Board of the 1944: Race to the Rhine game
Imperial Settlers, published by Portal Games, and Phalanx Games' 1944: Race to the Rhine entered the winner’s stand of the plebiscite organised by the BoardGameGeek website –the biggest online portal for board game fans.
1944: Race to the Rhine, created by Waldek Gumienny and Jaro Andruszkiewicz, was awarded with a distinction in the Wargame category. Imperial Settlers, created by Ignacy Trzewiczek, won gold for the best Solo Game and was a runner-up in three other categories: Strategy Game, Card Game and 2-player Game.
Merry Nowak-Trzewiczek, representative of Portal Games said :
This award is an enormous distinction for us (…). The solo variant offered in the game from the very beginning has gained great reviews, so in December of 2014 we created an additional extension – a campaign in which gamers can develop their Imperial Settlement through a set of subsequent skirmishes. We made the campaign mode available as a PDF file, free of charge, and it was warmly welcomed, which I suppose has earned us the Golden Geek.
It’s not the first Golden Geek presented to Portal Games. Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island is one of the publisher’s games awarded in recent years. Race to the Rhine on the other hand is the first of Phalanx's games nominated for this prize.
Here is how Dominika Gorgosz from Phalanx Games commented on the success of 1944: Race to the Rhine:
The first edition of this game was exhausted in no time. A reprint is planned for the end of the first quarter of this year. The game was warmly received both in Poland and abroad. After the nomination was announced, we received enquiries about the reprint not just from Polish gamers, but from American gamers as well. We are very happy with this and we will hand them new boxes of this game with great pleasure.
Gorgosz also denotes the meaning of the presented distinction:
This recognition is a great appreciation of our authors’ work, but also of the whole board games business in Poland. It proves that Poland can compete against board game powers like Germany, Great Britain or the United States.
The two games have been published in both Polish and English. Portal Games has also announced versions of Settlers in 11 other language, including Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian and Portuguese.
The Golden Geek Awards vote has been organised since 2006. The BoardGameGeek.com website was founded in 2000 and has over million users from all over the world. Its database comprises of over 75 thousand board, card and dice games. The website publishes reviews, news, instructions, tutorials in various languages, image galleries and ads regarding game exchanges, sales and purchases. There is also a database dedicated to authors, publishers and illustrators.
This year Golden Geek Awards were presented to the best board, story and computer games. As in the recent years, the first category received the most attention. The website users decided to award the main prize for the best board game to Marc Andre’s Splendor. Neither of the two Polish computer games that got into the finals – This War of Mine and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter – made it to the podium.
Source: PAP, edit. KK, transl. Agata Dudek 03/03/15.