2002 Winners

GENERAL STRATEGY - MULTI-PLAYER CATEGORY

SAN MARCO

Set on the enchanting island of Venice, this Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum design uses a very clever idea not often seen before. Each turn a player is given a set of cards, some good, some bad. It's his goal to split these into two sets. Another player then chooses one set leaving the other to the "divider". Dividing the cards can be agony! You want to split them up so that your opponent gets the least advantage possible while leaving yourself with good cards. The game is released by Ravensburger and is the first International Gamers Award for the design team of Moon & Weissblum.

GENERAL STRATEGY - 2-PLAYER CATEGORY

DVONN

The latest in the Gipf Project of games from designer Kris Burm and released by Rio Grande Games and Don & Co. The game starts with players placing disks on an elongated hexagonal board. Once this is filled up players move their pieces creating larger and larger stacks. When you move a piece it must move exactly the number of pieces in its stack and must "capture" another stack. This often means that larger stacks are weaker as their number of moves gradually decreases. Further complicating maters is the fact that each stack must remain connected to one of the three special "Dvonn" pieces scattered about the board. Since these pieces can become part of a stack (and therefore moved around the board) this is a lot trickier than first appears.