{"id":3764,"date":"2025-02-04T12:36:50","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T12:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/?p=3764"},"modified":"2025-02-06T21:26:46","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T21:26:46","slug":"harmonies-darwins-journey-splendor-duel-among-winners-in-this-years-boardgamearena-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/04\/harmonies-darwins-journey-splendor-duel-among-winners-in-this-years-boardgamearena-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"Harmonies, Splendor: Duel romp to wins in this year’s BoardGameArena awards, Darwin’s Journey sees off stiff challenge from Terraforming Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BoardGameArena<\/a>, Asmodee’s online board gaming platform which passed 10 million registered users last summer<\/a>, has unveiled the winners of its annual contest for the most popular games added to the service in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The competition pitted four different titles against each other in five separate categories, which could be voted on by any BGA user who had played every game in a particular category at least once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asmodee title Splendor: Duel<\/a> stormed to a win in the Best 2-Player game category with more than 63% of the vote, with the Altered<\/a> trading card game finishing second on 20.2% and Pocket Cats<\/a> third on 14.6%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harmonies<\/a> – also published by Asmodee – sealed a convincing win in the Best Regular Game category with almost 45% of the vote , with Cartographers<\/a> scoring 23.8% and Middle Ages<\/a> about 16.4%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Best Casual Game was an extremely tight affair, with Castle Combo<\/a> from Catch Up Games ultimately triumphing over PlayPunk’s Captain Flip<\/a>, which gained 35.6% and 34.6% of the votes respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Best Expert Game title went to Darwin’s Journey<\/a> with 35.7% of the vote, outdoing powerful competition from Terraforming Mars<\/a> on 32.2% and Age of Innovation<\/a> on 18.9%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BGA included a Best Animal-themed Game award this year, which was won in an incredibly close contest by Pandasaurus-published The Wolves<\/a>, edging out Mountain Goats by 30.9% of the vote to 30%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nana Tori Dori<\/a> received this year’s Special Award from the BGA team itself, following an internal vote by its staff members for the game from 2024 they felt most deserved an award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year’s award winners including Ticket To Ride Europe<\/a> and Heat: Pedal to the Metal<\/a>, both published by Asmodee studio Days of Wonder, complex zoo-building game Ark Nova<\/a>, co-operative aeroplane landing game Sky Team<\/a> and nature-themed tableau builder Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BGA<\/a>, which started life in 2010 as an online tournament website exclusively available in France, took eight years to reach its first million accounts \u2013 but saw its user numbers accelerate rapidly in the wake of Covid lockdowns and the takeover by board game giant Asmodee in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asmodee\u2019s influence had already boosted BGA\u2019s profile ahead of the takeover, with the addition of the publisher\u2019s games such as 7 Wonders in 2018 lending more legitimacy and heft to the growing platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the online service\u2019s operation has swelled even more heavily since joining the Asmodee stable, going from about 250 available games in 2021 to more than 900 last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The service remains unmatched in terms of competitors, although several small-scale online gaming platforms such as\u00a0TableTopia<\/a>,\u00a0Yucata<\/a>,\u00a0Rally The Troops<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a018xx.games<\/a> also exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more stories like this direct to your email inbox, click here to sign up for BoardGameWire’s free email newsletter. \n\nAnd if you’ve found our reporting interesting or useful, please consider a paid subscription to help support our journalism!<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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BoardGameArena, Asmodee’s online board gaming platform which passed 10 million registered users last summer, has unveiled the winners of its annual contest for the most popular games added to the service in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[571,949,97,16,1181,6,135,1183,164,1063,326,1240],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-571","tag-949","tag-asmodee","tag-award","tag-bga","tag-board-game","tag-board-games","tag-boardgamearena","tag-darwins-journey","tag-harmonies","tag-online","tag-splendor-duel"],"blocksy_meta":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3807,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions\/3807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}