Honorable Mentions
Dim Sum? More Like Git Sum! is a wonderful game about family dynamics, played around a dim sum table. Its passive-aggressive insult workshop is cleverly designed to immerse the players into the shoes of a Cantonese family. While we did find that there is a little bit of preparation involved, it didn't stop us from adding it to one of our honorable mentions, for its thoughtful notes on cultural representation and interesting play.
Laurel Halbany’s The Widows’ Market does not declare itself a “game,” but rather an “interpretation.” In addition to the text itself interpreting ancient Sumerian practices documented on tablets, players are then asked to interpret the freeform procedures themselves from the sparse text provided. We found the situation evocative, feminist, and multicultural at its core. The Committee saw in this work the kind of historical imagination and creative leaps needed to make a tight, engaging game.
We found Caroline Hobbs’ The Clinic to be a timely and informative look at the reality of abortion clinics through an extremely meticulous simulation. Ordinarily, we would say a game like this requires too many materials and has massive overhead in terms of player preparation. Nevertheless, we all learned something with our encounter with this game, and the present-day situation is urgent enough that we think you, too, should maybe learn these things. This game is a great launchpad for those conversations.
Many games over the years have confronted the ugliness that is capitalist society, but few delve into the ongoing impacts of whole industries on the psyche of those performers who work in them. Who Do You Think You Are? by Kat Jones analyzes the career of the Spice Girls through the lens of painful performances and the ambiguous rewards of fame. For all those of us with nostalgia for our 1990s pop groups, the game is a sobering reminder of just how complex bubblegum pop and stardom happen to be.
David Rothfeder's It Was a Beautiful Mistake is a poignant game about a teacher looking back on their career. Each player portrays Alex Park during a different year of their life as a teacher, with the retirement-age Alex left to make meaning out of a lifetime of struggle, joy and sacrifice. The Committee is pleased to honor this game as a solid, nuanced take on an under-explored topic that we think will resonate with many.
In this game by Aleks Samoylov an under-prepared and under-resourced theater troupe must put on an excerpt of beloved classic The Life, Death and Apotheosis of Bastard Jim in order to retain the favor of their patron. Packed with exquisitely written theater-trope characters, this larp creates a play-within-a-play that can optionally be performed in front of an audience. The Life, Death and Apotheosis of Bastard Jim combines theatrical improv and larp in a way that is sure to produce interesting results.
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