The Spiel des Jahres—Germany's "Game of the Year"—award is the biggest prize in the board-game business. It guarantees both sales and bragging rights around the world. In May, the Spiel des Jahres jury announced its shortlist. Today, the organization crowned the winners: Kingdomino by Bruno Cathala won the main award, while Exit: The Game by Inka and Markus Brand won "complex" game of the year. (The "children's" award already went to penguin-flicking game Ice Cool.)

The two titles are quite different. Kingdomino is a quick-to-learn, family-oriented tile-laying game in which each player builds a 5x5 "kingdom" out of oversized cardboard dominoes, each showing different landscapes and bearing different numbers of crowns. Points are awarded at the end of the game by multiplying the size of each connected landscape area by the number of crowns that each landscape area contains. Add all the landscapes in your kingdom together and you have your total. Simple!

But thanks to a clever tile-selection mechanism, each turn gives you only a limited choice, and taking better tiles immediately means you choose later in the next round. Conversely, taking worse tiles in the present ensures first choice in the future. Once chosen, tiles are placed based on easy rules—but with the limitation that your kingdom can never grow beyond a 5x5 grid or you lose the tile. (A well-regarded, two-player variant lets players expand their kingdoms to a 7x7 grid, allowing for more strategic depth.)

The Spiel des Jahres jury praised the simple elegance of the mechanics and said that "the planning of the extensive landscapes around the castle and the clever mechanism in the tiles selection are harmoniously interlinked and masterfully reduced to their essentials."

By contrast, Exit: The Game is a series of super-puzzle-y "escape rooms in a box" (three are already available in English; more are on the way). Trapped inside a cabin or a lab or a pyramid, you and your friends must cooperate to solve a series of physical and mental puzzles before you can gain your freedom. (Usually in around an hour.) The faster you go—and the fewer hints you need—the better your final score.

In our recent roundup of "escape room" games, we called Exit one of the top choices in the genre, and the jurors at Spiel des Jahres agree. They gave Exit: The Game their Kennerspiel des Jahres award for a more complex title, moving away from the standard board games that have won in years past.

The Kennerspiel award went to all three of the initial Exit games due to the "remarkable quality of these co-op adventures... The many innovative puzzles make it a pleasure to look for non-trivial and often ingenious solutions." The series, said the jury, was a "must for all escape room fans."

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