I mentioned in the "Hippodice" thread that a while back, Darkehorse expressed interest in wanting to develop an American equivalent of the Hippodice competition. I'd like to begin some discussion here about how such a contest might be judged, both conceptually and, practically speaking, how exactly we'd pull the thing off.
First, I propose that we not reinvent the wheel, and use Hippodice's structure. Loosely, it works like this:
Round 1: Rulebooks are read, with X selected for playtesting.
Round 2: The X games are playtested, with Y selected for the finals.
Round 3: The Y finalists are playtested by representatives from established publishers, and a winner is chosen.
I'll elaborate a bit: (throughout, I'm assuming we'll get about 75 entries or so to start; this may be way too high, or way too low)
Round 1: I envision that 5 or 6 people could be responsible for reading the rulebooks and selecting, say, 30 or so games for playtesting. We'd have to set up a structure where each rulebook was read by at least 2 people, and the game given a rating, with the best-rated games going on. (We'd have to define whether the "winner" of the overall competition was the game judged to be the "best", or the "most sellable". There is a difference.)
Round 3: This one is also (theoretically) easy to implement. Here in the US, we have Rio Grande, Mayfair, Out of the Box, Days of Wonder, Uberplay, Dancing Eggplant, etc. If each company could provide a rep to help judge, we'd have a very respectable competition right off the bat.
Round 2: This is the tricky bit. It's my understanding that Hippodice does nothing but playtest for 3 months. I don't honestly believe there's a group in the US willing to do that. My thinking, then, is that we need a model whereby games can be judged by a "consortium" of many groups. My initial idea was something like the Boston area's "Unity Games" group, which is a group of 10+ different local game groups. But it wouldn't necessarily have to consist of groups that were geographically linked.
We would need to derive a judging model for such an arrangement. Here's my idea: each group would be responsible for playtesting X games. They would play each game Y times and give it a score. To calibrate, each group would also give scores to several "benchmark" games (Puerto Rico, Acquire, El Grande, etc), so that the groups' scores can be normalized. Probably, we'd also want each game to be playtested by at least 2 different groups, if possible, although that would increase the total number of "playtesting events" that would need to happen.
Finally, I want to propose an additional refinement that Hippodice doesn't include, namely, the categorization of games. Perhaps it could be as simple as "card games/board games", or perhaps it could be grouped by the scope of the games (e.g., "strategy", "family", "party", etc). The point is that since this contest, like Hippodice, is supposed to bridge the gap between publishers and designers, it might be helpful to have the games broken down by type so that publishers can get a sense for what the best games based on what they want to publish. It would also streamline judging, since it's easier to ask a group to compare 5 card games than to compare a card game, 2 tile games, and 2 board games.
These are just my initial thoughts. Please chime in with a judging model that you think would work. Offers to participate in judging are welcome, but remember, we're talking about playtesting 30-40 games here. This is a HUUUUGE commitment, and I really do think it's beyond what one group could handle. We absolutely MUST avoid the judging bailout we had in our last contest, and so I think we want to minimize the work that any one gruop has to do. That's why I favor a "consortium" model for Round 2, but other models might work.
Let's make this happen!
-Jeff
Jeff, I'm more than willing to marshall what folks I can in HG to assist. We have bi-monthly playtest sessions where members can float their own designs...I don't see any reason why we couldn't also incorporate (or substitute for the period of the competition) playtesting contestants' designs instead.
For what it's worth, I had envisioned the first screening round to be something like this (and maybe this is what you had in mind as well, sometimes communication in pure-text media isn't 100% clear): each of the "selection committee" members would read all of the entries (certainly not a small task unto itself), and, say, select the best 10 from the group. If you want to get elaborate, they could even be ranked top to bottom, but it would probably just be easier to select the best 10. Then, everyone's Top-10 list would be compared, and the games which received the most commonality by appearing on more lists would tend to be the ones to advance to the prototype phase. Of course, the weakness here would be if everyone picked the same 10 (or close to it), and only 10-15 entries actually got votes.
This type of structure (or something similar) I think would facilitate having judges in less-than-geographically-similar locations, as it would rely less heavily on a conference-style discussion of which designs to select. Having a geographically diverse selection committee (and playtest group, if it can be organized) would help to eliminate any potential geographical bias in the judging.
I am a little concerned about your suggestion to categorize games. Would you proposed to have a "best card game", "best abstract strategy game", "best bidding game", etc., or were you more intending it to be something like "the 10 finalists include 3 card games, 2 bidding games, ...."? I'm not sure that we'd get enough entrants, at least in the early years, to be able to meaningfully segregate the different categories of games. I could, of course, be completely wrong.
Another item we should consider is timing: when should we have it? I would think that summer would probably be best, as time demands from school (for those in school) would be less and that might translate into a larger judging/playtesting pool. On the other hand, it might conflict with family vacations. Further, since Hippodice has their's in the winter, it would make sense for us to stagger "Rhinopawn" (or whatever we choose to call it...I'm just going to use my pun-inspired name until an alternative is derived) to the summer. Thoughts?
I will definitely lend my support (and recruit heavily in HG) in getting this ball rolling!