4 April 2025 ~
Rocky and Mike and Brant do their best to muddle through a discussion around why we do/n’t care about wargame awards, what’s wrong with popularity contests, and how you would design the “right” kinds of wargame awards.
We certainly don’t discuss all of the possible awards out there, and we don’t do a deep dive on each of them, but we try to cover a variety of ways in which these different awards approach their categories, participation, scope, and scale.
So what did we miss? What awards didn’t we cover that we should have? How would you organize a set of wargaming awards – categories, voters, scope & scale – if you were going to do so? Sound off below!
Here’s a bunch of links to some of the wargame awards discussed on the show
- The Charles S Roberts Awards
- Wargames Illustrated Awards (reader survey)
- Golden Geek Awards
- SDHISTCON Summit Award
- The Homo Ludens Golden Luddite announcement
- Origins Awards archive
- Tabletop Games Blog (for the interesting category names)
- History on the Table Awards (from a few years ago on BGG, their own site seems to be messed up)
And this was from the question we asked at the end of 2024 about your wargame-acquisition decision-making
And we also asked whether or not awards had any bearing on purchase decisions.
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Fwiw, The Summit Award games are publicly nominated, but the board and advisory committee are responsible for selecting the winners. The desire to recognize a more diverse group of historical games likely arises from the lack of recognition they receive in the wider hobby and the more wargame-focused awards.
Thanks! I knew there was a committee decision in there somewhere, but wasn’t 100% sure where