Finally the long overdue report on the DSP Awards predictions of last August.

First, many thanks to Trond Braut who pointed out what I had forgotten: games by Asmodée have this year begun to be distributed by the former ProLudo in Germany. This had dropped that game's predicted ranking when it should not have. On the other hand it didn't make much difference as the game apepared neither in the final slated of predictions nor in the top ten results.

But now on to the results:

N	Prediction	Result
1	Dominion	Dominion
2	Le Havre	Le Havre
3	Pandemic	Pandemic
4	Space Alert	Finca
5	Battlestar Galactica	Small World
6	Small World	Valdora
7	Chicago Express	Diamonds Club
8	Automobile	Im Wandel der Zeiten
9	A Castle for All Seasons	Sherwood Forest
10	Descent: The Road to Legend	Fauna

Observations:

• The number of differences is substantial.
• But the top three were predicted exactly.
• Among the rest of the predictions, only one, Small World, even appeared in the final rankings, being predicted sixth and actually appearing fifth.
• Characterizing the titles expected to appear, that did not, except for one, A Castle for All Seasons, they are all American or British in origin.
• Characterizing the titles that did appear, all originated in continental Europe.

Based on these observations, it cannot really be stated whether the methodology worked or not. Or maybe it did, since it was correct for the first three entries.

However, after that it is plain that boardgamegeek.com voting is at present firmly attuned to Anglo-American style games. A while back the consimworld.com site began charging money to use its most popular sections. Now there's a good way to drive away a lot of your audience. Where did they go? Very clearly it was to BGG where these fans of war games, Anglo-American games and heavier games in general are shifting voting patterns in this direction. It has been my observation that even the hardest core war or railroad game players do play and rate other types of games sometimes. Of coruse, even if they do not, if they give high ratings for their favorites, the top Germans games will tend to be outranked.

As a consequence it appears this may be the last prediction that can be made because as things stand now, it appears that BGG ratings can no longer be employed to preduct DSP results as they once were. (Unless maybe the new site spiele-check.de can serve.) In fact, it appears the BGG rankings are no longer a useful resource for finding the best, new German-style games. Perhaps some would claim they never were, but even a few years ago it was still a useful resource in that regard; this is now certainly no longer the case ...