The 2026 Kennerspiel des Jahres shortlist pits three nominees against each other as three competing answers to one question: where should complexity actually live in a game built for experienced players? Grant and Miles walk through all three designs — the hybrid app-driven cooperative brawler Boss Fighters QR, Donald X. Vaccarino's inverted deck-builder Moon Colony Bloodbath where the shared Progress deck is both your construction and your doom, and Reiner Knizia's stripped-back tile-placement game Rebirth where restraint does the heavy lifting. Along the way, they debate whether offloading boss logic to an app is genuine design or a workaround, whether Vaccarino's so-called engine-losing mechanic is a truly new category or a pessimistic spin on something familiar, and whether Knizia's elegant minimalism is harder to pull off than it looks. The episode lands on a concrete design principle: deciding where to hide difficulty is itself a design decision, not just a tuning knob.

The 2026 Kennerspiel des Jahres shortlist is out, and three very different games are competing for a category that rewards depth without demanding expertise. Grant and Miles dig into Reiner Knizia's Rebirth — examining whether its dual-sided board represents two genuine strategic identities or a single game at two weight classes — then turn to Donald Vaccarino's Moon Colony Bloodbath, where a shared deck builds progress and catastrophe simultaneously. The conversation closes with Boss Fighters QR, debating whether a live app handling boss complexity is an elegant accessibility solution or a transfer of cognitive work the category expects players to carry themselves. Each nominee reflects a different theory of what connoisseur-level design actually means.

The 2026 Spiel des Jahres shortlist arrived with zero predicted nominees and a genuine piece of history on the line — two designers are each one win away from completing all three award categories in the prize's 47-year history.

Grant and Miles work through all three nominees in detail. Corey Konieczka's Cozy Stickerville raises the question of whether a no-lose-condition, sticker-driven cooperative loop counts as real design innovation or accessible depth that only looks like depth. Martin Ang's JinxO splits the hosts on whether its everyone-is-guessing empathy mechanic genuinely advances what Codenames started. And Markus Slawitscheck's Morty Sorty Magic Shop prompts a debate about whether clean execution of a constraint-based formula — with a double-sided board designed to serve two audiences at once — is formula or achievement. With Reiner Knizia also nominated for Rebirth, the jury's July 12th decision carries weight well beyond a single award cycle. Both hosts commit to their picks before the announcement.

This episode is ultimately about what accessible actually means as a design standard in 2026.

Brass: Pittsburgh raised $9.1 million on Gamefound in one of the top board game crowdfunds of all time — but Grant and Miles are asking whether that number reflects design quality or simply Birmingham's reputation cashing a very large check.

They break down Pittsburgh's three headline mechanics — decentralized markets, coke, and oil pipelines — and examine whether designer Gavan Brown's additions constitute genuinely new strategic objects or incremental layering on what Brass: Birmingham already solved. The conversation moves into the campaign's Endgame mechanic, which added over $1.2 million in the final stretch, and probes the tension between Brown's stated philosophy against deluxe edition arms races and the campaign's actual $125 Collector's Edition and $350 bundle. The episode closes on a distinction that applies well beyond Pittsburgh: IP gravity and design quality run on separate ledgers, and only the table delivers an honest verdict.

Cole Wehrle's departure from Leder Games to found Buried Giant Studios is the lens this episode uses to ask a harder question: what happens to a designer's work when commercial safety disappears?

Grant and Miles open with the industry split itself — Leder keeping Root, Buried Giant taking Arcs and Oath — and what that division reveals about two incompatible visions for a game studio. From there, they dig into Root's radical faction asymmetry and its COIN series roots, debating whether the new-player friction is a design flaw or the honest cost of genuine innovation. The conversation then traces Wehrle's full design arc through Oath's Chronicle system and into Arcs' trick-taking action economy, weighing critical acclaim against a narrow audience. The episode closes on the unresolved question of whether creative independence sharpens a designer's ambitions or simply removes the subsidy that made those ambitions sustainable in the first place.

This episode is about what a game has to give up in order to say something true.

UK Games Expo turns 20 in 2026, and Grant and Miles use the milestone to ask whether the hobby has genuinely improved or whether publishers are still selling the same instincts to a larger crowd.

The episode opens with the raw scale of UKGE 2026 — 53,000 visitors, 600-plus exhibitors, a sold-out floor — and makes the case that demo queues and show-floor conversions are more honest market signals than any sales chart. From there, the hosts dig into the 20 Judges Choice Award categories, debating whether Vantage by Stonemaier Games earns its Best Adventure, Story or Legacy win or whether it layers Euro-mechanical polish over borrowed narrative stakes. The conversation moves into demo culture, asking whether the UKGE floor filters for accessibility rather than depth, and what 145 international exhibitors from 35 countries signal about which designs publishers actually back in a $1.76 billion market.

The recurring gap between Judges Choice and People's Choice results ties every thread together: the audience may have outgrown publisher confidence.

The 2026 Spiel des Jahres nominations are out, and this episode asks whether the world's most commercially powerful board game award rewards genuine design innovation or a self-reinforcing set of jury preferences. Grant and Miles break down all three nominees — Castle Combo, Agent Avenue, and Krakel Orakel — examining the specific structural decisions that put each game on the shortlist, from Castle Combo's placement-constraint tension to Agent Avenue's scalability problem outside the two-player format. They debate whether the jury's five co-op wins in seven years reflects a real design insight about accessibility or a pattern of theme-capture, and neither host cleanly resolves it. Each host names a dark-horse 2026 title that deserved consideration and explains exactly why the jury passed. The episode closes on a single organizing idea: the games that win are the ones that solve a social problem at the table, not just a mechanical one.