Kennerspiel 2026: Three Nominees, One Theory of What Gamers Want

Grant: Okay, the Kennerspiel des Jahres shortlist dropped, and I have to say, three nominees, three completely different bets on what a connoisseur game is even supposed to be. Miles: Welcome back to the Design Deck, everybody. I'm Miles. Grant: And I'm Grant. And Miles, I've been staring at this list since May 19th, trying to figure out which one of these is actually going to win. Miles: Yeah, same. And the stakes are not small. BoardGameWire reported that Pegasus Spieles co-founder said winning the main... Main prize can boost a game's sales 10 to 20 times in the months after the announcement. Grant: Right, which means the jury isn't just handing out trophies, they're making a market call. Miles: Exactly. So here's what we're doing today. Three games, one crown. Grant: Okay, Boss Fighters QR, cooperative monster bashing where the boss literally runs on an app. The jury called it out specifically, and wait for it, they still nominated it. Miles: Which tells you something. Grant: Right. Then, Moon Colony Bloodbath. Donald ex Vaccarino, the guy who designed Dominion, basically inverts the deckbuilder: the deck that grows, kills everybody. Just the name alone earned it a spot on my watch list, honestly. Then Rebirth from Reiner Knizia—Clean, Spare, the anti maximalist argument. Miles: Three different answers to the same question: Where does the complexity actually live in a game designed for experienced players? Grant: And we've got opinions-strong ones. Miles: Wow. Grant: We'll get into all three designs, and then land somewhere on which one we think deserved the crown. Miles: All right, the jury reviewed five hundred and seventy one games to get the To get to this short list, ICv2 conforms the full nominee list, so let's start with the one that probably raised the most eyebrows in that jury room. Grant: Boss Spiders QR Hybrid App Design on the Kennerspiel Stage The math on that is wild! Miles: Which tells you something. Grant: Then Moon Colony Bloodbath-Donald ex Vaccarino, the guy who designed Dominion, basically inverts the deck builder: the deck that grows kills everybody. Miles: Just the name alone earned it a spot on my watch list, honestly. Grant: Then Rebirth from Reiner Knizia-Clean, Spare, the anti maximalist argument. Miles: Three different answers to the same question: Where does the complexity actually live in a game designed for experienced players? Grant: And we've got opinions-strong ones. We'll get into all three designs and then land somewhere on which one we think deserved the crown. Miles: All right, the trio reviewed five hundred and seventy one games to get to this short list. ICv2 confirms the full nominee list, so let's start with the one that probably raised the most eyebrows in that jury room. Grant: Boss Fighters QR, hybrid app design on the Kennerspiel stage. The math on that is wild. July twelfth Berlin The jury calls the Kennerspiel winner, and just like that one publisher's print run planning changes overnight. Miles: And if you're not already tracking the Kennerspiel des Jahres, let me give you the quick brief. Kennerspiel means "connoisseur game of the year." Think of it as the Oscars for games that take more than twenty minutes to explain. The audience already plays; they want something that challenges them. Grant: And the sales math behind that trophy is wild. Pegasus Spiel co-founder Karsten Esser told BoardGameWire that winning the main prize can boost a game's sales 10x to 20x in the months after the announcement. Miles: Wow. Grant: That's not marketing. That's a market signal. Miles: Right, and this year the jury was working through a record pile. ICv2 reported 571 games reviewed total, 440 just across the Spiel and Kennerspiel categories. Categories Grant: Five hundred seventy one! Miles: Yeah, and out of all that, three games make the Kennerspiel shortlist. Three! Grant: Okay, so get this: When I look at a shortlist, I don't think three great games. I think three competing arguments. What is each one saying the field should be doing? Miles: That's exactly the right frame, because this year's three, Boss Fighters QR, Moon Colony Bloodbath, and Rebirth Aren't just different games, they're almost like a design debate. Grant: Rebirth is Reiner Knizia-tight efficiency, every tiny action doing two or three things at once. That's one theory of what a connoisseur game should be. Miles: Moon Colony Bloodbath is Donald X Vaccarino, the Dominion guy, going somewhere much darker and more spatial-another theory entirely. Grant: And then there's Boss Fighters QR Miles: Which requires a phone to play. Grant: A Spiel nominee that requires a phone. Miles: The jury flopped it directly; they acknowledged that app dependency turns off a lot of players, but they still nominated it; they said they admired the skill of the integration. Grant: So the jury just told every designer in the room, "We'll look past the phone if the design earns it." That's a position; that's them drawing a line in the sand. And Miles: And Boss Fighters QR is the most provocative entry on that shortlist for exactly that reason. So what does the phone actually do, and does it earn that pass from the jury? Grant: that is the question. Okay, so let's actually get into the mechanics of Boss Fighters QR, because the phone thing is doing a lot of work here. Miles: So for anyone not familiar, deck building means you're constructing a personal hand of cards during play, improving it over time. Boss Fighters QR does that, but flips who your opponent is. Every card has a QR code on the back. You scan it and the app reads the action in real time, then decides how the boss reacts. Grant: Right, and this isn't just tracking hit points. Big Boss Battles review noted that if you hit too hard, the boss enrages. Stall too long, it escalates its own attack pattern. Miles: Wow. Grant: The app is running branching behavior. Miles: Which is what digital boss battles have always done. That's the whole slavish fire fantasy. A villain that actually responds to your choices. Physical co-ops have chased that for years. Grant: And mostly failed. I mean, Pandemic Legacy's rotating disease events were clever. However, but the Boss was always a static rule system. Miles: Right. Grant: You were reading the room; the room wasn't reading you back. Miles: Exactly. And that gap, our reactive villain, is hard to close with cards and tokens. Grant: So my question is, does offloading that to software count as Design or is it just outsourcing the hard part? Miles: You knew I was going there. Grant: I'd do the math. Miles: Look, I've seen this play out a hundred times with Hybrid games. The ones that fail. I'll put the interesting decisions in the App. The ones that work keep player agents. Grant: and see at the table, and let the app handle the bookkeeping. Miles: And Palm and Zach were apparently deliberate about that line. Lucas Zach said in a Pegasus interview that if the app does too much, players say, "I might as well just play on my PC." They kept status tokens and card feel physical on purpose. Grant: So what the app runs is boss logic, the branching logic, the phase shifts, the enrage triggers; what stays at the table is everything the players do-hand management, combos, targeting. That's the split! Miles: Okay, I'll give them credit for that; the campaign structure also helps. Ten bosses, physical loot boxes after each fight that upgrade your deck-big boss battle noted each boss is its own puzzle, not just a bag of hit points. Grant: Noted: Some require you to break armor before dealing real damage; others summon minions, shift phases, change weaknesses mid fight; the opponent makes that feasible without a forty page rulebook. Miles: Which brings us back to the jury. Tabletop Sentinel pointed out the jury are confident more than ninety per cent of games will stay electronics free, but they admire the skill of this integration. That's a carefully worded endorsement. Grant: It's not 'apps are great,' it's 'these designers used one well.' There's a real difference. Miles: And that's the actual design lesson: the app didn't replace the design problem, it relocated one specific Speaker 3: problem. Speaker 4: A specific piece of it, the players still carry the cognitive load of the deck. Grant: Which is Completely different from the philosophy with the next nominee does: Moon Colony Bloodbath buries all that complexity inside a communal deck. No screen, no scan, just a pile of cards the players themselves poisoned! Speaker 4: Two designers, same problem: how do you build a gamer's game without burying people in rules? One handed it to a phone. The other hid it in the cart. Grant: And the approach you choose shapes everything else about the experience at the table. Miles: Okay, flip the whole premise, no app, no screen. Moon Colony Bloodbath puts all the complexity inside a single shared deck that every player builds together, and then suffers through together. Grant: And the guy who invented the deck builder in the first place is the one doing this. Vaccarino created Dominion, Spiel des Jahres two thousand nine, over two and a half million copies sold, basically by accident, working on a combat system that wasn't gelling invented a mech The mechanism where each player grows their own private deck-that fix became its own genre. Miles: Right, and in Dominion, your deck is yours. You tend it, you optimize it, nobody else touches it. Meeple Mountain described Moon Colony Bloodbath as an engine building, engine losing tableau game. Those last two words, engine losing, that's the whole design argument. Engine losing. Speaker 4: That's a new one. Grant: So walk me through what actually happens at the table. Everyone contributes cards into a single shared Progress Deck—that's the term, Progress Deck—and the deck drives the game forward: it flips cards, those cards fire events at everyone simultaneously, killer robots, moonquakes, food shortages. The more you build, the more catastrophe you're cooking into the system. Miles: And the win condition is what, survive the longest? Grant: Survive the longest. Last colony with living astronauts wins. you're not racing toward a finish line, you're just bleeding slower than everyone else. Miles: I mean, that is one way to design a victory condition. Grant: Wargamer called it an elegant engine whose narrative is built into the very nuts and bolts of the bloodthirsty killing machine, because the theme isn't flavor text slapped on a box, the game state is the story. Miles: Okay, so here's what I'm wrestling with. Stefan Feld did something adjacent within the Year of the Dragon back in... In back in two thousand seven, scheduled disasters, everyone bracing for the same incoming events-that's not new. What's Vaccarino actually adding? Grant: The shared construction-in Dragon you know what's coming but you didn't put it there; in Moon Colony Bloodbath you built the disaster yourself, you added that card, you signed off Speaker 5: Yes. Grant: on it-FroGames describe the whole design as a game where building and losing are the same move. Miles: That's a meaningful distinction. It shifts the psychological weight entirely. Grant: entirely, completely. And that's where the jury's commentary lines up. They drew a direct comparison to Daybreak, the 2024 Kennerspiel winner, where the game uses mechanics to comment on technology and collective consequence. Moon Colony Bloodbath is doing the same. The robots that were supposed to help you are the ones that eventually come for you. Miles: Which tracks with basically every tech project I've ever watched from the outside. died. Grant: Right? Miles: So is engine-losing a genuinely new design category, or is it engine building with a pessimistic wind condition bolted on? Grant: I think it's new when the loss is mechanically authored by the players, not just inflicted by the game. That's the distinction. You feel responsible. Miles: I'll grant you that. The math is interesting. You're always choosing between adding something that helps you now... And loading a gun pointed at everyone's head later. Grant: And you never stop pulling the trigger, because stopping means falling behind-that's the trap. Miles: I noticed. So Boss Fighters' QR solved the reactive villain problem with software; this one buries the same tension inside a deck you helped assemble. Two totally different answers to the same design question. The next nominee going in the exact opposite direction, stripping systems out entirely instead of stacking them. Grant: Reiner Knizia: One tile per turn, and you score immediately. That's where we go next. Miles: So, on the opposite end of that spectrum-Babylonia: Knizia's argument for doing less. Grant: And I mean that in the best way possible-tile placement where you're literally placing one tile per turn and scoring it immediately, plus area control around castles-that's the whole rulebook. Miles: Area control, meaning surround a castle with more tiles than your opponents, you own it; five points at game end. Grant: Hmm. Miles: Castle changes hands as the board fills; that tension is where the game lives. Grant: And the farm chain scoring-you score one point for connected tile and a matching group the moment you place it, so a small cluster early is fine, but if you build that chain to eight or ten tiles? Miles: The math starts getting interesting fast. Grant: Exactly. A simple rule compounding decisions. Miles: Okay, so the dual board structure: Scotland gives each player private mission cards-personal hidden objectives-Ireland flips those to public shared goals-every one races to complete first. Grant: Two completely different psychological experiences on one board. Scotland is about concealing your angle; Ireland is a foot race where everybody sees the finish line. Miles: I love that as a design move. Grant: Two games, one box, five minute rules teach either way. Miles: And BoardGameWire.com flagged why this nomination carries extra weight: Knizia's chasing a third SdJ-category win across different award tiers, which would be an unprecedented sweep in the award's history. So this isn't a designer coasting; he's making a very deliberate statement. Grant: Here's my problem with that framing, though: Babylonia, another Knizia tile layer, critics consistently call it the deeper game. Opinionated Gamers literally wrote it lacks the strategic depth of Babylonia. So is the jury rewarding craft, or are they rewarding accessibility dressed as depth? Miles: Hmm, I'd push back on that a little. Grant: Yeah. Miles: The jury's language was specific, rewarding investment strategies. That's not about how many rules there are; that's about whether every placement compounds meaningfully. Grant: Fair; but Carcassonne is also one tile per turn, also area control around cities; it's been out since two thousand, what's the delta? Miles: I knew you were going to go there. Grant: I always go there. Miles: The delta is the dual board structure and Knizia's way of tying farm scoring to chain length rather than closed features: in Carcassonne you wait for the city to close, in Rebirth you score the instant you extend a chain: Grant: Mm-hmm. Miles: more granular feedback, faster decisions. Grant: Okay, that's a real design distinction, I'll give you that. Miles: The Big Boss Battles review put it well: light rule set that leaves players free to focus on crunchy, highly tactical decisions. That's actually a hard thing to engineer. Grant: It is; the complexity lives in the spatial relationships, not the rules overhead. Same move the jury praised in Azul back in the day. Miles: So three nominees, three hiding spots for complexity: the op absorbs it in Boss Fighters' QR, the shared deck detonates it later in Moon Colony Bloodbath, and Rebirth buries it in the board geometry from Move one. Grant: Which one earns the Kennerspiel label most honestly? That's what we're settling next. So three theories walked into Berlin on July 12th: complexity in the app, complexity in the shared deck, complexity in spatial geometry. The jury had to pick one. Miles: And the winner tells you exactly what they valued. I keep thinking about this like reading an auction result, grant, not what people said before the bidding, but where the gavel actually fell. Grant: Okay, that framing is mine and I'm taking it back. But yeah, the price doesn't lie. Miles: My verdict? Moon Colony Bloodbath. Vaccarino built a game where the players architect their own downfall. That's not complicated. That's genuinely new psychological territory. Grant: And now push back on that. Rebirth is the one that makes me feel like a connoisseur. Every tile placement compounds. Kinesia hid the difficulty inside decisions that look simple. That's harder to design than a clever deck mechanism. Miles: I get the elegance argument, but looks simple risks feels thin if the table doesn't already know what to look for. Grant: That's the tension. Boss Fighters QR hides complexity in the app. Moon Colony Bloodbath hides it in future consequences. Rebirth hides it in the board geometry right in front of you. Miles: And those are three completely different bets about where a connoisseur player wants to do their work. Grant: One of them requires a charged phone. Miles: Fair point. So what's the actual design takeaway? Because if I'm building a Kennerspiel prototype right now, this Feld just handed me a blueprint. Grant: Where you hide complexity is a design choice, not a difficulty dial. You're deciding where the player's brain does its hardest work. Get that wrong and you have a complicated game. Get it right and you have a connoisseur one. Miles: The Jury just told five hundred seventy one games' worth of designers exactly which answer they rewarded. Grant: And that's worth paying attention to. All right, that's a wrap on the twenty twenty six Kennerspiel race. Miles: Three nominees, three completely different answers to the same question:--Where does the complexity actually live? Grant: Boss Fighters QR puts it in your phone, Moon Colony Bloodbath hides it inside the engine you're building, Rebirth buries it in the gaps between tiles you thought were simple. Miles: And honestly, the jury's job this year is brutal. Grant: Yeah. Miles: Every one of those is a defensible pick. Grant: The best design decision is the one you can't walk away from. Miles: Exactly. Trophy drops July 12th. We'll be watching. Grant: If this episode got your brain turning, we want to hear which nominee you'd crown. Find us at thedesigndeck.com or tag us on social. Miles: New episodes every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen, and if you've got a game you want us to take apart, Grant: Bring it. Seriously. Miles: Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next week.