As I mentioned in the previous Design Diary, The Awards 2026 will be picking up where we left off: in June 2024.
Despite this announcement appearing in the fourth installment of this series, it was actually one of the first decisions I made when I set out to bring back The Awards and was based on three rationale.
Rationale #1: Fighting the Hype Cycle
As someone who has made a hobby out of tracking TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns, I suspect few people are as aware of the hype cycles that this field runs on. There are nigh uncountable numbers of hugely successful, $100,000+ projects that seem to essentially disappear once their campaigns end. Not in the sense of them being scams and not delivering on the promised material, but in the sense that the hobby's collective attention just kind of moves off of them. And this makes sense given that any crowdfunding campaign is going to have a lag time between collecting the money and actually making the thing they want to make. Hell, there's even a lag time between the campaign ending and collecting the money that was pledged. So what tends to happen is that buzzy games generate a lot of hype, possibly a lot of money, and then 6-18 months later (if backers are lucky) the product actually arrives. But what's happened in the interim? Why, 20-50 equally buzzy games have shown up, gotten a lot of attention, and raised a whole bunch of money themselves. By the time your big crowdfunded game actually shows up, it's quite possible you've completely forgotten about it between other projects you've backed and the games that you're actually playing. I know that this happens to me with some frequency, at least.
So how do The Awards propose to combat this? Well, since we took 2025 off, it seems only good and right to pick up where we left off and see what great stuff was made from June 2024-May 2025. By focusing on games that have been out for nearly 1-2 years, we're hopefully getting some more mature and field-tested games, things that have been in people's hands that the judges might have even played already. We're also pushing back against the hype cycle by bringing these """""older""""" games back into the public eye when we announce the winners, hopefully giving them another boost of attention beyond what they might have received when first released.
Rationale #2: Fairness
This is a fairly minor reason, but the eligibility window for The Awards in the past has unfairly impacted any games released in May (and also April a little). I don't know how many games were released on, say, May 31, 2024, but those games would only have been eligible for The Awards 2024 and would have required their designers to already know of this whole endeavor (a tall order to be sure). By giving The Awards a year's lag time, designers get a lot more time to even hear about The Awards, let alone submit their games for consideration.
On top of this, and this ties into Rationale #1 a bit, the distance of a year also gives designers some needed perspective to figure out what games they want to submit. Recency bias is a hell of a thing, and newly released games could easily be seen as far better or far worse than they actually are. Anyone interested in submitting to The Awards can now really take a hard look at their catalog from June 2024-May 2025 and figure out how to put their best foot forward.
Rationale #3: The Bit
This comes last because it's the weakest rationale, but commitment to the bit is absolutely central to The Awards. Just look at our name, for God's sake. Now the bit here isn't specifically that we're behind the times or anything, it's that we're different from those other award shows.
Yes, we're straying hard into "not like other girls" territory (explicitly so just a sentence ago!) but it feels relevant and important here. I'm not trying to say that we're better than other award shows, but it behooves us to set ourselves apart from them. I covered this to some degree back in Design Diary #1, but I'm looking for The Awards to have a coherent and distinct identity, and having a more retrospective approach to our submissions just makes The Awards stand out from our peers and be that much more memorable.
Closing Thoughts
Now all that said, The Awards is nothing if not ever-changing. This year's experiment could prove disastrous: designers might have no desire to submit their """"""older"""""" stuff, the general TTRPG public might have no interest in what was the best of 2024-2025, the sun could collapse in on itself ~4-5 billion years early...
All things that are equally likely to happen as a result of these decisions I'm making right now!
But barring that last item in that list, The Awards can always change and adapt. It could be that The Awards 2027 will bring us back up to speed and current events! Either way, I'm excited about the retrospective focus of The Awards 2026, and I hope you all are too!
