmodee hit Take Time and multiple Dice Tower Award winner Luthier to take the prize.

The Druids of Edora, Nippon: Zaibatsu, Recall, Sanctuary and World Order were all also in the running for this year’s multiplayer award.

While missing out on the multiplayer award, Fate of the Fellowship did secure a win in the best solo game category, beating out Benjamin Amorin’s Ace of Spades, Tyler Brown’s design Hercules and the 12 Labors and Jamey Stegmaier’s Vantage to the prize.

That result marked Leacock’s first IGA win in any category, 18 years after Pandemic earned him his first nomination in 2008. His other nominations have included Pandemic Legacy, which lost out to Mombasa in 2016, and Daybreak, which was beaten by Nucleum in 2024.

Hans im Glück’s Duel for Cardia, designed by Faouzi Boughida and Mathieu Rivero, took this year’s award for best two-player game.

That title beat a six-strong field which also included Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s design Moytura, Richard Borg and Adrien Martinot’s Star Wars: Battle of Hoth, Corentin Lebrat and Gricha German’s Tag Team, Israel Cendrero and Sheila Santos’ The White Castle Duel and Stegmaier’s Vantage.

The International Gamers Awards were founded in 1999 with the aim of recognising outstanding games, their designers and publishers, with winners selected by an international panel of board game critics.

Other previous multiplayer winners have included Carnegie, Lost Ruins of Arnak and Root.