An Indonesian party game designed in Surabaya just beat 570 competitors to win the most important award in board gaming and no Southeast Asian designer had ever done it before. 

JinxO, a word-association party game designed by Martin Ang and published by Surabaya-based Tabletoys Games, has won Spiel des Jahres 2026  Germany's "Game of the Year" award, handed out in Berlin since 1978 and widely nicknamed the Oscars of board games. Released in German as Dito! through Zurich publisher Game Factory, the game beat out over 570 entries and two other finalists, Cozy Sticker Ville (USA) and Morty Sorty Magic Shop (Austria), to take the top prize. It's the first time a game from Indonesia  or anywhere in Southeast Asia  has even been nominated, let alone won.

At a Glance

• 570+ games reviewed by the jury before the shortlist
• 6 languages JinxO has been translated into (English, Spanish, Korean, German, Thai, Hungarian)
• 2024 the year JinxO debuted, at SPIEL Essen in Germany
• 2nd Asian designer ever to win, after Hisashi Hayashi's Bomb Busters in 2025

What Is Spiel des Jahres, and Why Does It Matter ?

Spiel des Jahres isn't a sales chart or a fan vote. It's a jury of independent journalists, editors, and reviewers with no ties to the game industry, deciding which release best balances originality, rules that are easy to learn, and fun that holds up around a table of strangers. Winning the sticker on the box has historically meant a sales bump into the hundreds of thousands of copies  the kind of exposure that put Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride into households worldwide.

How Did an Indonesian Game Win Europe's Biggest Prize?
JinxO is deceptively simple: players write down answers to a prompt, and you only score if your answer matches someone else's  but not everyone's. Guess exactly what one other person is thinking, and you win big. Guess what nobody else wrote, and you're "jinxed." It sounds like trivia. It isn't.

"We made a party game because in Indonesia people really love to play party games," Martin Ang said onstage in Berlin. "It's really famous in Indonesia right now, and a lot of people like it  even the gamers also like it."

The jury's own reasoning backs that up: on paper, JinxO looks like a race for points. In practice, players only win by reading each other correctly, which means the game quietly turns into a crash course in how your friends, coworkers, or complete strangers actually think.

What Made the Judges Pick JinxO Over 570 Other Games?
Association chairman Harald Schrapers said the win reflects the award going global: "We're proud that for the first time, a Game of the Year from the Global South is expanding how we look at the world of games." JinxO's win also breaks a three-year streak of cooperative games taking the prize (Dorfromantik, Sky Team, Bomb Busters) and makes it only the fourth word-based game to win the award in 47 years, after Barbarossa, Codenames, and Just One.

For Tabletoys Games, a homegrown Indonesian publisher, this is the payoff of years spent pushing a locally designed game into a market that has almost never looked outside Europe and the US for its biggest winners.