Spiel des Jahres 2024 Winner Proves No One Likes Playing With A Backseating Player
The Spiel des Jahres award for best board game of the year has landed! This high flying game has been soaring above the competition all year.
If you’ve been paying attention, then this announcement should come as no huge surprise. Sky Team wins the 2024 Spiel des Jahres! Congratulations to Scorpion Masqué!
Sky Team is a 2 player cooperative game about landing planes. It’s been highly praised for its dynamic gameplay and innovating mechanics. Players roll dice in secret and have to allocate those dice to different slots on a shared board. In fact, it’s a game I highlighted a few weeks ago for great cooperative games!
In Sky Team, players can discuss overall strategy before rolling. However, they’re not allowed to offer ideas like, “If I roll a 4, I’ll use it for this or that.” This means the game really excels at “forcing” teamwork versus having one player make all the decisions for the other. This is something many cooperative games struggle with. This, among many other great mechanics, make it a excellent choice for Spiel des Jahres 2024.
Let Players Play
Games like Pandemic, often get bogged down with “backseating” or “quarterbacking”, where the most experienced player (perhaps unintentionally) directs the other players how to best dole our their actions on their turn.
Backseating isn’t inherently bad, but it does sometimes mean the newer players often don’t get to fully enjoy the gaming experience. The quarterback is really just playing a solo game, but using the other players as the avenue by which to make their own optimized moves.
If you’re the sort of person who often brings the games to newer players, remember: it’s maybe their first time playing. Chances are, they are just looking to have fun with their friends. You’ve played this game a hundred times, and so losing feels bad. I get it. But with new players, I suggest focusing on making sure your friends have fun playing, and then consider winning as a potential bonus.
Anyway, congratulations again to Sky Team and Scorpion Masqué! Keep flying high.
