The Diana Jones Award announcement will be Wednesday July 30, 2025 at Gen Con. Learn about the finalists in the next tab!
From a long and eclectic collection of nominees, the committee of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming selected four finalists that it believes best exemplified “excellence” in the field of gaming for its 2025 award. They are:
CHARLIE HALL
A tireless journalist covering tabletop games.
Over his nearly 13 years at Polygon, Charlie championed TTRPGs and Board Games as on-par with video games as an art form and means of connecting people. Many journalists in the space count Charlie as part of the reason they got their start in the industry or were able to continue working in games journalism. Charlie worked tirelessly to cover how tariffs have affected companies and publishers big and small, while also greenlighting pieces about stunning new games, crowdfunding projects, and charity initiatives.
DAYBREAK
An inspirational board game about climate change.
The climate crisis is… exhausting. It feels like it can’t be stopped. But Daybreak imagines a world — one not too different from our own — that actually tries to halt it. It shows us that stopping catastrophic climate change is going to be hard, but it roots the solutions as much in the communities that will weather the change as it does in the technology needed to transition away from fossil fuels. We need inspiration if we’re going to win this fight, and Daybreak challenges us to think about what COULD be if we took on the challenge. In addition to all of the interesting thing it does as a game, it’s also impressive as a scientifically accurate board game, and uses green components on top of that.
RASCAL NEWS
An excellent tabletop news site.
This reader-supported and worker-owned tabletop journalism shop started about a year ago, founded by Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter in the wake of big magazines firing staff writers. The loss of Dicebreaker this year is a good reminder that it’s important to have independent tabletop journalism, and Rascal does excellent work.
Visit the Rascal News website.
ROSE ESTES
The author of the Endless Quest books.
Rose Estes was one of the first employees at TSR and one of the few women at the company in those early days. She wrote the first Endless Quest book on her own time as a pick-a-path introduction to D&D, and she managed to convince the company to publish it when they became desperate for new things to sell to their bookstore accounts. She shuffled the original typewritten pages around by actually throwing them into the air. The book became an instant bestseller and spawned a whole line of dozens of books. Rose went on to write loads of other books, and she currently runs the Hauser Gallery in Seal Rock, Oregon.
The 2025 Diana Jones Award ceremony will be held in Indianapolis on Wednesday, July 30th, at our annual gathering of tabletop games industry professionals, the unofficial kick-off of Gen Con, the world’s largest tabletop games convention.
Many thanks to the sponsors of this year’s event for their support. Our key ceremony sponsors are:
Our other ceremony sponsors are:
- Andrew Chesney
- Anthony Gallela
- Chip Theory Games
- The Corner of Story and Game
- Curtis Frye
- Daniel and Laura Block, in memory of Stewart Wieck
- Darrington Press
- David Hoppe
- Free League Publishing
- Gen Con
- Geoff Engelstein
- Heroic Signatures
- Hoplite Games
- Jim Kitchen
- The Kraken gaming retreat
- Lazy Wolf Studios
- Marlowe House Games
- Matt Forbeck
- Mike Webb
- Onyx Path Publishing
- Red Writes Books
- Renegade Game Studios
- Ross Thompson
- What Box Consulting
- The Yellow Hand
We’d also like to thank our board members: Matt Forbeck, Michelle Nephew, and Camdon Wright.