Thanks to everyone who participated and voted this month! My debut entry, School of Fish, seems to have been a crowd favorite, but I’m not sure if it was the best entry at all. However, I promised myself that I would make a prototype and playtest the game if it won, so you can probably expect some posts about that in the future.

As for the contest itself, this month was a very interesting challenge, with a lot of good entries. I tried to vote based on the following criteria that I found relevant to the spirit of the competition:

1. Originality: We’ve all played a lot of games, so I decided that I would award high points for anything new and unfamiliar, even if the idea did not seem all that exciting at first glance. Originality is important to me!
2. Importance of turn order: In the spirit of the challenge, I wanted to reward games that were heavily dependent on a variable play order higher than entries that relied on it to a lesser extent.
3. Thematic integration: Do the mechanics and theme work well together? Particularly, to what extent did the theme naturally integrate with a variable play order as mandated by the contest rules?

Here are my opinions on some of the entries, with the rest coming in if I can find the time (there were a lot of entries!):

Dirty Business: My top vote, and for a good reason. I love market manipulation games, I enjoy programmable actions, and I love trading games! In combination, this was a really strong concept. My only real critique is that it’s a card drafting game, a mechanic that seems a little overused following the success of Dominion. (That’s not anything against the design, though). Having the various actions make sense within the thematic framework of the game could pose a difficult design challenge too, but one I’m sure the designer can handle!

Space Conquest Game: A firmly original concept (I think?), with the order of the phases determined by dice rolls. I can foresee this leading to some very exciting situations! The theme is strong as well, but not as tightly integrated with the mechanics as I would like. It’s an easy fix though: the turns could represent epochs and eras instead of the year-to-year happenings in the Galaxy (think Smallworld rather than Diplomacy). That way, there would be Centuries of Warfare and Centuries of Trade, and so on. Somehow, that would just make more sense to me. Otherwise, a great idea for a game!

The Host with the Most: I was somewhat torn on this, but it got my third vote in the end! This is a much stronger game than it would appear at first glance. It’s a party game, but the actual mechanics would work just as well in a different board game, I think. If the order of play cards had challenges that you could actually stack in your favor from round to round, this would be a great strategy game of trade and alliances! I’m thinking maybe a resource management game, or a game of political corruption or something. Either way, there really should be a way to manipulate the deck of order cards (so that Uncle Bob can stack the deck full of 1960s trivia questions, while Cousin Jane can try gunning for shoes and makeup). I’ve long been looking for a way to make players actually want to trade "win condition" cards, and I think this concept holds a potential solution to that problem! Kudos on that!

Teen Sensation: Contender for my third vote. A strong combination of clean mechanics, a hilarious theme and good implementation of the contest restrictions. I’m not sure if it’s all that original though, but this was very hard for me to gauge without seeing some of the cards. Complex card games with lots of unique cards are difficult to sell in a 500 word write-up, so I think that’s part of the reason why I had a hard time deciding if I liked this idea enough to merit a medal. But it’s a solid concept, with a tight integration of theme and mechanics, and humor! I suppose my main critique here is that the contestant could have used some of his or her word count to show some example cards. This was a very short entry, perhaps too short.

Thank you for the vote and feedback, Corsaire!

Stalling in School of Fish could certainly become an issue, but it’s one I tried to solve with the Murky Water mechanic. If it turns out to be a problem during playtesting, it’s easy enough to reduce the amount of empty spaces needed before that clock starts ticking. This could present some other issues, of course. At the very least, it would mean a worsening of the spatial awareness difficulties in determining the movement of the shark (and the shark is an important catch-up mechanic!).

In defense of Teen Sensation, the challenge restriction is very much present in this entry! You have to actively harm yourself if you want to control the play order, which I think is interesting in itself. Why you would want to do this depends heavily on the cards though. I think the design really needs a lot of cards with special effects to really work (so-called exception based design, like Magic: the Gathering). The cards cannot just give you points, that would make the headline actions pretty pointless.

Thanks for posting the results, Rich. Good to get at least some sort of sense of feedback.

Thanks Bluebeard. Having just downloaded and played Alien Frontiers this week, your mechanic seems much clearer. Wish I had bumped it up further. I suffered a bit from falling in love with an image I had in my head of dueling Roombas, probably a little too much time spent at the hackerspace. I'll have to check out Robo Rally, again, been years.