AUGAs 2000

These are "game of the year" awards, decided by polling the members of Unity Games (UG). Since UG is run on eGroups, and eGroups makes it easy to set up and vote in simple polls, I used the eGroups polling mechanism, supplemented with an FAQ that you'll find at the foot of this page. Due to the mechanism used, and the timing of the poll right at the end of the year, this is much more like a magazine's "reader's poll" than a critics' award such as the Deutscher SpielePreis.

Categories
and Results

There were four awards.

  • Best game of the year (overall) was Taj Mahal, with 8 of the 22 votes cast. Second was Carcassonne, with 4. La Città and Web of Power tied for third, with 2 each. The following games each received a single vote: Carolus Magnus, Die Fürsten von Florenz, Galaxy, Aladdin's Dragons, Ohne Furcht und Adel, and Traumfabrik. (A bunch of other games were among the choices, but received no votes. Java was among them.)
  • Best board game of the year was again Taj Mahal, with 6 of the 20 votes cast. Second was again Carcassonne with 4. Tied for third, with 2 each, were not only La Città and Web of Power, but also Aladdin's Dragons and Traumfabrik. The following games each received a single vote: Carolus Magnus, Die Fürsten von Florenz.
  • Best card game of the year was Ohne Furcht und Adel, with 5 of the 12 votes cast. Meuterer was a close second, with 4. Babel got 2 votes, and Galaxy 1.
  • Best 2-player games of the year were Battle Line and Battle Cry, eaching receiving 4 of the 11 votes cast. Babel got 2 votes, and Zèrtz 1. There is no tie-breaker, so the two Battles share the award.

I estimate the turnout to be a little under 40% for the overall award, and proportionately lower for the others. I arrive at this by noting that eGroups thinks that UG has 65 members (as of January 6, 2001, the days the polls close), but that this figure is inflated by some people registering more than one email address.

Post-Poll
Comments

These comments are editorial, subjective, and unsuitable for consumption without pinches of salt.

The Results

Taj Mahal's victory as game of the year was not a surprise to me, given not only its Deutscher SpielePreis victory, but also the high regard in which I know it to be held by many UGers. I expected Die Fürsten von Florenz to be a strong contender, but it garnered only a single vote.

Carcassonne's second place surprised me. It's a lot of fun, but not nearly as absorbing as Taj, Fürsten, or La Città. I voted for the last of these, without expecting many people to join me; some find it slow. Talking of Carcassonne's surprising second place... how many votes did it get? And how many email addresses does Dave Bernazzani have registered? ;)

Taj Mahal also won board game of the year. I believe that some people voted for one board game as game of the year, and a different one as board game of the year. In at least one case, the voter found it hard to decide between two board games, and so voted once for each game.

I expected Ohne Furcht und Adel to be a clear winner as card game of the year, since almost everyone except me seems to rate it very highly. But Meuterer was in the running right down to the wire. This can be seen as a victory for the mechanism whereby, in each round, players choose roles by secretly selecting cards. The mechanism was introduced in Verräter (Traitor), by Marcel-Andre Casasola Merkle. Bruno Faidutti borrowed it for Ohne Furcht und Adel. MACM used it again in Meuterer, the seafaring sequel to Verräter.

The 2-player category was the "battle of the battles," which ended in a tie. Battle Line's share in the victory gave Reiner Knizia two and a half of the four AUGAs, which would seem to make him game designer of the year. Richard Borg got half an award, for Battle Cry. He might have done better had he not been the victim of the biggest problem with the procedure.

The Procedure

If the AUGA 2000 polling ends up in the Supreme Court, then it will be because of one or both of the last two categories. I inadvertently omitted from the choices Hera and Zeus, a two-player card game rated extremely highly by many people (but not so very highly as to get it any write-in votes). When I started getting into gaming around the middle of this year, it was already well established, so I never thought of it as a 2000 game. Mea culpa.

The procedure was quick and simple - maybe too much so. I decided to use eGroups' polling mechanism. To determine the choices, I: (1) looked over the results from the Deutscher SpielePreis and other awards; (2) omitted games that actually came out in 1999 (the "big" prizes don't correspond with the calendar year); (3) looked over the more recently-published games, especially the Essen games, and included some that seemed to have been well-received.

The games identified by this procedure were the choices on the eGroup polls. I will be the first to admit that there are problems with using eGroup polling. Here are some of them, starting with the most severe.

  • Once you've set up a poll, editing it results in the discarding of all previously-cast votes. This means that if you were to fix a typo, or add a new choice (for example, Hera and Zeus to the card or 2-player category), then you reset the votes to zero. So we were stuck with what I entered, omissions and all.
  • As soon as you set up a poll, eGroups sends email to all members announcing the poll. This meant that I could not, as I intended, test the poll by: setting it up; asking a couple of people to check it; making any changes that they suggested; and only then announcing the poll. In addition, it meant that each UG member received four emails, one for each category, when a single announcement email would have sufficed.
  • However hard I tried, I couldn't get eGroups to include in each question the URL of this page without introducing a space into it.
  • eGroups won't let you specify an end date to be shown for a poll unless you tell it to close the poll automatically on that date. I didn't want to use autoclosing, which allows you to specify only the date, not the time.
  • Finally, here's something that's certainly a limitation, rather than a bug. eGroups allows only simple polling. In other words, you can only vote for first place, not for second, etc.

In the light of this, my decision to use eGroups polling for the AUGAs was a bad one.

a Few
Anticipated
Questions
(FAQ)

Here's the FAQ I set up as I opened the polls. I couldn't call them frequently asked questions, because, as I typed them, I hadn't set up the polls, and so no-one had asked any questions.

  • What does AUGA stand for? Annual Unity Games Award. It's pronounced like the word "augur."
  • What games are eligible? Any game released in 2000. The list of nominations provides examples of games that are eligible. Here are examples of games that aren't. Torres isn't, because, despite receiving the 2000 Spiel des Jahres, it came out in 1999. Cosmic Encounter isn't, because it is a reissue of a classic game, rather than a game new in 2000.
  • What do I do if I'd like to vote for an eligible game and it's not among the choices offered by the poll? Email me with your vote. If the poll offers "Other" as a choice, you might also vote for Other at the eGroups site, to signal that there is at least one write-in candidate for the poll.
  • Are there any write-in candidates that I should be aware of? Yes, I must admit that there are some games I should have included in the choices, but overlooked. In particular, I've just noticed that I omitted Hera and Zeus, which many consider a great game. My apologies for this careless mistake.
  • Can't you just add games to the list of choices for the appropriate polls? No. Or rather, not without erasing all votes previously cast. This is a limitation of eGroups polls.
  • What do you mean by "best"? It doesn't matter what I mean by it. Please vote according to what you think the word means, or should mean, in the context of the games of 2000. If you think that this might be an interesting question to discuss on the list, then feel free to start a topic!
  • Can I vote for the same game in multiple categories? If it fits, yes. To use an example of a game I haven't played, and so am not biased about: if you consider Zèrtz to be the best game of 2000, you probably also consider it the best board game and the best 2-player game.
  • When do the polls close? At noon on Saturday January 6.
  • What do the winners get? Nothing. Well, maybe respect (feel free to sing along with that last word). Maybe an invite to any and every group under the UG umbrella. Maybe an AUGA augurs well for future sales.
  • Are there plans for AUGAs for games of 2001? Given the definition of the word "annual," yes there are. I've attempted to keep the procedures for these first AUGAs as simple as possible. If, after seeing how this first time goes, UGers want more choices (e.g., more categories, ability to specify 2nd and 3rd places as well as first), then I expect they'll get them for 2001 and beyond.

Recycling the recycling symbol since 2000. Click on the symbol, or here, to go to my main Games page.

Recycle the electrons and email me.

Or, if you feel the urge to buy any game you've read about at this site, you might want to head over to Funagain to read more about it, and maybe even buy it.