The Spiel des Jarhes is an annual award for outstanding board and card games published in Germany. Its web site is athttp://www.spiel-des-jahres.org/.

Open Letter to the Spiel des Jahres Jury, 1998

I congratulate you on many excellent choices for nominations for this year's SdJ award--I cannot remember a year in which there were so many strong nominations, and there are no painful omissions.

I was also quite struck by the fact that the list of games on yourweb-site, and presumably the list of games on your press release, which reminds us that that Amigo created Elfenland, Hans im Gluck created Euphrat and Tigris, and Ravensberger created Tonga Bonga.

I'm quite sure that there is no other major award in which the credifor an artistic work is completely granted to the publisher; how much better we would have been if Random House had been granted the Nobel prize in 1949 for its landmark novels The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom. I congratulate you for your daring and brillian move in completely slighting the actual *designers* of the year's best games in favor of rewarding the publishers and packagers. I hope that you take this trend to its logical extreme in years to come and merely hand out awards to the publishers with the largest payrolls.

Congratulations again to FX Schmidt, Kosmos (twice), Abacus, Berliner, Hans im Gluck (twice), Amigo, Schmidt, TM Spiele, Ravensberger, and Jumbo. And as for Reinhard Staupe (Basari and David & Goliath), Wolfgang Loedtke (Caesar and Cleopatra), Frederick A. Herschler (Canyon), Karl-Heinz Schmiel (Die Macher), Reiner Knizia (Durch die W=FCste and Euphrat & Tigris), Alan Moon (Elfenland), Kris Burm (Gipf), Rudi Hoffmann (Minister), Stefan Dorra (Tonga Bonga), and Wolfgang Kramer and Horst-Rainer Roesner (Tycoon), well, let's hope that someday you too can be a publisher and get re-cognition for publishing other peoples' games.