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Azul is a beautifully produced strategy game that can be fantastically cutthroat with two players and equally challenging with four players. The game has also won the As d'Or award in France, the Origins award for best family game, and a Mensa Select winner, so the SdJ award is only the latest recognition of this game's excellence.
If you're not familiar with the game, take a few minutes to watch this instructional video from Bebo.
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Michael Kiesling (c), with Plan B's Sophie Gravel
Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg from designer Wolfgang Warsch and publisher Schmidt Spiele won the 2018 Kennerspiel des Jahres, beat out Warsch's own Ganz schön clever as well as Heaven & Ale from Michael Kiesling, Andreas Schmidt, and eggertspiele.
North Star Games plans to release an English-language version of the game for those who don't want to struggle through translating the cards from German, and the company now anticipates this version being available in November 2018.
If you want to know more about this highly variable bag-building game, check out this long overview video that I posted in June 2018.
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Wolfgang Warsch (l) with jury member Bernhard Löhlein
Designers Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau received a special award ("sonderpreis") for Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 from Z-Man Games, with Leacock thanking multiple co-designers in countries all over the world after ten years of work on the Pandemic game system. In jury member Tom Felber's words:
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In Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, the already ingenious gameplay was developed at a top level. The authors not only value a functioning game system, but also put on an interesting background story. The legacy principle changes the game board, game components, and rules in an exciting and sometimes surprising way. Against this game, all future legacy games will have to be measured.
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