British Game Awards

In December, we’ll present six British Game Awards to RPG-related things we think deserve more recognition. The winners will (depending on what they are) have happened, been active or been published in 2008.

We’d love to hear ideas of what deserves an award. For example, you could nominate:

• An overlooked game, released in 2008.
• A games designer who was active in 2008.
• A convention that happened in 2008.
• A games forum that was active in 2008.
• Or, in fact, anything RPG-related that happened, was active or was published during the year.

You can nominate your own product, if you like, or even yourself.

Do feel free to nominate things or people from outside Britain for British Game Awards. We’re called the British Game Awards because the judges are British and we’re judging from a British perspective. However, many of the games we play are from abroad, so we won’t limit ourselves purely to British games and events.

To nominate something, send an email to submissions [at] britishgameawards [dot] com. In the subject line of the email, put the name of whatever you’re nominating. In the body of the email, tell us why you think it deserves more recognition.

Only nominate one thing per email. Don’t send more than two nominations per person.

When you nominate, tell us how we can find out more about whatever you’re nominating. For example, point us towards the webpage of the publisher. Don’t nominate things that we can’t find out more about: for example, don’t nominate a GM who we’ll never meet or a convention we can’t attend before December. We’ll do our best to find out more about anything that’s nominated.

If you are a publisher, then to ensure we see your product, you can send it to us. You can:

• Attach an electronic copy to your email.
• Send a physical copy to British Game Awards, c/o Pelgrane Press Ltd, Spectrum House, 9 Bromell’s Road, Clapham Common, London SW4 0BN, United Kingdom.
• Give a physical copy to one of the judges: Simon, Steve, Graham and Angus will all be at GenCon US in August. We will also be at all the major UK conventions.

Any physical products sent to us will be sold, for charity, at the Dragonmeet auction. Please sign it, or get the author to sign it, before you send it! It’ll fetch more money that way.

There is no formal closing date for nominations, but the sooner you nominate, the more time we have to find out about whatever you nominate.

Note that we won’t give a game an award without playing it first. We can’t guarantee to play every game that’s nominated, but we’ll have played any game that gets an award.

The judging panel are:

Angus Abranson

Angus runs Leisure Games in London and is the director of Cubicle 7 Entertainment, the publishers of the upcoming Doctor Who RPG.

Steve Dempsey

Steve Dempsey is the editor of Places to Go, People to Be, the respected gaming fanzine. He runs tabletop and LARPS at UK and American conventions and is a strong advocate of the indie gaming scene.

Simon Rogers

Simon Rogers runs Pelgrane Press, publishers of the Dying Earth RPG and the GUMSHOE system, including Trail of Cthulhu and Esoterrorists. He co-owns ProFantasy Software Ltd, creators of the industry standard Campaign Cartographer map-making software.

Graham Walmsley

Graham is the author of Play Unsafe, a book about improvisation and storytelling techniques in roleplaying games. He is a member of the Collective Endeavour, a collective of British game designers, and regularly runs LARPs at UK Conventions.