No designer has ever won all three Spiel des Jahres categories in the award's 47-year history. This July, two designers could pull off that historic first on the same night. Reiner Knizia, the German mathematician-turned-designer behind 700-plus published games, and Austrian designer Markus Slawitscheck are both two-thirds of the way to the full set, and both have games nominated for the category they are still missing.
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See how it worksKnizia took home the Spiel des Jahres in 2008 with Keltis and the Kinderspiel des Jahres the same year with Wer war's? (Who Was It?). The Kennerspiel category, the jury's prize for slightly meatier titles, has eluded him. This year his cosy tile-layer Rebirth, published by Frosted Games and Mighty Boards, is one of three Kennerspiel nominees alongside Donald X. Vaccarino's Moon Colony Bloodbath and Boss Fighters QR by Michael Palm and Lukas Zach. Rebirth has players rebuilding a solarpunk-meets-medieval Scotland after a catastrophe, with castles housing greenhouses, wind turbines on the plains, and cargo bikes powered by sails. It is Knizia's own kind of game: a clean, mathematical tile-laying core wrapped in a cosy theme.
Slawitscheck has the inverse problem. He co-designed Challengers, the trick-taking-meets-deckbuilding hit that won the 2023 Kennerspiel, and Die magischen Schlüssel, which took the 2024 Kinderspiel. The big one, Spiel des Jahres itself, is the gap on his shelf. His nominee this year is Morty Sorty Magic Shop from Schmidt, competing for the main prize against Corey Konieczka's Cozy Stickerville and Martin Ang's Dito!.
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Find events near youBoth could win. Both could lose. But for designers who follow the European awards circuit, this is the closest thing to a record-book moment the hobby has produced in decades. The Spiel des Jahres jury crowns the winners in Berlin on 12 July 2026, and whoever gets there first joins a club of one. With Sky Team and Bomb Busters in recent memory, the main prize typically lifts a winner's sales by 10 to 20 times in the months that follow. Whichever game lands the prize will be on UK shelves by Christmas. Round up your group and you'll have a built-in winner to play.
Sources: BoardGameWire | Spiel des Jahres | Reiner Knizia (Wikipedia)
