France's most prestigious board game award, the As d'Or, has crowned its 2026 winners at the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes. The ceremony also introduced a rule change that has been a long time coming: all nominated games must now credit their artist on the box, a first for the awards and a meaningful step for an industry where illustrators have too often gone uncredited on the products they help define.
The main Game of the Year prize went to Toy Battle, designed by Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini and published by Repos Production. It is a light, quick-playing two-player wargame with a playful toy-soldier aesthetic, where players race to capture enemy headquarters or control the most territories on the board. It beat out Flip 7 and Rebirth for the top spot. For Mori, the designer behind Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest (currently published by Stonemaier Games) and the area-majority classic Ethnos, this marks his first major international award win.
In the Expert category, Civolution saw off competition from Cole Wehrle's Arcs and from Ants, a cooperative puzzle game about building ant colonies. Civolution is a 1-4 player civilisation-building euro by Stefan Feld (rated 8.2 on BGG) where players take on the roles of deities guiding their civilisations through exploration and development. Published by Deep Print Games, it plays in 90-180 minutes and uses a dice-placement system where players roll and pair dice to unlock actions from a technology matrix.
Two more categories rounded out the ceremony. Zenith, a strategic card game by Gregory Grard and Mathieu Roussel, won the Intermediate prize, while Mooki Island, a two-player children's card game by Florian Sirieix published by Le Scorpion Masque, took the Children's award.
Sources: Board Game Wire | Palais des Festivals
