Spiel des Jahres

Agricola is a bit of a departure for Uwe Rosenberg, previously best known for his tight, engaging cardgame, Bohnanza. Agricola is instead a big, sprawling game, quite complicated by the standards of the Eurostyle, and "tight" is not quite the word.

A finalist for the Spiel des Jahres award in 1999, Uwe Rosenberg's Mamma Mia! is not as well known, or arguably as deep, as his game Bohnanza, but it's a good game for a party setting, accessible enough for kids and yet with just enough strategy to hold the interest of sterner gamers.

From a game design perspective, it's interesting because there are essentially three layers to the game.

Lord of the Rings is an impressive adaptation of the classic story to boardgame format. The Lord of the Rings books, as beloved as they are, don’t quite fit the normal boardgame mold and could easily become a game with little more than a Tolkienesque flavor. Luckily for us, world renowned game designer Reiner Knizia decided to tackle the challenge. The result distills the essence of Tolkien’s epic into an innovative, engaging, and exciting experience.

"A game for Vulcan children" is how Kevin Maroney once described Hare and Tortoise (Hase und Igel in the German -- apparently German hares race hedgehogs). It's an apt description; the game has the external indicia of a child's game -- cute little animals drawn from a childhood fable -- but actually, it's a game of exceptional mathematical and logical rigor.

Torres, winner of the 2000 Spiel des Jahres award, is essentially a game of competitive collaboration in tower-building. Played on an eight-by-eight grid, players place plastic "tower blocks", building both outward and upward.

If you were in one of a handful of places in 1995 in the United States, you knew that a revolution was starting. It's been going on quietly ever since, even though most people are still blissfully ignorant of it. This game, Settlers of Catan, was the opening shot.

Alhambra combines bidding, building and planning in an unusual and engaging board game. It's the successor of Henn’s earlier stock market game, Stimmt So, but Alhambra has been reworked with a Moorish theme and a tile-layering component. The object of the game is simple: using tiles depicting different building components and with different walls, each player tries to make the best (and biggest) Alhambra possible. Gameplay is simple, rules straightforward, but execution can be very complex. Here's how it works: