Names are powerful. The Spiel des Jahres means "game of the year" simpliciter, but for years we know that the juries have been casting a narrower and narrower net of what games thay would consider. It has become more of a specialized imprint, which is fine--but it's strange that the name still inspires such cachet. Anything with rules in excess of 3 or so pages seems now to be firmly beyond the pale as far as the SdJ is concerned. Ah, well, times change, and we are prone to fits of curmudgeonly behavior. We do at least give our rundown of the 3 nominated games.

AYURIS: The City of Kings 1m02s (Frank West, The City of Games, 2018)

Games Played Last Week:
-Trick Shot 2m35s (Nikita Krylov &Artyom Nichipurov, Wolff Designa, 2019)
-LAMA aka Wrath of the Appliances: Rise of the Killer Kameras 4m50s (Reiner Knizia, AMIGO, 2019)
-Just One 8m01s (Ludovic Roudy & Bruno Sautter, Repos Productions, 2018)
-Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare 10m03s (Richard Borg, PSC Games, 2019)
-Fireball Island: The Curse of Vol-Kar 13m51s (Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, Justin D. Jacobson, Chuck Kennedy, & Bruce Lund, Restoration Games, 2018)
-Hansa Teutonica 15m38s (Andreas Steding, Z-Man Games, 2010)
-SpaceCorp 17m03s (John H. Butterfield, GMT Games, 2018)
-Rayguns and Rocketships 19m33s (Scott Rogers, IDW Games, 2017)

News (and why it doesn't matter):
-The tangled webs Kickstarter weaves (and then pulls) 26m23s
(Correction: During this segment we mistakenly conflated Travis Worthington of Indie Boards and Cards and Travis R. Chance of Kolossal Games. They have both had projects canceled by Kickstarter. We apologize for the error.)
-Endeavor: Age of Expansion Expansion 30m30s
-Pandemic Targets real-time 31m51s

Topic: How Big a Collection? 33m00s