The Awards 2026 Design Diary #2

Judges: what are they good for? Absolutely everything!

But what do they actually do in/for The Awards?

Judges' responsibilities

Let's start from the basics: the judges basically are The Awards. They are the ones responsible for reading, evaluating, and voting on all the submissions. I'm just the admin side making sure they have what they need to do their job. Here's the basic timeline of a judge's work for The Awards 2024:

Application and Selection

Interested parties submitted self-nominations to be judges in April 2024. The information requested was as follows:

• Their name
• As much demographic information as they cared to provide (race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc.)
• Where they lived (for the purposes of getting global perspectives in judging)
• Their games manifesto: Your games manifesto should show how you think about games. It should be fairly short (a paragraph, maybe two at most). It should be honest. It should explain why you want to be a judge for The Awards 2024. We are looking for diversity in the judging panel, not only in terms of the judges’ identities but also in how they think about games. Don’t say what you think The Awards wants to hear; tell us how you really feel.

Judge self-noms closed on April, judges were selected in May (with the help and input of two judges from The Awards 2023), and they didn't have much to do until June, when all the submissions were in.

Conflicts of Interest and Round 1

Once all submissions were in, the first thing the judges had to do was go through the list of submissions and flag any conflicts of interest they had. This was defined fairly broadly (all the way from "frequent collaborator" to "have an Opinion about their social media presence") and judges were expected to interpret it as fairly and honestly as they could. The only consequences from these disclosures were that some submissions just weren't judged by everyone in the first round, and not all conflicts of interest even necessarily resulted in a judge not voting on that submission if I deemed it to be sufficiently low-stakes.

During Round 1, each judge had 3 months to get through all the submissions, not knowing who any of the others were, and give each a simple yes/no vote. In 2022, we had 197 submissions; in 2023, 333 submissions; and in 2024, 104 submissions. This was, as you can imagine, a wildly different amount of work each year. In an attempt to corral that work, The Awards 2024 had the following policy for both submitters and judges: judges were not obligated to read more than 50 pages of submissions per submitter. Submitters were also limited to 3 submissions or 50 pages of material, whichever limit was hit first. Items longer than 50 pages were allowed, but there was no guarantee the judges would ever read more than the limit. Not everyone hit the 50 page mark, but imagine if they had: at 78 submitters that would have been 3900 pages to read in three months! 1300 pages per month! Just over 43 pages per day! I'll return to this later, but it remains my biggest current challenge in redesigning The Awards.

Round 2 and Discussion

Once all Round 1 votes were in, I tallied them up and assigned a cutoff value that would leave the judges with 40-50 finalists. Out of a group of 10 judges in 2024 (we started with 12, but lost two through attrition), 4 yes votes were enough to bring a submission into contention for winning.

While tallying votes, I also brought the judges into a shared Discord server. This was where they would further discuss their thoughts on the submissions (finalists or not) and develop their ideas for what they would deem Awards-worthy. After I shared the list of finalists in the server, they then had 2 months to deliberate on finalists and decide on their votes.

Crucially, they didn't have to come to a particular consensus or all agree on 20 winners. Every judge received 20 votes to allocate as they saw fit. They could give 20 submissions one vote each, one submission 20 votes, or any distribution in between. The philosophy here was that anything that inspires a judge to put all 20 of their votes on it probably deserves to be recognized as a winner. The results of this in 2024 gave 14 clear winners and 13 borderline results that all received the same number of votes, resulting in two further rounds of voting in which each judge had a number of votes equal to the available slots left (6 for the first runoff, 4 for the second runoff) and could only give 1 vote per submission. In retrospect, perhaps I should have applied the same logic to the runoffs as I did for Round 2. You live and you learn I guess!

Winner Announcement Livestream

Once all 20 winners were determined, the last thing the judges did was participate in the winner announcement livestream. Each selected two winners that they wanted to talk about and wrote a short 2-3 minute explainer of why they deserved to win on of The Awards. Last time around, this was in November 2024, marking the end of a 5.5-month commitment on the part of each judge.

So what's potentially changing for 2026?

The workload

I was a judge for the first iteration of The Awards and had an absolute blast reading through all the submissions. I have also read through (or at least skimmed) every single submission for The Awards 2023 and 2024, even though I have no influence on the outcome.

I am a sicko in this way.

And while it's true that I'm looking for TTRPG sickos to be judges for The Awards, most people don't have jobs where they can devote a significant amount of time over the summer reading through TTRPG submissions for this random awards show they joined. So, I'm trying to develop ways to mediate the intensity of the workload on the judges.

Some possible solutions:

Further limit page count

The current page limit/required reading is 50 pages, but I could reduce it further. I'm loath to do this, though, because that starts to cut into people's ability to submit more than 1 moderately sized zine. I feel it might cause more submissions of 1 big thing than a couple of smaller things. The same goes for reducing the maximum number of submissions from a limit of 3 to 1 or 2 items. If the goal of The Awards is to recognize smaller projects, people should be able to submit multiple smaller projects.

Extend the length of Round 1

There's no intrinsic reason Round 1 has to last three months. I could give it another 2-4 weeks, but I don't think the answer to managing judge workload is to have The Awards take up more of their year. Still, it's on the table.

Cap on submissions/submitters

I could put a cap on the number of submissions/submitters The Awards 2026 will accept, which would also have the effect of setting an upper limit of pages judges would have to read. Since the end goal is to have 20 winning submissions/submitters, the cap could be 200 submissions (always having 10% of what was submitted be winners) or 100 submitters (always having 20% of the submitters be winners). This is certainly the easiest change to make, but it does then penalize people who might be interested in submitting to The Awards but don't hear about it right away.

Have judges cover subsets of submissions

There is precedent for this, as I had to do this for The Awards 2023 when we received 333 submissions. It was patently obvious no judge could realistically be expected to do that in the time allotted, so each judge received about 2/3 of the total submissions. This is another realistic possibility, but I would certainly prefer that the judges read all submissions to make sure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle that might otherwise have been a serious contender.

Judge anonymity

Judges for The Awards have always been anonymous during the process, but from The Awards 2023 onwards they have participated in the winner announcement livestream and been identified on social media. During a recent talk I had with Clayton of Explorer's Design (and my fellow judge for The Awards 2022), he floated the idea of having the judges be public faces of The Awards from the moment they were selected.

This has two main benefits: additional voices to amplify The Awards on social media, and a potential draw for people who would want their submissions judged by particular people. Clayton has particular experience with this as a judge for the Ennies, as he was able to advocate for people (not particular individuals, just broad participants in design communities) to submit their games precisely because his judge-ship was public knowledge.

I'm torn, because I like the ability for the judges to be able to do their work in relative 'quiet' without feeling like people who submitted their games are reading the tea leaves of their social media presence, and I prefer that the judges not interact prior to the end of Round 1 so that their opinions are as much their own as possible.

HOWEVER

I think I'm: a) far overestimating how much submitters to The Awards would care to scrutinize the people judging their work considering that (to the best of my knowledge) the Ennies haven't had that issue in the 20+ years they've been going; and b) not giving potential judges enough credit in them being able to protect the integrity of their own opinions if they know who the other judges are.

The verdict

Unlike in the first Design Diary, I have no firm conclusions. There are tradeoffs for all the proposed ideas, and I'll really need to dig into the underlying philosophy of The Awards in order to guide the ultimate decision-making process. Until then, I would love to hear feedback on any of the proposed ideas!