▪️ In September 2026, some of the results of the 2026 Deutscher Spiele Preis (German Game Prize) 2026 were revealed, specifically places 4-10, with the order of the top three games due to be revealed the night before SPIEL Essen 26 opens.
In the end, Mathias Wigge's Sanctuary from Feuerland Spiele took the top spot, with Michael Palm and Lukas Zach's Boss Fighters QR from Pegasus Spiele taking second place and T.K. King, Dennis Northcott, and Koltin Thompson's Galactic Cruise from Kinson Key Games coming in third. (For an overview of Sanctuary, you can head to this preview post from August 2025.)
In the children's category, Toriki: The Castaway Island from Wojciech Grajkowski and Lucky Duck Games won out over Mooki Island and Paleolino.
▪️ Each year since 1991, Fairplay Magazin has awarded its "À la Carte" award for best card game of the year, and the list includes dozens of classic designs, along with several titles that haven't been on the market in decades.
For 2026, Fairplay chose Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière's co-operative design Take Time from Libellud for top honors. (Fairplay normally presents a ten top list for the year, but so far it's revealed only the winner.) If you're unfamiliar with the game, check out my rave review from October 2025.
▪️ Speaking of Fairplay, the magazine has a booth at each SPIEL convention where attendees can rate the games they've played, all on the honor system, mind you. The rating system goes from 5 (best) to 1, which (I believe) mirrors the academic grading systems used in German schools.
At the end of Saturday, 24 October, here are the Fairplay standings for SPIEL Essen 26 in its two categories: kenner- and expertenspiele, and familien- and kinderspiele:
Lucioles currently bears a 4.7 grade on the kenner list, with the next six titles being grouped at 4.3 and 4.2. Hmm. These standings are based on a minimum of twelve ratings for a game, so take them with a grain of salt.
Lucioles, by the way, is a co-operative, limited communication game for two players from Johannes Goupy, Joachim Thôme, and Catch Up Games that is called Fireflies in its English edition. (Catch Up typically releases a short run of English-language copies for fairs, then attempts to license the game to other publishers, focusing solely on its French market.)
Fireflies is a campaign game played in eight chapters, with each player starting somewhere on a 6x6 grid and seeing some of your fellow player's map. Your objective will depend on the chapter, and on a turn you either place a firefly adjacent to you to light new areas of the map, which lead to you participating in a scene from a book (akin to Tales of the Arabian Nights); replay a scene, which might change meaning based on what's happened since the first viewing; or pass priority to let the other player take an action immediately.
As is common in campaign games, new chapters will introduce new rules and game elements, while other items are retired. Players have a shared reserve for resources, with those resources carrying over from one chapter to the next.
Also worth noting on the kenner list, games in the 2-4 positions — Nokosu Dice, Eternal Decks, and Gibberers — are all German editions of games originally released in Japan.
Very Big Monster from Dimitri Perrier and Explor8 has a similar gap lead on Fairplay's family list, with a 4.6 rating compared to 4.2-4.0 for the next eight titles.
Very Big Monster is for 2-6 players, but is primarily intended for play in teams of two. Gameplay is along the lines of take-and-make games, with each player drafting a card from their hand, then playing it in front of themselves, but the twist is that as soon as you play your cards, you place your remaining cards in hand on another player's spaceship.
Why this matters is twofold. First, each player has an explorer card that scores for the terrain built by both the player and their teammate. Second, public mission cards can be fulfilled both by individual players and by teams. Thus, you want to give your hand to your teammate if you know they need a particular card and you want to give the hand to an opponent if they can't use any cards in it, with the side benefit being ideally someone else will give your teammate a card worth playing.
The game lasts ten rounds, with players holding ten cards in hand at the start of each round.
