The Cardboard Edison Award recognizes great unpublished board games
Announcing the winners of the 2020 Cardboard Edison Award!
First Place, Online: The Transcontinental
Designer: Glen Dresser / @glendresser
The Transcontinental is a worker placement euro about the Canadian transcontinental railway. The railway is a worker placement track that expands as players deliver resources to the railhead, with developments along the side of the track, and players share the same spaces for picking up and delivering. Ally cards representing historical figures provide great comboing possibilities.
Judges' comments on The Transcontinental:
This is a great intersection of theme and mechanics and I respect and appreciate how the particulars of the Canadian railway (in history) are reflected in the mechanics to make a railway game that is very unique.
Transcontinental is a wonderfully put together worker placement game that uses an underutilized topic and integrates some clever twists on the genre, including the bilateral action resolution process - letting you strategize and time actions both outbound and inbound, engine build a gameplan by going after specific ownership spaces, and expand your score both horizontally by way of board progress and vertically by upgrading locations.
There are so many cool things going on here! The core game structure with eastbound-westbound actions is clever and thematic, and the north/south offset actions creates great opportunities for interesting turns. On that note, this game's potential for explosive turns is off the charts--there are so many opportunities to make plays that make you feel smart.
I play a lot of worker placement games, and have never seen one quite like this.
About the designer:
Glen Dresser has been designing board games since 2013 and is the winner of the Canadian Game Design Award (The Transcontinental), The Saltcon Ion Award (Palooka Precinct), and is a two-time Cardboard Edison finalist (both games). In addition to game design, he's also an avid illustrator. Prior to game design, his creative outlet was literary fiction, with his novel Correction Road coming out from Oberon Press in 2007. He lives in Alberta, Canada, with his wife, their son, and a cardigan corgi.
Runner-Up, Online: Byline
Designer: Derek Lovell / @SoulboxGames
Byline is a worker placement/planning hybrid where you play as a freelance journalist in the 1960s. You have 10 days to plan and outmanoeuvre other journalists to find the best sources, complete articles, earn reputation and improve the circulation of the newspapers. Will you end up with your byline on the front page?
First Place, In-Person: Octochef
Designer: Marcus Lehner
Octochef is a frantic, co-op, real-time, octopus, sandwich-making game! Each player embodies two tentacles of the legendary Octopus Chef, who has risen from the sea to open up his seaside sandwich shop. Players work together to complete as many sandwiches as possible before the lunch rush is over!
Judges' comments on Octochef:
This game is just a bunch of fun! I was so glad to see that this is a real-time game with real decisions! Lots of little strategies reveal themselves as you become more familiar with the game.
So fun!!!!! This game would have amazing presence at a con. Great job!
So incredibly fun! You definitely have a game here that I and all my players would buy, 100%. The sitting back-to-back variant is EPIC.
This was a great game. I will be keeping my eye on it and hope to have a copy of it on my game shelf in the near future.
About the designer:
Marcus Lehner lives in Boston, Mass., where he is a proud member of the Game Makers Guild. Marcus has been hooked on making games ever since he made his first one as a wedding gift for his sister (whose husband can be entirely blamed for introducing the family to Catan). Now he designs games to play with his family and friends that try and bring novel and exciting experiences to the kitchen table. When not making games, Marcus can be found working as an engineer, answering absurd hypothetical questions on his podcast, and laughing at his own terrible puns.
Runner-Up, In-Person: Shaking the Tree
Designer: Clarence Simpson / @StoicHamster
A grid-less path building and area control game.
Finalists: Online Track
Cake Walk
Designer: Brian Cable / @briancable
Parade around the Cake Walk, eating colorful confections. Carefully pick which cakes to eat in order to stay in the game and eat more cake than your opponents!
Dragon Insurance
Designer: Charlie McCarron / @charliemccarron
You’re a medieval insurance agent strategically insuring castles, sheep, knights–everything dragons love to burn. And the dragons are looming above, ready to descend and torch everything in their path! Dragon Insurance is a competitive word-building game, in which you create words from letters scattered throughout the board, hoping to invest in the letters that survive dragon attacks.
Happy Hong Bao!
Designer: Benjamin Moy
In Happy Hong Bao!, players fill red envelopes (hong bao) with influential dollar bill cards to end up with the most valuable envelope.
Marvelous Works
Designer: Julio E. Nazario / @Junazaru
Work to make your artisans guild the best in the kingdom. Mine resources (marbles), forge beautiful items (roll them to the forge) and sell items to knights, nobles and ultimately royalty with a great worker stacking mechanic.
Finalists: In-Person Track
Con Artist
Designers: Nick Murray & Camille Murray / @Murraculous1 & @BitewingGames
Chart your victory across a canvas of stars in this game of deceptive illustration! Con Artist is a party-style game that captures the fiddly nature of constellations and enables memorable moments, heated debates, and genuine laughs.
Poisoners' Soirée
Designers: Mark McGee & Kevin Ude / @mmark40 & @UdeGames
In Victorian Europe, women in unfortunate circumstances would, on occasion, form “poison clubs.” The intent of these societies was to devise plots to poison their husbands as an escape from an unwanted marriage, or to poison anyone who merited demise. In Poisoners’ Soirée, you are in such a club and find yourself at a high-society tea party with the opportunity to poison any number of unwanted acquaintances! But wait, there may be other poisoners here too...
Shadowtelling
Designer: Garrett Sendlewski / @orangejump
Shadowtelling is a shadow puppetry story-telling party game.
Silly Snowmen
Designer: Jennifer Fosberry / @jenfos
Players earn points by building complete snowmen on the most desirable spots in the meadow. Accessorize your complete snowmen for the winter weather to add to your score. Attack other players by removing built parts, moving snowmen, or stealing their pieces.
Cardboard Edison Best Practices 2020
The Cardboard Edison Best Practices book is back for 2020! As always, it’s jam-packed with articles, interviews, and quotes covering every step of the board game design process!
In this year’s book you'll find:
advice from past winners of the Cardboard Edison Award
how to look at your game like a publisher
simple ways of improving representation
tips for writing rules
a board game design checklist
and LOTS more!
Sponsors for the 2020 Cardboard Edison Award
Alpha Player Sponsor:
Game Master Sponsor:
Meeple Level Sponsors:
Judges for the 2020 Cardboard Edison Award
Click a photo for profile information. Check back in later for more judges!
See the results from previous years’ Cardboard Edison Award
Rules
To be eligible for the award, designs must not be publicly available through any retail, secondary or print-on-demand market, including Kickstarter, before June 2020. Designs may not be licensed to a publisher during the period of the award. Designs must be original works that do not infringe on any intellectual property. Board, card and dice games are eligible. Sorry, no RPGs or videogames.
Submissions must include a brief description of the game, a video overview, and a rules document. See the submissions page for full guidelines and submission fee information.
Submissions will be judged based on engagement, originality of theme, and originality of mechanics. Finalists will be judged based on engagement, smoothness of play, and fit for target audience.
Submissions will go through two rounds of judging. Finalists chosen for the second round of judging will need to mail us a physical prototype for final judging. Finalists will receive full feedback from the judges.
One design will be chosen as the winner, at the judges' discretion. Judges are not eligible to enter.
Designs should be complete and playtested before being submitted. Prototypes do not need to have final artwork or graphics, but they should be clear and usable.
All designs remain the intellectual property of the designers.