I’ve been working on Distilled for over a year now, but have only officially entered in to two game design competitions. While one would think that there would be more opportunities for submitting games for consideration in curated, juried venues, it sort of makes sense: while BGG, GameCrafter, and others have some frequent design competitions, they are usually around specific prompts and don’t always require a game to necessarily be complete. Others may be targeted at people specifically seeking publishers or even looking at games *after* they’re published (such as awards like the Spiel des Jahres).
The Cardboard Edison page (home of the fantastic Cardboard Edison Award, which recently announced that Glen Dresser’s The Transcontinental (still on Kickstarter!) won this year’s competition) maintains an up-to-date listing of potential competitions to enter. Since I was fairly new to this scene, I’m guessing I’ve missed a few key submissions over the past few months, but hope to be able to participate in them over the course of 2021.
The first competition I entered – last summer – was the Board Game Workshop Design Contest. It was a bit more informal, in which it was a peer judged/rated competition focused on watching a two-minute video overview we were required to submit. Each game could be rated by each peer judge from 1 (poor) through 11 (perfect). The contest had 3 rounds, with 97 submissions in the first round alone, and after judging they would move the Top 20 on to the second round. With a final score of 6.7333 , Distilled came in 22nd place, so it narrowly missed the cutoff. In looking at my 15 scores more closely (see image to the left), I noticed that I had a single outlying score of a “3”, as compared the other scores being clustered between 5 and 9. Without that single, low outlier score, Distilled would have gone from from an average of 6.7 to 7, placing it into the Top 20 and moving it on to the next round! What I learned from this was to not get too discouraged from these contests, as the majority of judges seemed to like it, and it came down to one rotten apple that ruined the bunch. I also realized that I needed to pay more attention to the instructions – it turns out that I was only supposed to talk about the innovation of my game in that 2 minutes, not an entire overview of the game!
The latest opportunity to submit for consideration has been the SaltCON Ion Award. While this normally coincides with SaltCON in Utah in March, the submissions happen in December of the previous year, in order to have time to move games through the different rounds and be ready for in-person awards in the spring. While the in-person thing isn’t happening this year, I was grateful to be able to participate in this really great contest. They’ve got some great past winners, such as The Night Cage, which was recently successful on Kickstarter.
The requirements for the competition were that the game could not be published yet, and you were required to submit a short written game summary and a video overview that was up to six minutes in length. Due to me being unable to film in-person (because I don’t have any updated physical assets right now), I recorded the entire thing in Tabletop Simulator, added my voiceover based on a script I wrote, and infused some royalty free background music by the one and only Scott MacLeod (my students will often use him for animations – he’s one prolific musician!). The deadline was December 1st, so now it’s just a bunch of finger-crossing until they communicate updates in January!
Without further ado, here is the latest video overview of Distilled!