The 2021 Award

The WinnerThe FinalistsThe Ceremony

The Diana Jones Award committee is pleased to announce the winner of its 2021 award is NIBCARD Games.

NIBCARD is the multi-faceted company at the heart of the nascent Nigerian games industry. It designs and publishes its own games but also manufactures for other companies, mentors new designers, evangelizes games as a hobby, and runs Nigeria’s first games cafe and annual convention. All this is down to its founder, the tireless Kenechukwu “KC” Ogbuagu and his vision of “telling Nigerian stories through board games.”

NIBCARD is much more than a local company doing well. It’s a strong and original voice in publishing, creating a community of new makers and players across Africa and setting an example to the rest of the world of how to use games to make a difference.

Within days of the announcement of the award, CNN ran an excellent article on KC and NIBCARD Games and their tremendous accomplishments.

In the committee’s opinion, NIBCARD Games exemplifies excellence in gaming.

From a long and eclectic collection of nominees, the committee of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming selected six finalists that it believes best exemplified “excellence” in the field of gaming for its 2021 award. In addition to NIBCARD Games (the winner), they are: 

BIG BAD CON’S 2019 BABBLE ON EQUITY PROJECT AND POC PROGRAMMING

A fundraising effort to bring people of color to Big Bad Con

Launched by Orion Black, the Babble On Equity Project raised nearly $27,000 to bring 30 game designers, community leaders, players, game masters, and artists of color to Big Bad Con in 2019 by funding their travel and lodging. Combined with Big Bad Con’s other efforts, over 50 POC received financial support to attend the convention. This inspired a number of panels and events at the convention, including the POC Dinner organized by Ajit George, Whitney Beltrán, Banana Chan, and Sean Nittner—which was free for scholarship recipients—and the POC Meet & Greet mixer organized by Ajit George, Whitney Beltrán, Victoria Caña, Sean Nittner, Stephanie Nudelman, and John Stavropoulos, which provided attendees with personalized programs matching them to established industry veterans to meet, based on expressed interests. The POC Meet & Greet opened up a number of professional opportunities for the attendees and led to full-time, contract, and freelance jobs at a variety of companies including Bully Pulpit, Critical Role, Darrington Press, Evil Hat, Harebrained Schemes, Paradox Interactive, and Wizards of the Coast.

THE GAME CRAFTER

A print-on-demand manufacturing service for tabletop games

The Game Crafter provides print-on-demand capacity across a consistently expanding array of component types, operates a marketplace that allows anyone to profitably sell board and card games in quantities as small as a single copy, stocks more than 2,000 generic components, innovated a distinctive crowdfunding model, provides unique software tools, and serves an active design and gaming community. Because of the Game Crafter, today’s games are better, and brought to market faster, than ever before. This is true even of games not sold in the Game Crafter’s marketplace: a great many games printed in the traditional manner have been developed, tested, and iterated using the Game Crafter’s services. To date, more than 220,000 different titles have been created on its servers. The Diana Jones Awards recognizes the Game Crafter’s excellence in gaming this year in observance of its recent tenth anniversary of operation.

MIKE PONDSMITH

A game designer

Mike Pondsmith is a legendary designer and publisher of roleplaying games, board games, and video games. In 1985, he and his wife Lisa formed R. Talsorian Games, through which they published Mike’s tabletop roleplaying games Mekton, Teenagers From Outer Space, Cyberpunk, Castle Falkenstein, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk 3.0, and the recent Cyberpunk Red, which shows that he’s still at the height of his skills. Mike also designed the Buck Rogers XXVc roleplaying game for TSR and worked on the video games MechCommander 2, The Matrix Online, and Cyberpunk 2077, based on his original creation. 

SESSION ZERO ONLINE

An online tabletop gaming convention

Led by Rachel Teng, the Southeast Asian indie RPG scene brought their Session Zero gathering online during the pandemic on the gather.town platform as a virtual landscape of Southeast Asian and international exhibitors, panels, gaming tables, and activities, delivering to over 600 guests and staff an experience not seen in other online conventions. The exhibitor hall hosted 15 publishers, 55 game designers, 7 merchants, 17 artists, and convention staff, in 95 virtual booths. Video connections were responsive to the context of encounters among attendee avatars, delivering individual and small group conversations in the hallways, one-way video from panelists alongside two-way for conversation with friends in the auditorium, and group conversations in exhibitor stalls and at tables in the gaming room. There were hidden rooms in the landscape that attendees could hunt for that gave digital rewards like downloadable wallpapers or entry to a raffle for handmade dice or game pdfs. The whole event demonstrated extensive human-computer interaction insight, community energy, and the impressive potential of new platforms for online events. 

WINGSPAN

A board game by Elizabeth Hargrave
Published by Stonemaier Games

Wingspan is a board game by Elizabeth Hargrave that has you play bird enthusiasts trying to attract diverse birds to your wildlife refuge. However, to describe the game as a standard victory-points-generating engine builder — a game genre in which you make major investments early in the game to then self-generate points later in the game — is wildly missing the point. Wingspan is a gorgeous work of art both aesthetically and mechanically, with its different components all reinforcing central themes of nurturing, growth, and biodiversity. Even the game’s components are tools to teach you what different species of birds look like, a major credit to artists Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, and Beth Sobel. Hargrave herself has created a blockbuster hit with her first-ever published commercial board game and has used this outsider-to-insider transition to publicly advocate for more equity in a white male-dominated industry. Every person involved with Wingspan, from writer to artists to publisher, is someone to watch.

THE EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM

This year, the Diana Jones Award committee is also pleased to announce the inaugural Diana Jones Emerging Designer Program. The program seeks to highlight rising and impactful talent in the analog tabletop game industry. It takes special care to focus on communities that have historically been excluded from the larger industry conversations. This year’s winner will receive a Gen Con package that includes a free badge, hotel room, travel reimbursement, and a food stipend. The chosen designer and their work will be showcased during our annual awards event. We are excited for the opportunity to highlight creators whose breakout designs push the industry forward toward better and more inclusive storytelling while enriching gaming as a whole.

The 2021 Diana Jones Award ceremony was held in Indianapolis on Wednesday, September 15, at our annual gathering of tabletop games industry professionals, the unofficial kick-off of Gen Con, the world’s largest tabletop games convention. Due to the pandemic, a smaller but just as enthusiastic crowd of tabletop gaming professionals attended the event. Masks and vaccinations were required for guests inside the venue, although host Matt Forbeck removed his temporarily for the presentation to be able to be heard clearly.

You can enjoy the bulk of the presentation in the video below. Unfortunately, a technical issue cost 40 seconds in the middle of the presentation, but it is otherwise whole.

During the presentation, Diana Jones Award committee chair Matt Forbeck thanked the sponsors of the Diana Jones Award and the Emerging Designer Program. He also asked for a moment of silence and read the names of tabletop games industry creators who were lost since the last ceremony in 2019.

Diana Jones Emerging Designer Program coordinator Camdon Wright did not make it to Gen Con and asked Matt to read a statement about the award for him. This highlighted the program, its four finalists, and this year’s recipient.

With the help of 2020 Diana Jones Award honoree Maurice Broaddus, Matt presented the award to NIBCARD Games. At the request of NIBCARD’s founder KC, previous Diana Jones Award winner Eric Lang accepted the award on behalf of NIBCARD.

Many thanks to the key sponsors of this year’s event for their support. They are:

On top of that, we’d like to thank our other sponsors for their support: 

  • Peter Adkison
  • Anthony Gallela
  • Atlas Games
  • Bundle of Holding
  • Calliope Games
  • Erik Scott de Bie
  • Matt Forbeck
  • Gaming Paper
  • Gen Con
  • Jim Kitchen
  • OneBookShelf
  • Onyx Path
  • Pelgrane Press
  • Profantasy Software
  • Renegade Games
  • Janice Sellers
  • World of Chaldea