...um, Jump Gate? This year Games Magazine makes an... "unusual" choice for the best game of the year. Not a bad choice as far as I know, as I have yet to play the game to decide, but a game that I have never heard of and has made little to no waves in the gaming community.
This is actually kind of par for the course for Games Magazine. I've been reading them since I was a little kid, before BoardGameGeek or even the advent of the internet as we know it (oh god, so old.) I used to get giddy when the December issue arrived always two months early. I'd spend the afternoon drooling over all the great board games that I thought I'd never get to play. In the last decade, since they split the board games up from the video games, their choices of top game each year have definitely been interesting. Last year was definitely a good pick - Small World from Days of Wonder. But take 2004, for example - Alan Moon's New England won. This was the year another game from Alan Moon came out called Ticket to Ride. It swept the Spiel des Jahres and remains one of the best-selling games of all time. Does anyone still remember the out-of-print New England? I have a copy somewhere which I had bought on the recommendation. Must play that a second time....
