I wish they had an actual “advanced” category, with heavier games. Their advanced cateogory is honestly a joke.

I guess my question is, why would they need to expand? The reason SdJ is so big is because you can hand off the nominations and winner to a generic family in Europe and they go "ok, this is what to play at the holiday season" which is why one of the criteria is "it's widely available in Germany." Heavy games aren't going to have that fit that purpose, and the Jogo de Ano already sort of covers that niche if you're just looking for casual recommendations.

I think it even took them a while to introduce the „Kennerspiel“ category. Maybe we need something like an Expert category.

I've been playing Challengers a ton on BGA. There is a lot more to it than it may seem at first and it's a very fun game.

Yesterday I was mentioning Azul as an example of a game that's very easy to teach and a lot of fun when played casually but at the same has great depth at high level play. I think Challengers falls into this space too. The award is well deserved IMO.

The Decision Space podcast has just covered the game if you'd like some more in-depth discussion. They rated it very high too.

Edit: I totally missed that Sea Salt & Paper got a recommendation too! It's one of my absolute favorite small deck games, very addictive! And I'd highly recommend Next Station: London too if you enjoy flip & writes. It has quickly become one of our comfort games.

I've played challengers several times now and absolutely love it. My friends always ask to play it when I host a game night. I just don't like the art style that much, but the gameplay is great.

I’ve played Akropolis and Planet Unknown.

Akropolis is a competitive city builder where you’re having to make the choice of expanding outward or nullifying previous tiles by building on-top / upward for more points. I really enjoy it, my favorite new one of the year. (I tend to enjoy stylish, colorful, solo puzzley games)

Planet Unknown is a grid-planet that you’re terraforming with tetronimos. There are several tracks of environment types with different bonuses. I enjoyed the gameplay well enough but found it a little slow for my tastes; wife liked it more than I did.
What I did really appreciate is how replayable it seems. There are tons of planet variants, terrain tracks, and challenge cards that seem like you could really build the experience you want