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Ennies Good?? Also, By Total Coincidence, I am Nominated for Some
🕑 Added 2025-07-05 18:30:14 +0000 UTCEnnies Good?? Also, By Total Coincidence, I am Nominated for Some
The Prismatic Wasteland blog and my book with Games Omnivorous are nominated, respectively, for Best Online Content and Best RPG Related Product. Voting is open NOW, and I sure would appreciate your vote. Here is a link to vote: [ADD LINK]
Yes, the Ennies are good even when not a single game I know or like is nominated, purely by virtue of it highlighting games that may otherwise go under everyone’s radar. It also serves a legitimizing influence for the tabletop medium, if you care about that (and there are compelling reasons to not care or even to be against legitimization if it comes with increased professionalization). There are ways in which it could be better, but I mostly consider those as quibbles rather than an attack on the entire industry awards concept. My current position is that they are low-rent, somewhat slapdash awards but they’re our low-rent, slapdash awards, damnit.
However, this year more than previous years, I have seen more praise for what games are actually seeing nominations. Here are some things people were saying on my Bluesky feed when nominations dropped last-ish week: “Did the ennies get really cool all of a sudden??”, “What a good slate!”, “Great list this year”, “Why do this year’s Ennie nominations seem so much more interesting to me?”, “It definitely feels like there’s more stuff I’m familiar with and/or more interested in. And it seems like there’s hardly any 5e stuff which is nice”, “I don’t think I have ever been more excited by an Ennies slate!”, and “The Ennies appear to have chosen an excellent crop this year.” I don’t usually see this level of enthusiasm for Ennies; I more often see at least a handful of upturned noses, scoffs, and side-eyes. Sometimes I see those in a mirror especially. But not this year.
And not just because I was nominated. I mean, sure, that is obviously a sign of great taste, but I wanted to highlight just some of the great nominees that made it to your ballot this year. Lots of stuff that is great that I’m not shouting out (like, apparently the Monty Python game is surprisingly well-designed and hilarious in a not-just-cheap laughs way?), but it is worth adding my voice to the crowd in the cool stuff that is getting their due this year.
His Majesty the Worm by Josh McCrowell is nominated for both Best Rules and Best Game. I have been slowly stealing ideas and rules from Worm even before it was officially released. Theft is the highest praise that a game and ruleset can receive, but it would be nice for ol’ Joshy to get some medals as evidence of the great game he built and will continue to build on in the coming years.
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast from Possum Creek Games is nominated for a handful of awards: Best Art - Cover, Best Family Game/Product, Best Writing, and Product of the Year. It’s a great game which I have had the pleasure of both playing and running since it’s been released. I would love for the deluxe version to one day see its way back to print so I could get a second copy to keep pristine until my own family is old enough to play it (I think 5th/6th grader age kids would REALLY dig it), so I had already said last year that this was my early pick for Best Family Game, but all the other nominations (up to and including Product of the Year) are well-deserved for this groundbreaking game.
Mythic Bastionland by Mr. Chris McBastionland himself is nominated for Best Art - Interior, Best Layout and Design, and Product of the Year. Even though my physical copy is still (as of this writing, maybe not by the time I post it) making its way to me, I’ve already had a chance to play it, and it is more than worthy of the Product of the Year nomination (and the others too, it is a pretty book, but I think all that aesthetic comes second to McDowall’s standard for excellent, succinct design). And you don’t have to take my word for it: in an obvious display of British Solidarity (rigged!), Quinns Quest put out a glowing review of Mythic Bastionland just a couple of days before the Ennies dropped.
Wonderland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting from Andrew Kolb is also soaking up praise with nominations for Best Monster/Adversary, Best Cartography, and Best Layout and Design. Kolb has been doing great work on all his public domain settings to date, but I do appreciate this year’s judges for having the discretion to not put him up for “Product of the Year”, saving that for the culmination of his public domain project when he finally gives us all the adventure setting that I know Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood can be. Perhaps he will stat that one up for Cairn instead of pseudo-5e?
The Shrike by Leo Hunt and published by Silveram Press is nominated for “Best Adventure - Long Form” and The Dream Shrine (which I actually played a small bit of before it was released during last year’s GenCon) by Brad Kerr and Skullfungus is nominated for “Best Adventure - Short Form”. I also love that the Best Adventure category is broken out like this–good move by the Ennies. These are both great adventures from great teams of designers. I would really like to see adventures get more acclaim in these types of things, but it is at least time to see a dollop of praise applied to some of the best writing in RPGs.
Mothership: Deluxe Set is nominated for Best Production Values, The Mothership Companion App is nominated for Best Aid/Accessory - Digital, and the Warden’s Operations Manual is nominated for Best Supplement. I’ve actually used this, and it did aid my sessions of Momboat! And I, of course, have the Deluxe Set and it is one of the fanciest things on my RPG bookshelf (which is a stacked category, frankly). The Warden’s Manual is also probably the best dungeon master guide type product in existence and is useful for anyone planning a campaign of anything, not just Mothership. I love how it guides you through creating a notebook for your game or all the ways it is able to reinforce concepts with its visual design.
Dungeon Cats is also nominated (along with Yazeba’s) for Best Family Game/Product. Is this the best category? I mean, Break!!, Wanderhome, and Mausritter all cleaned up in this category in previous years, and all of those are great. Maybe we can just forget about the PbtA Avatar game also winning. But I digress. Dungeon Cats is really fun and its art is a highlight. It is definitely the kind of thing I could see a youth seeing the cover of at a bookstore and picking it up, not knowing it is a game, based on the art and concept alone. I think that is a big part of what makes a game a good game for kids. Adults are the ones who want a game because of nostalgia value, not kids. Kids (and discerning adults) are looking for something that sparks imagination.
I am beginning to get a sore throat from singing so many praises, but I think you get the picture. Ennies good! Or at least a LOT of good games are nominated this year; my above list is just a smattering of some of the ones I know are great from first-hand experience. If I kept going too long, we would be here all day.
I will also toot my own horn in saying that my blog is actually pretty good (and in particular had a good year during the nomination period for this year’s Ennies), so I was delighted that the masked judges of the Ennies agreed and put my blog up for the coveted Best Online Content category this year. Yes, last year’s post, Overloading the Random Encounter Table, won a Gold Bloggie (now THAT’s a damn good award series), but I also published The TTRPG Cooking Minigame, did investigative journalism about Whether GenCon is Worth It, put out the definitive non-TTRPG book and non-dice gift guide for TTRPG obsessives, declared the Year of the Beta, interrogated the use of female-coded monsters like the Medusa in TSR’s adventures, wrote about my Calvinball Experiment of making up rules only as they were needed, and spurted out a couple dozen other posts that I could list out but refuse to do out of respect for your time. Aside from the output, blogging is simply a blast and I am glad to continue to proselytize blogging as an end-in-and-of-itself that keeps the DIY spirit of TTRPGs alive. All of the nominees in the Best Online Content deserve their roses for fostering that DIY spirit, but I would like to shout-out my friend Nova’s blog, Playful Void, which is also nominated. Nova is not only one of the most prolific reviewers in the scene (vital work for the adventure ecosystem, and adventures are vital to the rest of the POSR ecosystem) but those reviews are also quality, not just quantity. Since Ennies voting is ranked-choice, I would encourage you to rank Playful Void as #2 if you are ranking me #1 (or vice versa). Luckily, we are not running against a disgraced former New York governor, so whoever wins will be highly deserving, but it is nice that ranked choice voting allows less sharp elbows even when angling for votes from the TTRPG populace.
The other category that I up for this year is Best RPG Related Product for my Prismatic Wisdom book that was gorgeously produced by Games Omnivorous. I don’t know all the entrants in this category as well as I knew those in the Online Content category (although I do now think I will pick up Chaosium’s At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers for my own beginning [charitably] reader), but it is surreal to be nominated alongside a legitimate academic work like MIT Press’ Playing at the World by Jon Peterson (who was very kind during a brief encounter at last year’s GenCon) and also comic books, children’s books and cassette tapes. A real hodgepodge category. I am super happy with how my book, Prismatic Wisdom, turned out, and I wrote earlier this year (Remember Books? They’re Back, in Blog Form) about why it was important to me to undertake it as a project.
Is all of that just a sixteen-hundred word way of saying “please vote for me”? Yes, of course. I am a blogger and am incapable of just saying “vote for me” when I could instead say that except much longer with many, many parenthetical asides. But I’d also like to say that’s for reading my blog over the last almost-five years–every time you read a post on my blog, I gain one XP.
