The nominations for the 2025 Spiel des Jahres Awards have just been announced.  Although there are now other lots of other awards (including the recently announced Golden Geek Awards), this is still the most prestigious award in board gaming and certainly the one that carries the most weight when it comes to casual gamers.  There are three categories, the Kinderspiel (children’s game) , the…

The 2024 nominations for the three Spiel des Jahres categories have just been announced.  Although there are now other awards, this is arguably still the most prestigious award in board gaming and, certainly the one that carries the most weight when it comes to casual gamers.  There are three categories, the Kinderspiel (children’s game) , the Kennerspiel (“expert’s” game) and the most desirable…

The boardGOATS love a good party, so once again, they met just before Christmas for their annual Un-Christmas Dinner and to decide the winners of the GOAT Awards.  After food, crackers and writing GOAT Christmas Cards, the group voted for two awards:  the Golden GOAT for our favourite game played during the year and the “GOAT Poo” award for our least favourite.  Everyone had the usual three…

After Blue and Pink had sampled the new pizza menu at The Jockey, people started to roll up and join them for the usual chatter.  There were a total of nine, which was one more than  required for the “Feature Game“, the recently announced Kennerspiel des Jahres winner, Challengers!.  This is a deck-building, dueling “capture the flag” game where players battle head-to-head to find the winner.  It…

Our next meeting will be Tuesday 25th July 2023.  As usual, we will start playing shorter games from 7.30pm as people arrive, until 8pm when we will start something a little longer.  The pub is now doing food, we we will be meeting from 6.30pm for those who would like to eat. To mark the recent announcement of the Spiel des Jahres winners, this week, the “Feature Game” will be the Kennerspiel…

The 2023 Spiel des Jahres (German Game of the Year) winner has been been announced as the cooperative campaign game, Dorfromantik: The Board Game which is based on the video game of the same name.  Players work together to together to lay hexagonal tiles to create a beautiful landscape trying to make the train track and river as long as possible while also fulfilling the orders of the…