Recently, we announced our games of the year for 2016. Like past years, they are a collection of games that we, writers of GeekDad, have enjoyed these past 12 months. It’s a good indicator of which games we’ve enjoyed and, especially, which ones we are still playing after reviewing them (in some cases) months ago.
But it’s not a very good system.
Rather than getting one great, must-have game, you get a bunch — and your wallet hates that. It’s sort of OK, as not everyone will have the same tastes as me or one of the other GeekDads, but there’s something really simple about saying “this” is our game of the year. So we are going to make some changes in 2017.
Over the next twelve months, you’re going to see the GeekDad Approved stamp again. We first began using that back in 2009, sparingly, but it fell out of favor. When you see the new version (see above), it’s going to be applied to a board game we really like. If we’re lucky, hopefully, we’ll be able to deal out a lot of these approved stamps this year.
Sometime in November, we plan on paring down all of the approved games to a group of 10 games that we consider to be the best of the year; this will make up our nominee pool. Finally, a group of very lucky GeekDad writers will get together and play the nominees a few times, make our cases for which was best and choose the one game we all think is best.
That’s it. We hope this will be a more streamlined and understandable recognition and we especially look forward to tweaking and improving the process in the years to come.
Update: Our Game of the Year is awarded to a game that was published and became available for purchase during the eligibility period—from November to November each year. But occasionally we come across games that we think are excellent that fall outside of that category, either because they’re older games that we’re just getting to review now, or because they’re Kickstarter prototypes that aren’t actually on the market yet. In those instances, we’ll use a GeekDad Approved seal that doesn’t have the year listed on it. While they’re not eligible for Game of the Year for that calendar year, Kickstarter games may become eligible once they’re actually produced and hit the market.
