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Winning game designer banned from future Spiel des Jahres events for anti-Israel symbol.
Board gaming is a much bigger hobby than it used to be. The Spiel des Jahres award was created in 1978 to highlight family-friendly games, and I played some of the early winners (Rummikub (1980) and Scotland Yard (1983))--but it was 1995's winner, The Settlers of Catan, that really changed the face of board gaming in the United States. As an established presence in the European market, the Spiel des Jahres evolved from a simple trade award to the gold standard for "must have" games. Like most at-home hobbies, board gaming also got a bump from the COVID pandemic--but more broadly, the nerdification of American culture has fed board gaming in much the way it has fed video gaming, comic books, and other IP-adjacent hobbies.
These days there are three "Spiel des Jahres" awards--the children's award, the regular award, and the "complex game" award. This year's "complex" winner was Daybreak, "a cooperative game about stopping climate change." The creator, Matteo Menapace, presumably wrote his own bio, though I don't know that for certain:
Anyway, Matteo reportedly wore a pin or sticker or something looking approximately like this onto the award ceremony stage. The announcement describes this as
Predictably, a reddit post in the most popular board game sub refers to it as a "pro-Palestine" sticker rather than an "anti-Israel" sticker. These days the line between those things can seem pretty thin, or so it seems to me. The commentary is predictable enough... I suppose in this case I would say that it seems like the political symbol in question "deliberately skirts the border of comprehensibility." Matteo is clearly an activist, who was doing activist things. The Spiel des Jahres people are clearly on board with the DEI rhetoric, and employ it in this announcement, so this may be one of those "leopards at my face" moments, too. But I don't know what Matteo's nationality is (Google suggests maybe he's an Italian living in the UK?), and Germany has some fairly strict anti-semitism laws for, you know, historical reasons, so there may be a culture gap issue here as well.
Ugh, half the posts in the /r/boardgames thread are deleted by the mods (and the thread now locked).
Unfortunately, /r/boardgames is a cesspool and has been for years at this point. I stopped visiting because I was sick and tired of reading people's political opinions in a forum which is ostensibly about board games.
Me too. For a time I tried to write a board gaming blog, and it used to get a lot of traffic when I'd post it to reddit. But eventually the politics of the sub just crowded me out. Especially after the mods themselves started parroting lines like "Everything is political" when I complained that I just wanted to enjoy some escapism. And this was back when people were arguing over Days of Wonder removing slaves from Five Tribes (still have my copy with slave cards), or when a game I backed on Kickstarter, Draco Magi, had it's cover artwork censored to make the woman on it less "sexualized". I think the final straw was when Shut Up & Sit Down posted this terrifyingly Orwellian review of Cards Against Humanity essentially stating it was a terrible game because it caused you to have politically incorrect thoughts, and people should not play it to avoid accidental thought crimes. This point of view was not appreciated.
Things have gotten so much worse since then.
I have a half-baked theory- I think that board games tend to be nerdy (of course) but also relatively low-stress, and low-competitive. I know there are exceptions, like professional chess, but for the most part it's a pretty relaxed hobby. The result is a group that isn't fierce enough to resist takeover from the political entryists.
And, Fundamentally, the hobby still has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to being actually inclusive (i.e., bringing in non-nerds and especially women). Board games are only fun if you have other people to play with, so there's going to be a push to support whatever "current thing" is.
yeah, you can't just chill at home enjoying a board game by yourself. You need other people, and usually a specific number of very dedicated gamers to play the more complicated games. Putting together a group of exactly 7 people to play a multi-hour game of Diplomacy is something of a game in itself, so you really have to work at it and bring in anyone you can get sometimes, even if they're kinda toxic or bad at the game.
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