The committee of the Diana Jones Awards has announced the shortlist for its 2009 award. Nominees include Dominion, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the Jeepform movement, the Mouse Guard RPG, and Sweet Agatha.
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to select one of these nominees and argue in the comments that it is worthy, above the other nominees, to win this award, which is “given for ‘excellence’ in the world of hobby-gaming.”
Please don’t argue that some other game that does not appear on the shortlist is more worthy; it may be so, but that’s not the task. Likewise, please don’t attack the futility of comparing an RPG to a movement to a board game; ours is not to attack the assumptions, but to deal with them.
Go!
You guys realize the slate this year is so good that this is an intensely painful question, right? HOW CAN I CHOOSE WHICH BABY TO LOVE????
-Rob D.
I have a bit of a vested interest, so I’m not going to push my luck and talk about how deserving Sweet Agatha is (that would be rather gauche, I think).
I will say that I feel this year there is some particularly strong competition. I’ve played with all of the nominees and would be very hard pressed to select only one to come in second place.
You should vote for Dominion because it is a powerful engine of play. Yes, it’s a lot of fun to play, and that merits some notice, but there are a lot of fun games to play, and they don’t all deserve this sort of notice. No, what Dominion does is introduce a new model of play by introducing a card game where the primary action of play is the actual construction of the deck, and does so in an entirely modular fashion. That seems like a very dry way of putting it, but in play it means that you will only use 10 decks at a time, insuring the game can constantly change and expand. While there are many decks in the core game, it is obvious how easy it would be to add more (as the recent expansion illustrates). The net result is a game that has a great mix of strategy and chance, has strong replayability and which has that ephemeral quality of being a game that people _get_ as soon as they start playing.
This is the kind of simple-but-rich game that you will play and wonder how no one has ever thought of it before, and which will spawn many successors as new games tap into the ideas it brings to the table.
All that and it plays in half an hour. What’s not to love?
-Rob D.
You should vote for Dungeons & Dragons , Fourth Edition because it is an unbelievable work of games craftsmanship which brings new ideas to the forefront of gaming while providing a fantastic vehicle for _play_.
There are two big elephants in the room you must address when you’re talking about D&D. First, would this game even be on this list if it were “Guys with Swords”? And second, what about other versions of D&D?
In any fair universe, the answer to the first is a decisive “yes”. It is not the D&D logo that has brought players back to this game, but rather the quality of the rules and their direct relationship to play. Somewhat more problematic is the relationship to fans of previous editions – there are no doubt some of you who would choose to rail against 4e because of your love of 3.x, and of course that is your prerogative. To you, I can only ask that you look at _why_ the decisions behind 4e were made, and ask yourself if 4e delivers on the answers that WOTC came up with. No, those are not the same answers they had for 3E, but should they be? Is it really necessary to put the versions at odds?
That aside, the fact that this is D&D is a pretty big deal, because it commands such a broad audience. The habits and practices that D&D encourages are likely to spread throughout the gaming community, and this is the first edition of D&D to seem conscious of that role. It uses that platform to preach player empowerment, improvisation, ease of use and most of all a focus on fun in play over other priorities, and that seems admirable enough to merit a vote.
-Rob D.
You should vote for Mouseguard because it is the most beautiful game you have ever seen. I do not speak of the art, though the art is truly gorgeous. Nor do I speak of the layout, though the layout may be the most fantastic of any game this year. Rather, I talk about the heart of this game.
I’m not going to speak too much too the source material – Mouseguard is a wonderful comic, and you should read it. It provides a brilliant setting and visual theme for the game, but if this were merely a licensed adaptation, it would not bear much note.
On some level this is all about Luke Crane. Burning Wheel, the system that forms the basis for Mouseguard, has always struck me as an incredibly brilliant game that was not to my taste. It is full of good ideas, but it feels like they are held so strongly that they are being yelled. It has no lack of creativity or passion, but is it the product of a vision.
Burning Empires turned a corner, and it felt like that passion was tempered by experience, and rather than shout, it sought to explain this vision of gaming. It’s quite long and quite thorough, and while I cannot question its quality, it still was not to my taste.
Mouseguard is the product of that experience tempered by wisdom, and it is the closest thing I have seen to having Luke on hand to discuss gaming. The rules are thorough and meticulous, directing every element of play, but they are not the centerpiece of things. Instead, they are presented as a servant to the game that you can play. What is remarkable about this is that it does something I would have said is impossible. Most games turn to Rule Zero (“Ignore the rules that don’t work for you”) to make it clear that the game serves the group. Mouseguard chooses the infinitely harder path of choosing not to take that easy out and instead craft every rule, every passage and every piece of advice to genuinely serve the group and the game. This is something many games talk about doing, but I had never seen that promise truly delivered until Mouseguard.
It is absolutely true that a lot of the gems in Mouseguard come out of Luke’s earlier works, and a cynic might take that as a strike against it, but to do so would be to ignore just how brilliant those gems are, especially with this level of painstaking carving and polish applied to them.
-Rob D.
I am familiar with both Jeepform and Sweet Agatha – enough so to know they deserve their spots on the list, but not well enough to truly advocate for them. Perhaps someone else can step up?
-Rob D.
I don’t know Jeepform or Sweet Agatha well enough to comment, but trying to pick a favorite between D&D4e, Mouse Guard, and Dominion is sweet agony. Normally I don’t like tabletop games that aren’t RPGs, but when my sister got me to try Dominion out, it somehow hit all the right notes and left me wanting more. And, come to think of it, Mouse Guard and 4e transformed BW and D&D into games I could fall in love with as well. In terms of the range of games available to play, it has been a painfully good time to be a gamer.
So, yeah, I’m biased in this answer, because I published one of the first American Jeepform games (that being A Flower for Mara. And there are certainly other fine games on the shortlist. However, I believe that the Jeepform movement deserves this award.
First, I think this because Jeepform is making LARP accessible for people who do not have large groups of people to play or the associated time and financial resources. Instead, Jeepform games can be played by a few people in a living room. I ran A Flower for Mara in a small hotel room at GenCon 2008. That’s LARP within tabletop space constraints.
Second, Jeepform has taken great strides to apply roleplaying to “real world issues”. Jeep games have focused on relationships, drunkenness, grief, and even rape. The experiences created by these games are powerful, often lingering in the mind for some time.
Finally, Jeepform has taken steps toward teaching all of us how to play well with others. This is true in terms of the various techniques that Jeepform espouses and also through the power of the creative experiences that Jeepform produces. People seem to be closer to each other after having played a Jeepform game. For that matter, the dialogue about Jeepform has expanded beyond Sweden, broadening the horizons of designers in other countries. I believe that the next several years will only see an expansion in this sort of gaming.
As such, I would award the Diana Jones Award to the Jeepform movement.
I’ll also note in passing that Sweet Agatha getting nominated has persuaded me that I need to check it out. I mean, I think I’ll lose my crime geek cred if I don’t.
Sweet Agatha isn’t just a game, it’s a work of art. It’s beautiful, most certainly, but its biggest draw is that it makes you think creatively. I’ve played it a handful of times with a couple of people, every time it tells a different story. By the end, you and your partner have written a novel you didn’t know you had in you.
It’s a phenomenal piece of work, I can’t recommend it enough.
Sweet Agatha offers an alternate definition of what roleplaying is that’s recognizable, recognizably new, and above all accessible. It absolutely flattens the notion that an individual self-publisher cannot make a game that satisfies all definitions, mainstream or otherwise, of “work of art.”
Hell, I helped *write* one of these games and I have a hard time not pulling for Dominion to win.
We gamers can be a curmudgeonly bunch at times–tell us over and over to play Game X and sometimes we’ll just stubbornly refuse to try it.
And you’ve probably heard folks crowing about Dominion for months. Maybe you’re sick of it. “Look at all those folks who’ve drunk the Dominion Kool-Aid,” you’re thinking.
But if you want to hold onto that badge of honor as a Real Gamer, you’d better play this game, and more than once, ’cause every game’s different in wonderfully significant and insignificant ways.
I won’t try to top Rob’s impassioned post, ’cause he’s already said it better than I could have.
But seriously, this game has the real potential to be remembered for years as a landmark achievement.
And in the meantime, it’s hella fun.
So…can I vote for a tie? : )
This year’s nominations revealed to me just how out of touch I am with practice, as opposed to theory. Of the nominees, I have read only two (D&D and Mouse Guard) and played only one (D&D). So this comments thread has been of great use to me.
That’s my confession for today.