Scott Tepper: SDJ By The Numbers

In the world of Euros, the focus right now is on the Spiel Des Jahres, or more specifically, the five finalists for the German game of the year.  What’s the big deal?  Realistically, to you or me, it’s not a big deal.  If one game or another wins, it won’t affect either of us more than just to have something to talk about.  But to a handful of people, the designers, and publishers, of these games, it’s a HUUUUGE deal, and rightfully so.

Just like on American Idol, there is a big gap between first and second place(just ask Kelly Clarkson and Justin…um…see, I don’t even remember his last name) winners of the SDJ.  Depending on to whom you talk, the game that wins the SDJ could sell between 300,000 to 500,000 copies.  The runners up will probably sell in the neighborhood of 10,000 copies.  Given that an average, run of the mill game might sell between 500-3000 copies, being nominated, and hopefully winning the SDJ can mean to a publisher the difference between scraping by and being flush.

There is always a lot of talk about which game will win the SDJ, but there doesn’t seem to be an exact science in how the game of the year is chosen.  Oh, it does have to fit some criteria.  As the SDJ committee is choosing a game that is more for the family market, the rules can’t be too complex.  They also tend to consider games from larger production houses to insure that the game will be able to be produced in sufficient numbers to meet the public demand.  Other than that, though, it seems that the qualities of an SDJ winner are somewhat amorphous. 

This got me to wondering what other criteria the SDJ committee considers when casting their votes.  When posed with situations where I’m trying to see a connection between a large mass of data, I create a spreadsheet.  I can’t help it.  It’s the microbiologist in me.  So that’s what I did with past SDJ winners.  I created an Excel spreadsheet and listed all 28 of the SDJ winners along with different attributes of the games.  Here are some of the things I found out.

Regarding the number of players, almost one third of the games played 2-4 players.  Only one game, Settlers of Catan, is listed as having a range of only 3-4 players. Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, was the only one that claims it can be played with 1-6 players, but I would challenge that several of the games could be played solitaire as well. Heimlich & Company was the only one that could accommodate 7 players.  The rest of the games have some sort of range from 2-5, 2-6, 3-5, or 3-6.  So for the most part, the SDJ goes to games that have a range of players, as opposed to a game that is exclusively for, say, 2 players.

Regarding the publishers, it appears that the SDJ committee does not have a problem choosing games by the same publishing house.  Ravensburger has produced the most SDJ winners with 6 awards.  Hans im Gluck is in second place with 5 wins.  F.X. Schmid has won 3 times.  Kosmos and Zoch had a couple of wins each.  Days of Wonder’s win with Ticket to Ride challenges the theory that the publisher of the SDJ winner needs to be German.

Similarly, the SDJ committee has no qualms about bestowing the SDJ on a game designer who has won before.  Wolfgang Kramer has had his games win first place 5 times.  Klaus Teuber is close behind with 4 wins.  Alan Moon and Michael Kiesling were able to snag the title two times each.

Game length between SDJ winners varies between 15-120 minutes.  Bluff is at the low end, and Tikal is at the high end.  Most of the games, though, fall in the 45-90 minute range with 5 games listed at 45 minutes, 13 games at 60 minutes, and 5 games at 90 minutes.  3 games clock in at about 30 minutes.  So it appears that SDJ winning games shouldn’t be too long, nor should they be too short.

Theme is one of the categories that I had a little bit of difficulty with.  I counted only 4 purely abstract games that won the SDJ: Villa Paletti, Focus, Rummikub, and Bluff.  20 of the SDJ winners were clearly themed games.  The problem I had was with classifying Heimlich & Co, Barbarossa, and Torres.  According to their rules, they supposedly had themes, but I found myself on the fence.  Regardless of how we classify those 3, it’s clear that the SDJ prefers games with themes over abstracts.

It doesn’t seem like the SDJ committee has a problem with luck in a game.  Only 3 winning games, Villa Paletti, Focus, and Hase & Igel, clearly had absolutely no luck in them.  You could say that Drunter und Druber also has no luck.  All of the rest of the games have some sort of chance element.  9 games have dice in them.  18 have some sort of cards in them.

One of the measures of a game’s complexity is how long it takes to teach its rules.  Although this is somewhat subjective, I think only 5 of the previous SDJ winners take 10 or more minutes to teach their rules.  The rest take, on average, less than 10 minutes to teach.  So according to this measure, a game like Through The Ages, is probably never going to win the SDJ.

The one attribute that surprised me the most was language dependency.  I had thought that the SDJ team wouldn’t select a game that wasn’t language independent, but it appears they have actually done so 4 times.  Now, granted, 3 of those 4 were in the 1980’s(Damfross, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and Auf Achse), but it is the winning by Settlers of Catan in 1995 that blows my theory out of the water.  Since there have been no SDJ winners in the past 12 years that have language dependent components, it is relatively safe to say that this is something the SDJ committee considers when making their decisions.

Only one game, Bluff(Liar’s Dice), allowed player elimination.  It’s my guess that we won’t see many more SDJ winners that let you eliminate players from the game.

I tried to make some sort of scale of component quality, but this didn’t turn out very definitive.  Part of the problem is that game components, especially cards, increased in quality as printing and manufacturing technology improved over time.

Game mechanisms didn’t really help to illuminate trends as all sorts of mechanisms can be found in past winners: bluffing, area control, set collection, deduction, memory, pickup and deliver, racing, train / track building.  The mechanic that showed up most often is tile placement, which appeared in 4 games.

The last thing that I came up with to dissect previous SDJ winners was a “unique” component or mechanism.  My hypothesis was that all these games would have something unusual about them.  But this proved harder to determine than I would have thought.  Many of the games did have a component that was different than most other games.  For example, how many games besides Villa Paletti can you name that have a stick with a hook in it?  Niagara is only one of 2 games that I can think of that have a working waterfall(can you name the other?).  El Grande has the Castillo.  Barbarossa is a sculpting game where you don’t want your sculpture to be guessed too early or too late.  Most of the other games, though, are just refinements, or reorganizations of mechanics that we’re already familiar with.

So all in all, there doesn’t seem to be specific guidelines that are used to choose the SDJ winner.  The most important and subjective attribute of all, that many have questioned the SDJ committee to be able to discern (and I am not about to try to quantify), is…fun.

Have I missed anything?

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