Spiel Des Jahres Board Games Bucket List

Build railway routes across different countries

Play Rummikub, a tile-based game of strategy and luck with numbers and colors

Build settlements and trade resources on the island of Catan

Guess words based on one-word clues

Create beautiful tile patterns in this abstract game

Strategic tile-placement game set in medieval France

Two players, no talking, dice on a cockpit panel; land the plane together.

Storytelling with surreal illustrated cards (2008).

The original deck-building card game (2008).

Build a town straight through everyone else's outhouses, then vote on the mess.

Draw your own track on the map with a crayon, then race the trains you built.

Cut the wires in the right order, telling your team just enough and no more.

Place settlements on the terrain your card allows and chase the scoring goals.

Liar's dice under a cup: raise the bid or call it, and lose a die when you are wrong.

Fill your zoo with animals from tile trucks without overcrowding a pen.

Program your moves along a 3D train, then watch the plan fall apart.

Sculpt something in clay and let the others guess it, slowly, with questions.

Build castles upward and score by the level your knight stands on.

Find the fairy-tale treasures under the trees and remember where they were.

Lay tiles into a peaceful landscape, campaign by campaign; the digital game as cardboard.

Move stones up five tracks, each of which you can only ever go one way along.

A huge black-and-white city poster and a stack of crimes to trace through it.

Haul freight across Europe by lorry, bidding for the contracts nobody else wants.

Everyone moves everyone's spy and nobody admits which one is theirs.

Colours and shapes on wooden tiles; Scrabble without the words.

Spend carrots to move; the first Spiel des Jahres, and still a clean race game.

Recreate a photograph with shoelaces, cubes or sticks and let the table guess.

Move your canoes across a river of moving discs and do not go over the falls.