What Sets Ravensburger Games Apart?

A man and young girl enjoying a Ravensburger game together

Everybody thinks of Ravensburger as a puzzle company. And they’re not wrong - we make some of the best puzzles in the world.

But did you know we make some of the best games too?

Ravensburger - and our other gaming brands, Alea and F.X Schmid - produce a range of high-quality games that win awards and delight players all around the world.

Ravensburger is a design house, not a factory

Ravensburger puts our game designers first.

We were one of the first companies to use our game designers in the marketing for our games, and we put their names on the boxes too. Nowadays, we have an incredible in-house design team, and we work with some of the best freelance game designers in the world, too.

Curated, not constant

Ravensburger releases fewer than ten new games a year, and that’s deliberate. We’re not interested in flooding the market with identikit clones of the same old games, with a couple of tweaks to the rules and a new box.

We want to create something new and exciting with every release.

We let our designers take the time they need to make their games the very best they can be before they’re released. Designing. Prototyping. Playtesting. Ironing out all the bugs so when you buy a new Ravensburger game, you know you’re experiencing it exactly how the designers want you to.

The kind of recognition that can’t be bought

That philosophy has led to Ravensburger games winning some of the most prestigious gaming awards around.

We’ve won several German Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) awards, from 1979's Hare and Tortoise to 2015's Broom Service. The Spiel des Jahres is one of the biggest game awards in the world - it’s been described as the Academy Award of board games. The jury plays and rates hundreds of games every year against specific criteria, so Ravensburger’s 13 wins across three categories is an incredible achievement.

But it’s not just the critics that are impressed by Ravensburger games. We’ve also won the Deutscher Spiele Preis (German Players’ Prize) several times, with games including Puerto Rico (which is now considered one of the best board games of all time), Louis XIV and a second place for Castles of Burgundy which has gone on to establish its own long-term legacy.

And our modern games are just as successful. In 2019 Disney Villainous won Game of the Year at the prestigious Toy of the Year Awards, and in 2024 Mycelia won both the Judges’ Choice and People’s Choice for Best Family Game at the UK Games Expo, as well as the Spiel der Spiele (Game of the Games) in Austria.

Licensing done as design

There’s a trend in the gaming industry for publishers to acquire big licenses, and just reskin them onto an existing game.

That’s not how Ravensburger do things.

Take Disney Villainous. It’s a huge license, with 500,000 copies sold - and counting. It’s done so well because we built it as an original, fun-to-play game design first, and a license second. The license serves the gameplay, not the other way around.

We’re able to produce high-quality games and licenses like this because we have such great designers to work with, in-house and freelance.

Built for play. Again and again and again

Ravensburger games are often a little more expensive than games from big rival companies. But there’s a good reason for that. We’re not interested in pumping out game after game, most of which will end up sat unloved on a shelf.

So we invest time and money into designing the best games we can. And we make sure that those games will last for many years of regular play.

Better quality boards. Better quality pieces. Better quality cards. All made from the best materials so you can enjoy them for game night every week, for years and even generations to come.