by W. Eric Martin

▪️ While some game industry awards — Spiel des Jahres, As d’Or, etc. — come elsewhen in the year, the fourth quarter sees many awards dropping near simultaneously, as with Fairplay magazine’s annual announcement of its À la Carte award for best card game, with the 2025 winner being Castle Combo from designers Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel and publisher Catch Up Games. (If you’re not familiar with the game, you can read or watch my review.)

The next three spots in the À la Carte 2025 results went to Faraway, The Gang, and Fishing.

▪️ Speaking of Fairplay, you can see the final standing of games in its Scoutaktion polls from SPIEL Essen 25. Fair attendees are asked to rank games, and the Fairplay booth maintains an updated visual ranking using the games in question.

In the end, Map Masters and Boss Fighters QR tied for the top rank in the family and kids category, while Compile: Main 1 barely beat out Les Derniers Droïdes (The Last Droids) in the enthusiast/expert category.

▪️ And speaking of Grégory Grard, the jury of the 2025 Lucca Comics & Games named him “Board Game Designer of the Year”, writing:

His creative journey demonstrates remarkable versatility: from light and witty party games to more strategic and structured titles, Grard has proven his ability to explore different genres and levels of complexity, while maintaining consistently high design quality.

During the reference period, his work showed a marked inclination toward ludic synthesis: essential yet profound mechanics, elegant design free from redundancy, and careful balance between aesthetics, usability, and thematic coherence. These qualities have earned him international recognition and contributed to shaping a modern approach to board game design, combining creative discipline with wide accessibility, and having a positive influence on contemporary trends in the field.

Image courtesy of Lucca Comics & Games

Equally notable is Grard’s collaborative spirit, reflected in fruitful partnerships with other designers, which have further enriched the creative landscape and underscored the collective cultural value of board game design.

▪️ As an aside, let me share one of the promotional posters for Lucca Comics & Games 2025:

As explained on the Lucca website, artist Rébecca Dautremer created six characters for fifteen posters that pair them in every way possible, but the image above was the one I primarily saw in publicity posts, perhaps because the tones in the poster mirror the French flag, which is a beautiful artistic touch.

▪️ The other award winners from Lucca Comics & Games 2025 were Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland‘s Triangle Agency for RPG of the year and Samuele Tabellini Ferrari and Vieri Masseini‘s Botanicus for Gioco dell’Anno, that is, game of the year.

▪️ And speaking of Botanicus, that game won the Kenners (connoisseurs) category in the 2025 Nederlandse Spellenprijs, beating out nominees Comet and Pirates of Maracaibo. In the Experts category, Tomáš Holek‘s SETI won over Men-Nefer and Windmill Valley, and in the Family category, Hisashi Hayashi‘s Bomb Busters bested Faraway (another runner-up!) and Pixies.

▪️ And speaking of SETI, that game took first place in the Deutsche Spiele Preis 2025, which was awarded at SPIEL Essen 25. Second place was claimed by Endeavor: Deep Sea from Carl de Visser and Jarratt Gray, while third place went to the Spiel des Jahres 2025 winner: Bomb Busters.

Matúš Kotry‘s Little Alchemists, another Czech Games Edition title, won the DSP 2025 for best children’s game.

From left: Daniel Theuerkaufer from Endeavor‘s German co-publisher Board Game Circus, Holek, Kotry, Hayashi (Image: Spiel Essen)

▪️ If you watch only one game review video this week, this is the one to watch:

Youtube Video