AUGAs 2001

Results are in. Congratuations to the following games and to their designers: Wyatt Earp (best game overall, and best card game), San Marco (best board game), and flowerpower (best 2-player game).

These are "game of the year" awards, decided by polling the members of Unity Games (UG). 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.

Nominations
and Voting

The nomination period ran Christmas Eve 2001 to noon on Saturday January 5, 2002 (the 12th day of Christmas, by my count). I nominated a bunch of games myself, and posted an invitation for further nominations to the UG list. The only further nominee was Bali.

Then I set up polls, one for each category, using the Polls area of the Unity Games group. Note that the counts given on this page differ slightly from those at UG. This is because I accepted votes by email, as well as via the web. I closed the polls at the end of January, as I'd previously announced I would.

Categories
and Votes

There were four awards.

  • Best game of the year (overall). 33 votes were cast, with the following results:
    • Winner: Wyatt Earp, by Richard Borg & Mike Fitzgerald, with 8 votes
    • 2nd: Capitol, by Alan R Moon & Aaron Weissblum, with 5
    • 3rd=: Medina, by Stefan Dorra, with 4
    • 3rd=: San Marco, by Alan R Moon & Aaron Weissblum, with 4
    • 3rd=: The Traders of Genoa, by Rudiger Dorn, with 4
    • Also received multiple votes: Kardinal & König: Das Kartenspiel, by Michael Schacht, with 3; Funkenschlag, by Friedemann Friese, with 2
    • Received 1 vote: Bali, by Uwe Rosenberg; Dvonn, by Kris Burm; Evo, by Philippe Keyaerts
  • Best board game of 2001. 30 votes were cast, with the following results:
    • Winner: San Marco, by Alan R Moon & Aaron Weissblum, with 6 votes
    • 2nd: Capitol, by Alan R Moon & Aaron Weissblum, with 5
    • 3rd=: Medina, by Stefan Dorra, with 4
    • 3rd=: The Traders of Genoa, by Rudiger Dorn, with 4
    • Also received multiple votes: Das Amulett, by Alan R Moon & Aaron Weissblum, with 3; Funkenschlag, by Friedemann Friese, with 2
    • Received 1 vote: Dvonn, by Kris Burm; Evo, by Philippe Keyaerts; flowerpower, by Angelika Fassauer & Peter Haluszka; Liberté, by Martin Wallace; Muscat, by Christiane Knepel; Volldampf, by Martin Wallace
  • Best card game of 2001. 31 votes were cast, with the following results:
    • Winner: Wyatt Earp, by Richard Borg & Mike Fitzgerald, with 15 votes
    • 2nd: Kardinal & König: Das Kartenspiel, by Michael Schacht, with 8
    • 3rd=: Gargon, by Rudiger Dorn, with 2
    • 3rd=: Vom Kap bis Kairo, by Gunther Burkhardt, with 2
    • 3rd=: Who Stole Ed's Pants?, by Jim Doherty, with 2
    • Received 1 vote: Bali, by Uwe Rosenberg; Der Herr der Ringe: Die Gefährten: Das Kartenspiel, by Reiner Knizia
  • Best 2-player game of 2001. 25 votes were cast, with the following results:
    • Winner: flowerpower, by Angelika Fassauer & Peter Haluszka, with 11 votes
    • 2nd: Dvonn, by Kris Burm, with 10
    • 3rd: Starship Catan, by Klaus Teuber, with 4

Post-Poll
Comments

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

The Results

The big news was Wyatt Earp as best game overall. This is a particularly impressive placing for a card game, given that board games tend to win overall awards. (I'm thinking not so much of last year's AUGAs, won by Taj Mahal, as of the big awards.) Congraulations to Richard Borg and Mike Fitzgerald!

Talking of card games, if there was a special "little card game that could" award, it would have to go to Michael Schacht's Kardinal & König: Das Kartenspiel (Web of Power Cardgame). This limited edition game, released late in the year, took clear second place in its category, and received multiple votes for the best game overall. While I'm making up awards, a newcomers of the year award would have to go to Angelika Fassauer and Peter Haluszka, whose flowerpower just beat out Kris Burm's Dvonn for best 2-player game.

Among the board games, we see 5 strong contenders, 3 of them from local lads Alan R Moon and Aaron Weissblum. San Marco won in the board game category, with Capitol 2nd there and in the overall category (thus the order of these 2 games was reversed in these categories, probably reflecting a preference among those who voted Wyatt overall for San Marco over Capitol when it came to the board games). ALan and Aaron's Das Amulett finished just out of the board game medals, bringing their share of the board game votes to just under 50% (14 of the 30 votes cast were for one of their games).

Sharing 3rd place in both overall and board game categories were Medina and Traders of Genoa. Seeing these very good games down there in the voting tells me that 2001 was a year with a solid roster of games, even though it lacked any one game likely to make a lot of "all-time best" lists. (I should remind you at this point that we're well into the subjective editorial stuff here, and that you should look back at the results if you want just the cold facts.)

My own votes were as follows: Medina for overall and board game; Der Herr der Ringe: Die Gefährten: Das Kartenspiel for card game; Dvonn for 2-player game. This suggests (at least) a couple of things: first, I didn't fix the results; and second, I'm out of touch with the people, since none of these games won, and mine was the only vote for the LotR card game.

The Procedure

I was a little disappointed in the turnout for best game overall. Since I held the 2000 AUGAs, UG membership has more than doubled, but the voting turnout didn't reflect this. One reason might be that many of the newcomers to UG are also newcomers to this style of gaming, and so didn't feel that they knew enough of the games well enough to be able to vote. On the other hand, the turnout in the card and 2-player categories was sharply up from last year. Thanks to all who voted!

Even though I extended the voting to the end of January this year, I must admit that closing the polls in January doesn't give much room to get perspective on the games. If we were to vote again on best games of 2001 in a year's time, the results might be very different. Had we voted on best games of 2000 in January 2002, I suspect that Princes of Florence would have shown very strongly. (Someone tried to nominate Princes for the 2001 poll, but I had to disallow it, since the German edition was out and fairly widely played in 2000.) But I for one don't plan to run any retro polls. You can see the results of such polls on Spielfrieks, which I think of as a kind of Unity Games for the planet.

Having said that, I think that there's a lot to be said for voting on the games of the year when the year and the games are fresh in people's minds. So I plan to run the 2002 AUGAs in early 2003. I hear that the guys in Vegas are already making Puerto Rico a favorite. See you at the polls!

a Few
Anticipated
Questions
(FAQ)

Here's the FAQ. I couldn't call them frequently asked questions, because, as I typed them, I hadn't opened nominations, let alone 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 newly released in 2001. The list of nominations provides examples of games that are eligible. Here are examples of games that aren't. Carcassonne isn't, because, despite receiving the 2001 Spiel des Jahres and Deutscher SpielePreis, it came out in 2000. Land Unter isn't, because it is a retheming of a previously-published game (Zum Kuckuck!), rather than a game new in 2001. Princes of Florence isn't eligible this year, because it was eligible last; Die Fürsten von Florenz got a lot of play in 2000, prior to the release of the English language edition.
  • Who is eligible to vote? Each member of Unity Games is entitled to one vote in each category. You don't need to have played every game in a category, you don't need to have attended a UG event, etc.
  • What do I do if I'd like to vote for an eligible but unnominated game and it's not among the choices offered by the poll? The best thing to do is nominate it so that you can later vote for it. But if you still need to vote for a write-in candidate, email me with your vote.
  • 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 2001. 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. For example, if you consider Dvonn to be the best game of 2001, you probably also consider it the best board game and the best 2-player game.
  • 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 2002 and beyond? Given the definition of the word "annual," yes there are.
  • Were there AUGA in previous years? There were AUGAs for 2000; those were the first.
  • Didn't you badmouth the Yahoo groups (then eGroups) polling feature after running those awards? Yes, as you can see from the AUGAs for 2000 page.
  • So why are you using this same feature again? Partly because many of the voters are already familiar with it. But mainly because I'm lazy.

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.