Cardboard Edison Award

Announcing the winners of the 2024 Cardboard Edison Award!

The Cardboard Edison Award recognizes great unpublished board games

Winner: Crowded Frontier

Crowded Frontier

Designer: Myles Wallace

The government has promised free land to anyone who can stake claim to it. You and your family have traveled west in the hopes to claim prime real estate, but this wilderness is full of similarly minded pioneers! Work together with your opponents to harvest resources more efficiently while scheming to seize control of the most valuable land plots by quickly building homesteads.

• A statement about the theme of Crowded Frontier

Judges’ comments on Crowded Frontier:

“The game ingeniously blends the placement of workers to gather resources with the strategic deployment of these resources to expand into new territories.”

“It's easy to explain and turns move fast. It's a breeze to play and yet there's plenty of strategy to consider.”

“The puzzle of placing workers both to get resources and to line you up with where you want to play houses is fantastic. Every turn when placing felt agonizing in all the right ways.”

“The resource collection system shouldn't work and I don't understand how it does. It honestly feels like you've pulled some kind of magic trick.”

“The core mechanics of the game are brilliant. I love how all the plays feed into each other. The core design is beautiful!”

About the designer:

Myles Wallace has always loved games and the power they have to bring people together to share meaningful, fun experiences. He has been designing games since 2011 and is the president of the ATX Game Designers Club, a flourishing community of passionate game designers and playtesters. He is incredibly grateful to this community and owes much of his success to their countless hours of playtesting, feedback, and friendship. Hailing from Austin, Texas, Myles works for a nonprofit doing community outreach and at home lives with his wife and cat.

1st Runner-Up: Snowy Peaks

Snowy Peaks

Designers: Yuri Morroni & Gabriel Toschi

Snowy Peaks is a cooperative card game where two players become climbers of cold mountains trying to reach their summit. Using an original take on ladder climbing, they must play cards with increasing numbers to keep climbing, but can also reset the counting by adding the values of two cards from their hands, changing routes at the cost of losing the highest card in the snow.

Judges’ comments on Snowy Peaks:

“This is a wonderful game packed with tension, subtlety, thematic storytelling, and satisfying gameplay choices. You've accomplished an extraordinary amount of game in a tiny box and lean playtime.”

“The idea of a ladder climbing game is usually simple but with the added goals and the item powers give the game a complexity that drips with the theme.”

“I wanted to keep playing this game over and over. I played it a combined total of about 10 times with three different partners, and I still felt like I needed more!”

About the designers:

2nd Runner-Up: Cart’nage

Cart'nage

Designer: Loïc Lamy

First, pick your race. Then, use dominoes to construct buildings. Then, in turn order, buildings are activated to throw or flick various tokens at opponents' buildings to try and destroy them.

Judges’ comments on Cart’nage:

“This game was so much fun... I was terrible at it, but had a great time losing!!!!”

“This game feels like the work of a mad genius! There are so many wild and crazy design decisions here, and I respect the hell out of all the insane asymmetric player powers you have come up with.”

“The variety of weapon types is a breath of fresh air in flicking-style games.”

About the designer:

Loïc Lamy is a French board game designer who moved to Norway two years ago. He had always enjoyed playing board games, and started designing board games in 2007. He has already published several games, including Deadwood, Ladies & Gentlemen, Mafia de Cuba, and the recent Eat Zem All (not yet available in English). What he likes in his designs is to make people live something, so that after the game you can tell a story about what you experienced. And his greatest pleasure as a game designer is to watch people having fun while playing his games!

Finalists

Caminito

Designer: Pedro Ometto

Caminito is a competitive Sudoku-inspired game with unique components—custom pencils that work as D6 dice—in which players will have to out-paint their opponents by coloring in walls, doors, windows, and roofs, and scoring points in many different ways.

Chroma

Designer: David Walsh

A trick-taking game where you play two cards to a trick that combine both value and suit!

Comic Book Boom!

Designer: Dan Nichols

Strike it rich as a publisher during the 1990s comics craze—but get too greedy and you’re in for a major bummer! Publish books with the hottest '90s trends (Cyborgs! Motorcycles!), dazzle collectors with over-the-top gimmicks (Foil covers! Holograms!), and spike sales with outrageous marketing stunts (Crossovers! All-new looks!).

Crime Scene Party

Designer: Leo Taylor

Turn your living room into a crime scene in this fast party game of deducing the murder of one of you!

Kells

Designer: Anne Meyer

Kells is a tile-painting game of medieval Celtic manuscript illumination.

Lily Hop

Designer: Matthew Hocker

Lily Hop is a "ribbiting" game of strategic hopping! Help frogs navigate circles of lily pads, and activate the effects of these lily pads to help your frogs capture flies and stir chaos in the pond!

N.M.R.

Designer: James Mapes

In N.M.R., naked mole rats compete to tunnel up to the surface and then bring a tasty tuber back down to their den. But if a snake discovers their tunnels, they must work together to stop it before it eats them all!

Single-Sort

Designers: Corey Andalora & Donnie Coleman

Single-Sort is a recycling-themed game where players choose real cardboard, plastic, and glass components from a central pile to cover spaces on unique puzzles in their own unique way.  How components land when they’re dumped from the recycling bin determines whether they will help or harm you in their placement.

Soothsayers

Designer: Jeff Grisenthwaite

Soothsayers is an engine-building card game in which players take on the role of powerful soothsayers seeking to harness the forces of the Tarot to shape the universe to their will.

Starlite Diner

Designers: Jay Bucciarelli & Liberty Kifer

In Starlite Diner, you’ll play as one of six robot chefs, racing in real-time to collect ingredients and complete orders. Will you cook faster than the speed of light? Or will you be stuck on dish duty your whole shift?

Tokamak

Designer: Alexander Simon Thrysøe

Researchers are attempting to build a machine to control the power of the stars, fusion energy, in a reactor. As construction progresses, the board and its opportunities change. Gather knowledge, seek funding, prospect, and advance your research to build the next part of the machine in a race to contribute the most.

Timeline for the 2024 Cardboard Edison Award

January 1: submissions open

January 31: submissions close

February: first-round judging

late February: finalists announced

April 11: finalist prototypes due

April: finalist judging

May: winners announced

Cardboard Edison Best Practices 2024

It’s here! Our annual Cardboard Edison Best Practices booklet, filled with board game design tips and resources, is back! Lots of articles and interviews covering all steps of the board game design process, including:

• advice from past winners of the award

• using feedback from unguided playtests

• tips for getting a design back on track

• the limits of pitching to publishers

• a board game design checklist

and LOTS more! Check it out!

Sponsors for the 2024 Cardboard Edison Award

Alpha Player Sponsors

Game Master Sponsor

Kingmaker Sponsors

Meeple Sponsors

Judges for the 2024 Cardboard Edison Award

Click for bios.

See the results from previous years’ Cardboard Edison Award

Rules for the 2024 Cardboard Edison Award

Submissions:

Submissions must include a brief description of the game, a video overview, and a rules document, in addition to a $20 submission fee (or Patreon code). See the submissions page for full guidelines.

Judging process:

Submissions will go through two rounds of judging.

First-round submissions will be judged based on engagement, originality of theme, and originality of mechanics. Finalists will additionally be judged based on engagement, smoothness of play, and fit for target audience.

Finalists will need to mail us a physical prototype for final in-person judging. Prototypes must be received no later than April 11.

All submissions will receive pitch feedback from the judges. Finalists will receive full playtest feedback from the judges.

One design will be chosen as the winner, at the judges' discretion. We may also name runners-up.

Restrictions:

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 2024.

Designs may not be licensed to a publisher during the period of the award. Additionally, we ask that designers refrain from holding licensing discussions with publishers about any submitted design while it is being evaluated for the award.

Designers must be 18 years or older to enter.

Cardboard Edison Award judges and sponsors are not eligible to enter.

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.

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.

FAQs

Can non-U.S. designers participate?

Yes! There are only two restrictions. First, the rulebook must be in English, and the components must be either in English or language-neutral. And second, you must be able to mail a physical copy of the prototype to the U.S. if your design is chosen as a finalist.

Can I submit more than one design?

Yes, you may submit as many designs as you want, as long as you pay the entry fee for each.

Is the award only for new designers, or can published designers participate?

The Cardboard Edison Award is open to unpublished games from both new and published designers. As long as the game isn’t publicly available for purchase or licensed to a publisher, it’s eligible.

Is my design eligible if it’s going to be on Kickstarter?

Sorry, the award is for designs that aren’t available as a final product. That includes any games that are on Kickstarter or will be before June 2024.

What if the design was released as a free print-and-play?

That’s fine, as long as it hasn’t been made available for purchase as a final product. But games that are available to purchase through print-on-demand outlets such as The Game Crafter or DriveThruCards aren’t eligible.

Why can't I discuss licensing with publishers while participating in the award?

Many of our judges are publishers, and they often express interest in designs that have been submitted. But to maintain the integrity of the judging process, we ask judges not to reach out to designers whose games are in the running. So we ask designers to politely hold off on any licensing discussions with publishers until everyone can approach the games on the same ground.

How finished does the game have to be?

There’s no hard and fast rule, but we expect that you’ll have thoroughly playtested the game and that it’s complete, or close to it, before submitting it. Complete games will naturally score better with the judges.

I submitted my game to the Cardboard Edison Award in a previous year. Can I submit it again this year?

Yes, as long as the game has undergone changes since then. We also strongly suggest making a new pitch video that represents the current version of the game.

What if my game was a previous finalist? Can I re-submit it?

Finalists from prior years may re-submit their game if the changes made in the interim are substantial enough to make it a different game.

Is it OK if I know some of the judges personally?

Yes. To head off any conflicts of interest, each submission will be reviewed by multiple judges, and we'll aim to have judges review submissions by designers they don't know.

Why do I have to make a video?

Video submissions have been used to great effect in game design contests (including ours), and we think it's the best way of letting you highlight what's interesting about your game.

What needs to be in the video?

Use the video to tell us about the game and how it plays. Give a sense of what players do in the game, and highlight what makes it unique and engaging. You don’t need to provide a full rules explanation or playthrough. And keep it brief. No more than 5 minutes. (And shorter is better.) Your video can be as simple or complex as you wish, but we won't be looking at the video's production values when we evaluate the submissions.

Do I need to be in the video?

No. If you'd rather not have your face or voice appear in it, your video can describe the game using visuals and text. One option we'd recommend looking into is Adobe Spark Video.

What if the video is more than five minutes long?

We tell judges to not feel obligated to keep watching past the five-minute mark.

What will the submission fee be used for?

The submission fee will help offset the costs of the award itself. The most significant expense will be the final judging events. Judges need to eat! Neither we nor the judges are paid for doing the award. In the interest of transparency, we would add that over the first eight years of the award, we’ve come out more or less break-even financially. We aren’t doing this for the money!

Will I get feedback even if my design isn't chosen as a finalist?

Yes! We will pass along pitch feedback from the judges that evaluate your submission.

How many finalists will be chosen?

We will select between 10 and 20 finalists in the first round of judging. We also might give some games honorable mentions.

If my game is chosen as a finalist, can I make changes before sending in the prototype?

Yes! We hope the judges’ feedback helps you refine your game in time for finalist judging. We also strongly suggest that finalists blind-test their rulebooks before finalist judging.

What do I get if I win?

We created the Cardboard Edison Award to recognize great unpublished game designs. We’ll promote the winning designs on our website and through social media. Also, the winners can use the award logo in any marketing materials for their design. In addition, all finalists will receive in-depth, detailed feedback from the judges’ panel.

What has happened to previous winners?

2016: The Blood of an Englishman, published by Renegade Game Studios. 2017: Castell, published by Renegade. 2018: Animal Kingdoms, published by Galactic Raptor Games. 2019: Umbra Via, published by Pandasaurus Games. 2020: The Transcontinental, successfully Kickstarted. 2021: Winter, published by Devir; Surf’s Up, published by The Op as The Perfect Wave; Octopus Scramble, signed by Sit Down!. 2023: Diatoms, successfully Kickstarted.

Can I get my prototype back after final judging?

Yes, we can send your prototype back to you or to a third party, if you like.

The Cardboard Edison Award is made possible by the support of our patrons on Patreon