Hobby titles stake claim for 2025 game of the year in traditionally mass market-focused Toy of the Year awards

A trio of gateway hobby board games have emerged as Game of the Year contenders in the Toy Association’s latest Toy of the Year awards – a prize traditionally dominated by mass-market games.

Life in Reterra, Hasbro’s opening gambit for a push into the light-gateway hobby game segment, is up against Ravensburger’s Chronicles of Light: Darkness Falls and The Op’s Gnome Hollow in the award category – an unprecedented showing for hobby games in the 25-year-old competition.

The trio will battle it out with The Op’s light card game Flip 7, UNO variant Show ’em No Mercy and Snap 2 It, an electronic game which sees players compete to become the first to complete a light switch circuit.

The award category is focused on games for children aged up to 14 and families, and has historically been won by ultra-light offerings – although hobby games have been making increasing headway in recent years.

Settlers of Catan’s nomination in 2014 was followed by a dead zone for hobby game representation until 2017, when Phil Walker-Harding design Imhotep was chosen among contenders for the award.

A watershed took place in 2019 when Prospero Hall design Disney Villainous was crowned game of the year, with the design studio’s Disney Animated Game also going on to pick up a nomination in 2023.

The Pokemon Trading Card Game Battle Academy won in 2021, but no year has featured so many non-mass-market titles as the latest set of nominees.

Life in Reterra co-designer Eric Lang has called the game one of the most important of his career – a notable viewpoint from the creator of acclaimed designs including Blood Rage, Chaos in the Old World and Rising Sun.

He said in a Facebook post in February that partnering with Hasbro was key to his ambition that the game becomes the first “lifestyle” experience for a theoretical mass market audience.

In an extensive interview with Polygon in March he said, “My personal point of view as a designer is to prove that the lines between what we call ‘mass market’ and ‘hobby market’ are mostly illusion — illusion and artificial.

“People are people. Fun is fun. Depth is depth. Of course, everybody has different tolerances, or [wants] different amounts of depth in the game, but there’s no one, weird, single, dividing line between what is in the mass market and what’s not. That’s all been decided by buyers at retail.”

Gnome Hollow part of a similar drive by The Op, a veteran publisher of licensed versions of mass market games such as Monopoly and Risk, to extend its operations into the hobby gaming space.

That push, which has included games such as Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle and The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, has taken a step up in the last year with the addition of games including Aqua: Biodiversity in the Oceans, Hutan: Life in the Rainforest and Tea Garden.

Anyone can make a single vote per category in the awards ahead of the January 10, 2025 deadline, with the winners set to be announced on February 28, the day before the Toy Association’s 2025 Toy Fair in New York.

Previous Toy Awards Game of the Year Winners:

2023: 5 Second Rule, published by Play Monster

2022: A Game of Cat and Mouth (Exploding Kittens)

2021 Pokémon Trading Card Game Battle Academy (The Pokémon Company International)

2020: Pictionary Air (Mattel)

2019: Disney Villainous (Wonder Forge)

2018: Soggy Doggy (Spin Master)

2017: Yeti in My Spaghetti (PlayMonster!)

2016: Pie Face (Hasbro)

2015: Simon Swipe (Hasbro)

2014: Boom Boom Balloon (Spin Master)