About this site

Why this site exists

Award results are scattered: each competition publishes its own, in its own language, often without the early years, and never alongside the others. Wikipedia documents each award separately. This site does the one thing that was missing: it brings all four together, from the first edition to today, broken down by category and cross-referenced by year and by game.

• An unbroken record since the award was created. An archive needs every year, not just the last five.
• Real influence on the market. An award that changes neither print runs nor shop shelves helps nobody pick a game.
• A way of picking winners that the others do not have: a closed jury, a French-speaking professional jury, a broad professional vote, a vote open to everyone. Four points of view, four verdicts that sometimes disagree, which is exactly where it gets interesting.

The ones that are not here

The Kennerspiel and Kinderspiel des Jahres are not separate awards: they are categories of the Spiel des Jahres, so they appear in its results. The Diana Jones Award does not always crown a game, sometimes a person or a magazine, so it fits in no column. The International Gamers Awards and the Origins Awards do exist, but the first carries little weight outside the hobbyist circle and the second has reshuffled its categories too often for one year to be compared with the next. That leaves convention and shop awards, which mostly reward whatever happened to be on site that year.

Why the Deutscher Spiele Preis podium, and not its Top 10

The Deutscher Spiele Preis does not name a single winner: it publishes a ranking of ten games, drawn from a broad vote. This site keeps only the top three, for three reasons. The question people arrive with is "who won that year", and only the head of the ranking answers it; the gap between sixth and eighth place sits within the noise of the vote and says nothing lasting; above all, the three other awards name one winner per category. Keeping ten German entries a year against one or two elsewhere would have made the DSP weigh three times as much as the rest on every year, decade and game page. That is not more information, it is a distorted reading.

The order they appear in

Everywhere on this site the four awards come in the same order, the order suited to the language: the Spiel des Jahres first in English, the worldwide benchmark and the only prize that can move an entire market; then the As d'Or, the major French-speaking award; the Deutscher Spiele Preis, the "dedicated gamer" counterweight that puts the first in context; and finally the Golden Geek Awards, the only open vote, a community barometer rather than a jury verdict.