In August, we announced the Alexa Skills Challenge: Games and invited developers to give their game ideas a voice. In just seven weeks, participants created over one hundred skills for the category Games, Trivia and Accessories. We want to thank everyone who participated in this challenge and created amazing voice game experiences for our customers.

Voice games provide a new opportunity for developers. Transferring the game experience to voice is an exciting challenge, from finding the most interesting use case to creating a voice user experience, which is very different to a graphical user interface. Thanks to your efforts, customers can experience a new and intuitive way to play games.

It hasn’t been easy to narrow down all the creative game skill ideas to the finalists, who provided not only the full submission package (including a video), but also scored the most points. Our judges used these criteria to award the points:

• Quality of the Idea: including creativity and originality, and the potential positive impact of the Skill.
• Technical Implementation of the Idea: including how well the idea was executed by the developer, the complexity of the services used to build the Skill, the depth of integrations with data or thirdparty APIs, whether it performs as expected, and more.
• Potential for Engagement: including the extent to which the Skill is widely useful, engages user over multiple turns (dialogues), might be extended to other scenarios, and more.
• Quality of User Experience: including how natural the experience is to the user.
• Quality of the Submission Package: including the description, video demo, and any other materials submitted to the Administrator’s Platform.

What’s Next for Our Finalists?

Each finalist will take home EUR 2,500 and continue to compete for the EUR 10,000 grand prizes. From November 7 through November 28, 2018, we will monitor customer engagement with each of the finalists’ skills, and our judging panel will evaluate each of the skills and select the winner of the EUR 10,000 grand prizes. There are some bonus prizes up for grabs so we’ll also evaluate a few additional skills. (As per the official rules: “a Bonus Prize may be awarded to a skill that is not a Finalist Prize winner.”)

Today, we are excited to share the finalists with you. Congratulations to each finalist!

To try out one of the finalist skills, just ask, “Alexa, let’s have fun” for UK and Ireland and “Alexa, lass uns spielen” for Germany and Austria.

English Finalist Skills

Star Commander: Star Commander is an adventure story that puts you in charge of the Starship Artemis, as it begins its fateful mission to explore the outer edges of the galaxy. Try out Star Commander.

Word Mine: This is an anagram game, where your handy canary will help you discover the letters to master the mines. Try out Word Mine.

Solar Race: Explore the Solar System and beyond with Amazon Alexa in this exciting space based, team challenge board game. Try out Solar Race. Please note, that you will need the board game to experience the full gaming experience.

Brain Ninja: This skill helps you to improve your productivity and performance by answering daily questions. Try out Brain Ninja.

German Finalist Skills

Schätze den Preis: In this German skill, you need to guess the prize of a product, can conquer with other players. It´s also a voice adaptation of the famous game “The prize is right”. Try out Schätze den Preis.

Marsstation: You are the commander of a research team based on a Martian space station. You are responsible to keep your team happy, maintain your station and manage repairs. Try out Marsstation.

Schnapsturnier: Schnapsturnier is the voice adaptation of the famous card game Schnapsen. Try out Schnapsturnier.

Der Eiserne Falke: In this interactive story, you play the former soldier Sardak, who will be ensared in unexpected adventures, when trying to save the kingdom of Rivaan from its downfall. Try out Der Eiserne Falke. 

Brain Pain: Brain Pain will challenge your brain with different noises, you need to identify. Sounds easy? The game will add new rules, while you play. Your right answer from the first round, will possibly be wrong going forward. Try out Brain Pain.

As well as these great finalists the following skills have been nominated for a Bonus prizes: Ich war einmal. Ein Wikinger, Kid Chef, Hide and Seek, Answer the Previous Question, Kinder besuchen den Bauernhof, Star Commander, Schnapsturnier, Guess the Logo, Puzzle Quest, Schätze den Preis, Twenty-One, Monster Madness, and Word Mine.

Good Luck to the Finalists!

The challenge winners will be announced on or around December 7, 2018. Thank you again to everyone who participated and worked hard to submit an entry to the challenge. We invite everyone to try each of the finalist skills and to build your own Alexa game skill.