Kennerspiel 2026 — Three Games, One Crown

Grant: Okay, so get this. The Kennerspiel des Jahres shortlist just dropped, and the jury handed us one of the most interesting three-way matchups in years. Miles: Three games that could not be more different from each other, like a Knizia Euro, a deck builder where your own engine kills you, and a game that ships with a live app boss fight. Grant: Right, right, right. And if Knizia wins, BoardGameWire reported he'd be the first designer in the Speaker 3: world to win a game. Grant: in the award's forty seven year history to win all three categories. Miles: Wow. Grant: That's the kind of stat that makes the conversation bigger than any one game. Miles: The jury was working from a record 671 games this year, according to BoardGameWire, so landing three nominees this distinct from each other is a statement in itself. Grant: We are going deep on all three today: Rebirth, Knizia's tile placement Euro with a dual-sided board. Record the Scotland side versus Ireland side question. Miles: Moon Colony Bloodbath, Donald Vaccarino builds an engine that actively tries to destroy itself, and we're going to debate whether that's clever design or collective chaos. Grant: And Boss Fighters QR (cooperative deck building where the boss lives inside an app). We'll get into whether outsourcing the boss to an algorithm is a Kennerspiel worthy move or a shortcut. Miles: And we close out with predictions: Grant's picking Moon Colony Bloodbath. Bloodbath. I'm on Rebirth, and we break down what each outcome would actually signal about where the jury thinks Knizia's level design is headed on July 12th. Grant: He is wrong, by the way. Miles: Very scientific take. Shall we get into the Kennerspiel standard first? Grant: Let's start there. The Kennerspiel has been around since 2011, 15 years of crowning one game that sits right in the middle of this market. Not a family game, not a full hobby title. That middle lane. Miles: And it's a hard lane to design for, wired for someone who already knows Catan but won't punish a newcomer who's never touched a worker placement in their life. Grant: Right. The Jury's description is actually pretty specific. Games for people experienced. Speaker 4: Experienced in learning new rules, that's the filter, not complexity for its own sake. Miles: Which is why the track record matters: Seven Wonders in twenty eleven, Wingspan in twenty nineteen, Lost Ruins of Arnak. These aren't punishing games. Every single one of them has a table friendly entry ramp. Speaker 4: And that bar is exactly what I keep coming back to when I look at twenty twenty six because this year's shortlist, Boss Fighters QR, Moon Colony Bloodbath. Rebirth and Rebirth is weird; three games that sit in almost completely different design spaces. Miles: "Weird" is the right word. Speaker 4: Board Game Wire reported the jury reviewed a record seven hundred and fifty one games this year-seven hundred and fifty one-and they landed on these three. Miles: Five hundred and seventy one-and that's three slots, so whatever made the cut, the jury felt strongly. Speaker 4: Which brings us to Rebirth, because Reiner Knizia being on this short list isn't just a good game getting nominated. Miles: No, it's not. Speaker 4: Board game wire flagged this, too: Knizia has already won both the main Spiel des Jahres and the Kinderspiel. Miles: Wow. Speaker 4: A Kinderspiel win would make him the first designer in the award's forty seven year history to win all three categories. Miles: Okay, I want to pump the brakes a little here, because the legacy angle is real. But does that create a halo effect around Rebirth the game? I've seen this play out: a great designer gets nominated and the biography starts carrying the argument. Speaker 4: That's a fair call, and I'll push back on it once we actually look at the mechanics, because I don't think Rebirth needs the biography. Miles: So the real question isn't does Knizia deserve a third trophy, the question is whether this shortlist tells us the jury is betting on elegant and familiar or willing to go somewhere genuinely unexpected. Unexpected. Speaker 4: Exactly, and one of these three nominees is as unexpected as the Kennerspiel has ever gotten, so what does it mean that it made the cut at all? So, let's actually get into the box. Rebirth is a tile-layer, two to four players, each drawing from their own personal supply and placing one tile per turn on a shared board. You're building farms, settlements, scoring through castle control and contiguous groups. Nobody attacks anybody directly. Miles: Which is the first question I'd ask for a Kennerspiel-like "Is indirect competition enough at this level?" Carcassonne does indirect conflict and nobody calls out a connoisseur game. game. Speaker 4: Right, right, that's my exact issue. You're not blocking me, you're optimizing around me, and Knizia's done this before, brilliantly, but I want to know if the jury's rewarding elegance or just restraint. Hmm. Miles: Let me make the case for the design, though. Because the dual board is doing more work than it looks. Scotland gives everyone hidden private objectives. Ireland flips that. Public tiered scoring targets that all players race towards simultaneously. Lastly, according to Board Game Wire's review, those two sides share the same core placement rules but create fundamentally different read-your-opponent layers. Speaker 4: Okay, so on Scotland you're hiding your plan. Ireland everyone can see the scoreboard ticking. Miles: Exactly. Ireland has a real race element; first player to hit a shared objective takes the bigger reward. Gryfgras's review put it well, the towers on Ireland are immediately visible and they shift the game's pace; it's not just a reskin. Speaker 4: That's actually a meaningful design argument. Two strategic identities, one box. I'll give it that. Miles: But, and this is where I have a real concern, some reviewers flag that a bad tile draw at a critical moment can feel punishing. You've planned five moves ahead and your supply just handed you the wrong tile. Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, for a game that otherwise rewards careful planning, that randomness stings worse than it would in a looser design. You'd accept it in something chaotic. In a precision instrument, it grates. Miles: I'm on both sides of that, honestly. You could argue the draw from your personal supply creates tension you can't fully control and that's the feature: it forces adaptation. But I don't know if I buy it at the Kennerspiel level. Speaker 4: Now let's talk about the elephant in the room: Boardgamewire reported that a Kennerspiel win for Knizia would make him the first designer in the award's forty seven year history to win all three categories: Spiel, Kinderspiel, Kennerspiel. He's already got two of them. Miles: That's a real number, that's not hype. Speaker 4: No, it's not; but I'll say what I said last segment about the halo risk. Does r Grant: Does Rebirth earn its standing alone, or does the story write the trophy? Miles: I've been thinking about that, and my honest read is Rebirth earns nomination on mechanics alone. The dual board, the castle control, the way each tile placement compresses space for everyone else without direct conflict, that's clean design. Grant: Clean design, yes, but Kennerspiel winning design? Uwe Rosenberg got Agricola into this conversation. This category rewards systems that shift how you think across plays, not just plays that feel smooth. Miles: But that's exactly the argument for Ireland mode. The public tiered objectives force you to read three other players' intentions simultaneously. That is a shifting system! Grant: Okay, fair; I'll concede the Scotland side makes a stronger case for the category. Ireland feels like the entry point, Scotland feels like the actual Kennerspiel. Miles: Direct put two games in one box and only one of them is at the right weight class, which is either brilliant or a little bit of a tell. Grant: That might be the most Knizia sentence ever spoken. Miles: Look, if Rebirth wins in July, I won't argue it's undeserved, but I want the jury voting on Scotland about. Grant: What I will say is this: Rebirth is the most controlled, minimal design in this short list, and the next nominee we're looking at is the exact opposite: Vaccarino built something where the engine you construct is also the thing that eventually destroys you. Miles: Yeah, Moon Colony Bloodbath is not subtle. Grant: Not even slightly. Now flip that completely on its head: Vaccarino's nominee is Moon Colony Bloodbath, and the publisher's own description calls it an "engine building, engine losing game." I love that they just said it out loud. Miles: No marketing spin at all. We built this thing and then it kills you. Grant: Right. So mechanically, you and the other players are building a shared deck together. Cards get added that trigger work events, growth. resources, but trouble cards also go in, and those stack disaster events, hunger, power failures, robots going rogue. You're all contributing to the same pile of chaos. Miles: And that's the design move that really separates it from anything Vaccarino's done before. Dominion, which he published in 2008, basically invented deck building as a genre, that whole game is about optimizing your own personal deck. Nobody else touches it! Grant: Completely isolated engines. Miles: Exactly. Moon Colony Bloodbath says no, the bloodbath is a group project-every card someone adds could be the one that tips the whole colony into collapse, the catastrophe is collective. Grant: Okay, so get this, the simultaneous action selection: when a work card flips, everyone picks an action at the same time. Mining, farming, building, research. No waiting. Miles: Sure, keeps the down time low. Grant: Sure, but the math doesn't work when everyone reads the board the same way. Table of people, everyone minds because oar looks scarce, now you've got a resource glut and nobody farmed; Colony starts starving three rounds later. Miles: And that's the story the mechanics are telling. The game has this built in narrative arc: early turns feel fine, you're building, then trouble cards accumulate, the deck gets heavier Grant: Wow. Miles: and you can feel it getting worse. It's not chaos; it's a slow-motion disaster you watched yourself create. Grant: Hmm, I'm on both sides of this; the thematic arc is genuinely clever, but I keep coming back to the Kennerspiel question: if the disasters are partly random-whatever trouble cards happen to surface-does individual skill actually matter enough? Miles: I'd push back on that. You can prep for the trouble you know is in the deck. Every reshuffle is a signal. The players who track what's been seeded in, who build their colony to absorb shocks rather than just optimize output, those players consistently survive longer. Grant: So it rewards anticipation over optimization. Miles: That's exactly the counter Spiel argument for it. Dominion rewards you for building the perfect machine. Moon Colony Bloodbath rewards you for building something that won't. It won't collapse when the machine turns on you. Grant: And Deadpan, which it absolutely will. Miles: Every single time. The question isn't whether your colony dies, it's whether yours is the last one standing. Grant: And that winner by survival framing is pretty interesting design real estate. Most Euro games reward you for building up. This one rewards you for not falling apart fastest. Miles: The jury called it when they nominated it. The shared DAC-S social pressure – everyone's complicit in the disaster, and the blame is genuinely distributed. Grant: All right. That said, Boss Fighters QR is doing something just as subversive, and I want to get into it because Vaccarino inverted the deck, Palm and Zach inverted the game master entirely. Okay, switching gears entirely. Palm and Zach, Boss Fighters QR. Miles: The one that's going to make purists uncomfortable. Grant: Exactly. So here's the physical setup. You've got a cooperative deck building campaign, 10 bosses, and every single card has a QR code on the back. You scan it, the app reads your action, and the boss responds in real time. The boss lives entirely in the app, your cards, your hands, your decisions. Entirely on the table. Miles: And I actually think that split is the interesting design question: what does the app take off the table? Grant: Everything that would have been a reference card nightmare: boss attack patterns, health tracking, difficulty scaling, all of it handled digitally. You're not cross referencing tables; you're just playing. Miles: Which is exactly how the jury framed it. Their nomination statement says the difficulty can be adjusted to the group thanks to the intuitive app. They're not embarrassed by that, they're calling it a feature. Grant: Ah, and I get the argument; but, Miles, I'm not totally sold. When the boss behavior lives in an algorithm I can't inspect, I lose something. In Mansions of Madness the app handles monster movement, and what you lose is the ability to strategize against the knowable system. You're reacting to outputs you can't fully model. Miles: That's a real critique, although I'd push back slightly. Descent's app integration got dinged for exactly that reason. Boss Fighters apparently solves it by keeping the player's side fully transparent: you always know your own hand, the opacity is the boss, and that's intentional. Grant: Okay, that's fair. That does mirror a video game boss fight in a way most board games never actually pull off. Miles: Which was Pullman-Zach's stated design goal: they wanted the PC boss battle experience. Big, reactive. reactive" surprising without the rule books and look up tables; and these are the guys who won the Spiel with Dorfromantik in twenty twenty three, so they've already proven they can strip a design down to its emotional core. Grant: Right; Dorfromantik is a very different animal, though—that's pastoral, meditative.... This is a boss battle game where a smartphone is a required component. Miles: No question; and jury chairman Harald Schrapers was asked directly whether that signals a trend. His answer, according to BoardGameWire: "No." He called it an addition, not a direction. Grant: That word matters—addition: not evolution, not the future—an addition, which means the jury isn't betting on apps. App-first design They're saying this specific app and this specific game earns its seat at the table. Miles: So the real question is, does outsourcing the boss to an algorithm make the game more interesting or less? My read: more, because the surprise is the point. You're not supposed to solve the boss; you're supposed to survive the encounter. Grant: I land differently: the campaign structure, ten bosses, loot boxes after each fight, deck upgrades-that's genuinely compelling. But for a Kennerspiel, I want the complexity to live in my hands, not on a screen I'm half ignoring between scans. The app is doing cognitive work that I think the category expects players to do. Miles: So you're saying the jury is rewarding accessibility dressed as depth? Grant: I'm saying the math on what counts as a gamer's game is Speaker 3: - Grant: Gets murky when the game master isn't sitting at the table, that's my concern. Miles: I think it's a legitimate nomination. Whether it wins is a different argument, one we're about to have. Grant: So where does all of this leave us? Three nominees, one award. Miles: I'll go first. My money's on Rebirth. And not because of Knizia's legacy I've been on record pushing back on that halo. It's the design argument. A dual board structure that genuinely produces two different strategic identities is a harder achievement than it reads. Grant: Okay, so for you, a Rebirth win says the jury still values I use elegant restraint-design that does more with less. Miles: Exactly-and that's been Kennerspiel's DNA for most of its history. Grant: My read is different. Speaker 4: Hm... Grant: I think Moon Colony Bloodbath wins. Vaccarino built a shared deck that generates disaster and progress simultaneously. That's a structural idea, not just a clever twist. The math works for it because the tension is baked into every single draw, not outsourced anywhere. Miles: Taking a shot at Boss Fighters QR one last time Grant: I mean, Look, Palm and Zach made something genuinely new, but a Boss Fighters win would be a statement that the jury sees app integration as a first-class design tool, not a support layer. That's a big swing for a category that's always been about player cognition. Miles: And honestly, that might be the most interesting outcome. It would signal the jury has decided hybrid physical digital. It is mature enough to define the enthusiast's category; not to qualify for it. Grant: Which is either visionary or premature, depending on where you stand. Miles: So three nominees, three answers; restraint, structured chaos, or borrowed intelligence: the jury votes July twelfth. Speaker 5: Yeah. Grant: And whichever answer they pick will shape what designers chase for the next three years. That's not nothing. All right, that's a wrap on the Kennerspiel 2026 shortlist, and honestly, what a bracket. Miles: Three games, zero obvious winner. That's the sign of a good year. Grant: The number that sticks with me? Board game wire reported the jury reviewed a record 571 games to land on these three. 571! Miles: And your point about Knizia lands hard. Does the legacy carry the game or does the game earn it on its own? Grant: That's the question July 12th answers. I'm still on Moon Colony. Colony Bloodbath the engine losing mechanic is genuinely different Miles: And I'm still on Rebirth, two strategic identities, one box. Grant: we'll see who owes who coffee Miles: If you want to weigh in, tell us which nominee you're backing. Find us at thedesigndeck.com or tag us on social. New episodes every Thursday. Grant: subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the winter breakdown and if this one was worth your time leave a review it genuinely helps Miles: Thanks for being here. See you next Thursday.