Zenobia Award Selects Finalists

The Zenobia Award, given to designers of marginalized groups to encourage their growth as designers and enrich the area of historical wargames, has selected its eight finalists.

The Eight Zneobia Finalists, without exception, have exciting, intriguing themes, and use settings uncommon in hobby board gaming.  For example in Liberation-Haiti, by Damone Stone, you can play as enslaved Afrians & Marroons fighting for abolition against the French Colonial government. Or work as gender-defying queers to meet at secret houses in Molly House by Joseph Kelly. 

From the Zenobia Awards announcement page, please follow the links and  read the details on all of these game designs if you want to know more:

From among 46 Proposals, we received 37 Prototypes. Some 30 Zenobia volunteer Judges divided these Prototype games among eight Panels to evaluate them for historical richness and fidelity (40% of score), originality of topic and mechanics (20%), and game system elegance and play experience (40%). 

The Board and Chief Judges then met to select the eight Zenobia Finalists —our top-rated games either by scores as received or modified to balance average Panel scores. Two additional games that stood out for either Historicity or Gameplay receive honorable mention here.

Finalists have the opportunity to revise prototypes by 15 September for evaluation and selection of three winners 15 October.

We invite you to also view the announcement video:

The audio-only podcast version of the announcement can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/harold-buchanan/the-zenobia-award-2021-announces-the-8-finalists-and-2-honorable-mentions