The Mind and Detective triumph at France’s 2019 As d’Or game of the year awards

Social card game The Mind and app-enhanced mystery Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game have been named the big winners at this year’s As d’Or awards.

The ‘Golden Ace’ game of the year prizes – France’s equivalent to the German Spiel des Jahres – are similarly divided into three categories for expert, ‘all public’ and children’s games.

The ‘all public’ As d’Or is the awards’ headline trophy for a widely-accessible release. 2019’s award was claimed by The Mind, the Spiel des Jahres-nominated number-counting card game-cum-social experiment, seeing off competition from Codenames-y, Dixit-y deduction game Shadows: Amsterdam, the gorgeous board-scrolling Solenia and Treasure Island, the bluffing game based on the classic pirate novel that involves drawing on the map for real.

The expert As d’Or, meanwhile, was won by Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, which uses a companion app to power along its interlinked tales of murder, mystery and conspiracy solved by players against the ‘clock’.

The win meant Detective triumphed over arguable frontrunner KeyForge: Call of the Archons, the hugely popular card game created by Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield that uses algorithms to generate billions of unique decks. Also in the running in the particularly heated category was subversive co-op board game Spirit Island.

Over in the children’s category, memory-based animal challenge Where’s Mr. Wolf? came out on top, beating the self-proclaimed ‘first legacy game for children’ Zombie Kidz Evolution, emotional dice game The Color Monster and poo-themed card game Who Did It?