Zenobia Awards finalists

The Zenobia Awards have come to the finals with 8 games going up for the highest honours. Quite a few that seem promising to me at first sight.

Have a look:
zenobiaaward.org/finalists/

As the website of the Zenobia Awards mentions:

Historical board games are enjoyed by people from all walks of life, but their designers are predominately white men. The Zenobia Award hopes to change this by encouraging game submissions by people from marginalized groups.

The Zenobia Award is not an ordinary design award. Promising applicants will receive mentorship on their designs from established industry designers, and the winners will receive help navigating the game publication process in addition to a cash prize.

The Zenobia Awards have surprisingly not been mentioned on this site very much. I think the editorial board might reconsider that silence

As a board member for Zenobia I'm thrilled with the quality of entrants we were able to attract. Organizers Volko Ruhnke and Harold Buchanan have done a fantastic job with this program.

Odd coincidence -- I had just bumped into one of these games -- Molly House -- browsing Amabel Holland's twitter feed last night (and I never look at twitter.) 10 hours later I run into it a second time. Looked to see if it's available (since it keeps knocking on my door) and don't find it anywhere. Just curious what the future of all of these titles are.

Really a wild set of themes when you see them all set beside each other like this. A refreshing change from the usual stuff you see advertised and talked about.

Ha. Those look great! I'm not at all in the market for a new game, but I really like the themes of most of those entrants. Interesting stuff.

jur wrote: The Zenobia Awards have surprisingly not been mentioned on this site very much. I think the editorial board might reconsider that silence

Good idea, I submitted a news piece.

Interview with Ruhnke of Buchanan?

or one or two of the finalists?

These all look fantastic, regardless how it places I would love to see Liberation Haiti get published. I've been waiting years for a Haitian Revolution game to get published after Jon Poniske's Black Eagles has been languishing in publication limbo.

I finished up the Revolutions podcast on the Haitian Revolution and it makes me want to play out a game based on the situation, it really has a lot of characteristics of a classic coin game in that there are many sides with very conflicting and complementary interests depending on the situation (French colonial authorities, slaves/former slaves, local white elites, colored elites, maybe British?).

Of course, that would leave someone playing either the colonial powers or local white slaving elites and that is a very difficult needle to thread and get right tonally.