Back on July 19 I mentioned that I'd just sent in my votes for the Deutscher Spiel Preis. It's kind of ironic that the DSPs--considered more of a "gamer's game" award--are voted on by the public via Internet and German game magazines, while the more commercial & family-oriented award--the influential Spiel des Jahre--is chosen by a select committee. What really matters are the results, and in 1997 (for instance) the SdJ was Mississippi Queen, while the DSP winner was Lowenherz (with MQ a distant 3rd).
The results of the voting were posted today. Well, the partial results. We have the ranked listing of the top ten games. Later we should get to hear what the actual vote tallies are. The DSPs use a simple point-voting system where each first place vote is worth 5 points, second is 4, and so on. Some years the voting for the top few games is close (such as 2000, when Taj Mahal, Torres, and Vinci finished with 2184, 2064, and 2028 points). Other years there's a runaway, like when Puerto Rico more than tripled the score of the second-place TransAmerica. Sometimes the voting distribution is as interesting as the overall results.
(By the way, the place to look up all of this interesting data is Mik Svellov's Brett & Board.)
This year's winning games are
1.. St Petersburg (Michael Tummelhofer)
2.. San Juan (Andreas Seyfarth)
3.. Goa (Rüdiger Dorn)
4.. Attika (Marcel-André Casasola Merkle)
5.. Einfach Genial (Reiner Knizia)
6.. Ticket to Ride (Alan R. Moon)
7.. Maharaja (Michael Kiesling & Wolfgang Kramer)
8.. Finstere Flure (Friedemann Friese)
9.. Hansa (Michael Schacht)
10.. The Bridges of Shangrila (Leo Colovini)
I've played all of these except Shangri-La, and I'd order them as follows:
St. Pete
Hansa
Ticket to Ride
San Juan
Einfach Genial
Goa
Maharaja
Finstere Flure
Attika
...Except that's not reflecting of how I actually voted! Oops, so sue me. In that earlier weblog entry I wrote the following
"I voted for Hansa, St. Petersberg, Die Fugger, Iglu Pop, and Wings of War. Just missing the cut were San Juan, Ticket to Ride, and Santiago."
Actually, that's not too far off. Only Hansa and St. Pete are flipped (and I've played a lot more SP in recent weeks to firm up that opinion). The rest of the games I voted for didn't make the cut. And I'd still vote for them.
Ryan Wheeler in my local group pointed out that three of the top five games are available on Brettspielwelt, while none of the bottom five are. Hmm. When I checked for 2003, the exact same is true: three of the top five. In 2002 it was just two of the top two, but they were the first and second place vote-getters. (Unless Puerto Rico wasn't online at the time of the voting--that may be true.)
I wonder if we'll get to hear what proportion of the votes came through the Internet. The rest of them appear to come from paper ballots available at German game shops and catalogs.