Is this the least surprising news ever? ;-)

4th time the IGA has matched the DSP interestingly, out of the only 9 times the IGA has been awarded.  Other 3 were Tikal, St. Petersburg, and Caylus.  I’m guessing it’ll be the second time the Golden Geek matches both, just as it did with Caylus.  Making all three awards awfully fond of worker placement games!

For comparison purposes, I made a table here - http://games.fooville.net/nycgamer-article-Awards.html

I understand that the vote was actually quite close. (The details are usually released a short time after the announcement so we’ll have to wait to see.) Furthermore, as the second-place game was Brass and not Race For The Galaxy, I’d say that the news is at least a little surprising.

Yeah, Tom, Agricola’s victory was far from certain, because we knew that several of the voters weren’t the game’s biggest fans.  It was easy to imagine Brass or Race sneaking past it.

This is getting to be monotonous, but congratulations to Uwe Rosenberg and the Lookout/Z-Man teams.  SdJ Special Award (the best they could have managed), DSP, and now the IGA:  that’s the gaming Triple Crown, baby!

Oh, and congratulations as well to Jason Matthews and Christian Leonhard for 1960.  That’s two IGAs for Matthews, as well as a sweep for Z-Man this year.

Hmm, well not knowing the tastes of all of the individuals on the committee that well, I’d have put gobs on money on Agricola winning… perhaps I should have if it was in doubt.

gobs *of* money

I was in Larry’s camp - I thought that Brass or Race had a VERY good chance at the IGA and was surprised when I heard that Agricola had won it.

Surprised and delighted, of course :-)

I can’t find the details of the voting. Help ?

Olivier,
Details at http://www.internationalgamersawards.net/viewarticle.php?action=section&sectionid=1&titlesort=0

For the benefit of those who don’t want to read the whole thing, it came down to a vote between Agricola and Brass, which Agricola won by 11 votes to 8.

The system doesn’t aim to pick out a runner-up, but if you take Agricola out and run the count for the remaining 9, Brass would win and so on this occasion the game that looks like the runner-up is the runner-up.

Tom,

There is a mistake on your chart.  Agricola is the 10th winner of the IGA multi-player award, not the 9th.  The one you have missed from the list is Puerto Rico.

In 2003 we switched from using the calendar year to the same “German game year” that is used by the SdJ and the DSP.  To achieve this we either had to have one award covering 18 months or put in a 6 month “shortie”.  We opted for the latter and so in 2003 there were two winners: Puerto Rico and Age of Steam.

Thanks Stuart!  I fixed the chart accordingly.  Anyone else is welcome to let me know of other things that I need to fix or may have overlooked (although I already know that I don’t list all the Mensa winners each year, just a few).