Time may destroy everything, but it also makes everything weird, too! This is a mind-bending sequel of Karolina Soltys' 2020 Golden Cobra game The Glimpse, in which a family begins to separate into alternate-reality versions of themselves after a computer update. By introducing simple, temporary online tools and a strict, long-term bond with another player, The Reach has the potential to deliver an unforgettable online experience that's also as low-key and easy-to-maintain as any of our ordinary texting friendships. We want to hear about your Tales of Two Robins!

For those of us who want an experience akin to Don Freeman's children's book Corduroy or, well, Toy Story over a hot beverage, this game promises a fun and odd afternoon. In the spirit of the best Mad Tea parties imbued with unmentionable and random existential worries, At the Doll Cafè takes Jacqueline Bryk's The Porch and makes it about doll things. And it may, indeed, be a commentary on you too, dear player. A clearly-written, well-organized game that promises a simple, effective existential crisis.

The Archive, which specifically references over thirty previous Golden Cobra games, easily amasses the most GOLDEN COBRA POWER POINTS (Cobra Commander's personal statistician calculated that it accumulated 1,136.2 Power Points). And while we can all agree that this is good news, The Archive is also an excellent game that has something really interesting to say about larp as a medium and how we approach it both intellectually and as an activity. By inviting players to explore larp through futuristic archaeological work and Dead-Sea-Scroll-like fragments of previous games to explore and piece together into something new, The Archive gives us a sense of depth and history in a way that is sure to be fun to play.

A strong premise for freeform can always be found in specific human situations, and nothing is more human than the chaos of daycare - even cryptid daycare! From the madlib character creation to the stuffy bureaucracy of the incident reports, this freeform larp is ready for any group to pick it up and go nuts. Now you, too, can create a cryptid who responds to stress by prophesying doom!

Merrilee Bufkin's complex and hilarious (and semi-autobiographical) look at the wild interpersonal dynamics among Southern Baptist women of a certain age, is a lovely example of recontextualizing and building on an earlier game (in this case, Tasha Robinson's The Regency Committee on Decorum and Punchbowl Poop Prevention). Something deeply weird has happened in the community and it's up to the ladies prayer group to sort it out, amid religious rivalry, grim rhetorical combat and, no doubt, plenty of bless-your-hearts. You'll laugh, you'll fake cry, you'll flip the snack table. Funny for sure, but also heart-felt and smart.

Laura op de Beke's game Benediction takes place over five in-game days, as a group of medieval nuns await the arrival of a holy man set to change all their lives. It's an intensely focused, well-researched, and emotionally heavy game about women given the chance to be introspective about their roles, their God, their fears and their desire.There's lyrical beauty to Benediction, which makes excellent use of ritual group prayer across the liturgical hours to both set the tone and create a sense of (sacred)space, and is driven by a series of revelatory and often disturbing announcements that occur daily at lauds. While not particularly sad on its surface, Benediction promises to be a deeply emotional experience - one that will make us cry.

Perennial Golden Cobra rascal Tim Hutchings' game Honeynet deliciously mashes together contemporary anxiety over artificial intelligence and surveillance culture with a beloved Golden Cobra winner from the past - Jeff Dieterle's game Wigilia - and the result is somehow both greater and weirder than its parts. There is a darkness to Honeynet that belies the gentle and sweet game-within-a-game at its core as well as the absurdity of its AI shards' realm of knowledge. Recontextualizing Wigilia as a horrifying exercise by amoral techno-monsters is certainly a bold choice, and it comes together like a delicious piece of opłatek.

I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of the uncanny valley, and particularly, how technology can be used to evoke uncanny sensations. Recently, I received a spammy text from my own phone number. I was struck with horror until I realized what was going on—that scammers can mask their own number with any number of their choosing. Still, it felt intimate and insidious, like an alternate version of myself had gained agency in a parallel realm, and was now imposing its will on “the real” me. “Dark Reflections” brilliantly taps into this vein of uncanny dread. Let’s face it—mirrors are scary objects to begin with, and I’ve always found them especially scary at night when, in the hazy realm between sleep and waking, I fear glimpsing reflections that are not my own. “Dark Reflections” creates a scenario in which two players, The Real and The Reflection, collaborate on the creation of a self via the “black mirror” of the device screen. The concept is wonderfully simple and opens up endless possibilities for gameplay. One variation suggested for The Reflection to be supportive, which might wind up being even creepier.

Can you encode secret messages in your knitting? Casting Off Tyranny lets us exercise our knitting skills while also saving our fictional Homeland. Drawing on some of the best aspects of recent keepsake and "lonely fun" games, Casting Off Tyranny hit us in the gut on so many levels: how to communicate with others, how to resist fascism, how to use what's at hand to achieve your goals. Let us all knit beautiful works while trying to save the things that we all share and love.

It's about time for all of us to drop everything and party, specifically, like we're in the bathroom of a Neko Case concert near midnight in September 2004. There's a Sad Girl in the bathroom. What do we do to comfort her? The spontaneous community that this game is intended to create is just delightful, and we cannot wait to embody these characters. Big bonus points for a variety of play options, including in-person, video call, and group text.

Uninvited involves a psychic investigating an in-person haunted house and letting a digital, online chorus of players help guide them through it. The game employs online game techniques to then share an experience in the physical world. Its premise assists players to use technology in accordance with how we ourselves might use it, only for secret player instructions to transform the interaction into a true horror scenario.

"The sun has risen. Face east and speak your final words before you are turned to ash." Sunrise is a short, coherent game about vampires who have used up their food supply (humans) and now wait to be burned alive by the sun. This intense game focuses on inevitable doom and makes it quite clear what players must do, while never shying away from the core existential material of the scenario. Player and character are separated, and the character will –– regardless of what happens –– undergo a change before they meet their end.

This year's ingredients are Reflection, Midnight, Guest, and Drawer. Hagmann's Calling Down involves a phone call between an eerie concierge and a player guest. This guest is now trapped in their room as of midnight, and must reflect on their own past, as well as appease the ghostly forces that now hold them in sway. We loved the way that at least 3 of the 4 ingredients are combined to create an atmospheric, suspenseful interchange.

June Tarpé Mills, Jackie Orme, Chu Hing, Matt Baker. Many women and minorities in the early American comics era have gone barely recognized, their work left to languish in attics and archives. A Wake in the Dream of the Last Drawer stages a funeral for Captain Valor, a near-forgotten hero no longer being drawn in comics. The scenario lets the players give fictional eulogies to this vanished character, which also serves as a metonym for so many other creators' characters who are now receding into the recent and distant past. The silliness and seriousness of the scenario cannot be separated from each other.

Look. I’m not too proud to admit it. I’m one of those dudes who, every year on Halloween, watches Nightmare Before Christmas, and as much of the Addams Family as he can stream, and plays Monster Mash really loud. Because. What do you want from me. It’s a graveyard smash! But while this game could have been the bait on one of those Looney Tunes box-and-stick traps designed to catch me specifically, I also think it’s just… great. The roles are clear, the rules straightforward, the conflict real enough to generate honest friction, but the stakes light enough to permit hijinx and hilarity without a great deal of bleed. These days I’m hungry for ways to hang out with friends who can’t be physically co-located for any number of reasons, and Crypt Kickers I could toss at friends who’ve never tried LARP or freeform gaming before, and know we’d have a good and memorable time. That’s a beautiful thing. Also, it would work perfectly online without a great deal of prep—as a parent, an important consideration.

One of the most detailed, powerful, and thoughtful games we've read in a long time. The Personal Testimony of the Last Kings of Heaven maps the real testimony of the leaders of the 1860s Taiping Rebellion in China onto player decision trees. How does one save one's family? How does history intervene? Brilliant, efficient, historically interesting, and ready to play.

Small-town pagans in the late 1990s converge in the chatrooms to attempt the celebration of Samhain. The game captures the utter duress that small-town white Christian American life places on those who seek alternate systems of religion and meaning. First Sabbat uses Discord to perfect, coherent effect, doubling down on its content without inhibiting player freedom or game structure.

The long arm of colonialism extends over centuries to the present, and the Brazilian larp Sobre a arte de bem governar terras e povos shows how small decisions made among an elite committee can ripple outward and cause lasting political and religious animosity, both in the core as well as the periphery. We appreciated the rhetorical power of this larp, as well as different scenes demanding different committee rules.

Kurayami Matsuri, or the Festival of Darkness, is the local tradition that Nomachi Inemuri explores in the game Kurayami Box. While it is a solo journaling game, it directly addresses pandemic conditions and allows players to integrate Shinto prayers into their rejuvenating play.

"Kurayami Matsuri" is a traditional Japanese festival held in "Fuchu City, Tokyo". In particular, it has a strong taste as a "Shinto ritual", and the practice of "not being allowed to see precious things" is a characteristic that is unique to Japan and has a high degree of regionality. It is called "Dark Festival" because "it is not allowed to see" "the sacred spirit moves from the shrine to the portable shrine and then departs", so it is "performed in the dark." In the Kurayami Box, the spirit of "self" on another world line axis is "healed" and healed while the "person" who has become a "box" takes a walk without being seen by people at night. Depart the spiritual body to the next world. Because I am doing that, I can say that I am "made" when it comes to "incorporating the traditional culture of the region."

Also, since the "Kurayami Festival" is a festival of shrines, it is one of the religious events called "Shinto". "Norito" is like a spell used in "Shinto." Also, chanting the congratulatory words with the sounds of "3," "5," and "7," is an excellent way to incorporate traditional things. In Japan, we celebrate when we are "3 years old (female and male)," "5 years old (male)," and "7 years old (female)," because these numbers are considered "auspicious numbers." In addition, the "Shimenawa" displayed in shrines and the like is written as "753 ropes," and in any case, the game actively incorporates numbers that symbolize traditional culture for Japan.

There can never be too many games about unionizing. In The Hench Union Larp, voting is asymmetrical and never really "fair." But that's also not the point. Watching fun and interesting characters take on Management, in this case their supervillain boss, is the point.

Voyagers is a two person game inspired by the Voyager satellites’ Golden Records, and fittingly the two characters are only able to communicate by asking questions via text communication and sending songs in reply to those questions. The most intriguing part of this game is that both characters are different versions of each other from parallel universes who were largely identical until a significant event took place four years ago and caused a divergence. We particularly appreciated the tight design and innovative use of technology and music. The limits placed on communication here really set the mood and grant special importance to what little you are able to say to one another.

When the clock strikes three, and the long shadows creep over your bed, you awake and turn over a tarot card to reveal another part of your fate…Will you survive a ghastly haunting, or will you become possessed? The mechanics of Awake at the Witching Hour are proof that mechanics and narrative when intertwined can produce spectacular, and in this case, horrifying, effects. In addition to its simple yet elegant mechanics, this game highlights the need for a solo game category as it proves you can have a deeply impactful experience all by yourself

The Glimpse does something remarkable. It makes us consider character and define ourselves through that which we are not but which could have been. It explores parallel universes that are defined through the presence or absence of a single traumatic event. It then smashes both realities together in a way that is truly unique to the digital medium. Having players have to reflect on their character through alternate reality is a truly original way to define character and we couldn't be more impressed.

Duels in the Tower of Eternity has a truly unique way of developing character through interspersing solo LARPs that involve strong and evocative physical activities with narrative beats the characters experience on their way to their final duel. The game is an unequivocal delight for anyone who loves Revolutionary Girl Utena, while still conveying something groundbreaking and special to those who are unfamiliar. Incorporating such vivid physical activities as a sustained part of character development throughout the game (which is played over multiple remote sessions) is truly original, and we can't wait to play.

This game about the history-making sumō wrestler Hakuhō Shō, the ancient spaceship AI who loves him, and the starship’s officers who must learn to communicate in terms of Hakuhō in order to get that AI to return to the fold evokes Jon Bois’s 17776, the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode “Darmok,” and the situation we’ve all been in (or put others in) when trying to interact with someone who’s a huge nerd about one specific thing, on their terms. Hakuhō, like all the Golden Cobra media inspirations this year, is a topic who would normally require a thorough cultural consulting process, not always possible in the contest cycle. But in light of those constraints, we particularly appreciate the game’s primer on how to approach a culture, sport, and body type about which the players may not know much, as well as the way the game integrates that possible lack of familiarity into the play process, teaching players how to learn about an unfamiliar subject with sensitivity and enthusiasm. We awarded this game “Best First Weird LARP for People Who Have Only Played D&D Before” because of its humor, ease of play, clear roles, and emphasis on lore and statistics. In addition, though these prizes are not always given out, we wish to award this game all three of the Outstanding Performance, Fighting Spirit, and Technique prizes for exceptional performance during a sumō wrestling tournament.

This is a game that is written to make you fall in love with physical mail. The Coeuriers is a beautifully evocative myth that, since time immemorial, each letter or package sent across the land is a mystical being with its own unique spirit. The game itself is a delightful journey of crafting vivid missives, receiving them, modifying them in a meaningful way, then sending them on again. This game brilliantly overcomes narrative flow and postal delay challenges by tying meaning to each individual missive rather than the interactions between them. If you’ve ever wanted to declare undying love, threaten an invasion, confess profound regret, or do almost anything else and also finally get to go all out with stationary supplies & packaging (optionally), this is your chance. A remarkably sensory shared experience for our time of isolation.

This is a great little game. Fun and tight - it's bound to get a lot of play. However, what's more remarkable is the framework the author has developed to let anyone in the community reuse the infrastructure freely available at https://storysynth.org . It's the perfect way to encourage more games playable in our remote environment, and is simple and straightforward to use. We highly recommend everyone with an idea to give storysynth a whirl and start making the next game for us to play together remotely. Thanks Randy.

I occasionally think comedy is a strange Faustian pact. Comedy just has a winning personality. We like people who make us laugh. You get a long way on that. Conversely, Comedy is something which seems to make you much less likely to do things like (relevantly) win awards. Comedy gets you so far, then stops, the applause and smiles your only reward. Part of me almost submitted to that instinct, thinking “are you really going to pick the one which just delighted you most as the winner, Gillen? You’re going to get laughed out of serious Nordic LARP circles if you ever show you face there. Well, “laughed out” is probably the wrong phrase to use, but—”

I digress.

However, then I thought that the business of delight and joy is precious, in all years, and this year especially. And, above all, always remember, that funny does not mean joking.

Which is my long way to say “I love this”.
You play 12 th century French artists, all tasked by your patron to draw an animal. Sadly, despite your talent in other areas, you absolutely cannot draw this one specific animal. Problem. You all try to draw it, occasionally writing to your peers to share your progress, asking for advice, and filling them in on the 12 th century France chat. Your peers write back with feedback. Eventually, the final work is completed… and then we skip to modern day, and all the players become art historians, presenting a short academic thesis on the work of this unknown 12 th century artist in a streaming symposium. And then all the essays and art are collected in a little book.
I am delighted.

It’s a clear smart satire of art, creativity, academia and everything. I love how the playfulness of the concept is mirrored with the formal playfulness of skipping between digital, epistolary, streaming and publishing. It’s charmingly written, and skilfully evokes the mode it hopes to be played in. It understands the difficulty for players to create art for others to see, and makes it accessible by insisting everyone – no matter how talented – must make bad art, and then makes it funnier by everyone taking your doodles of a cat with odd eyes intensely seriously.

Most of all, it’s my winner because it’s the one which I immediately wanted to play, would enrich my friends life, and bring us together, no matter how apart we were. It’s the one which I will forward to my friends and go 12 th CENTURY ARTISTS! NOW! LET’S GO! excitedly.

I also cannot draw, and feel very seen and cared for. Thanks, Liz.

This is just fantastic -- the setting is, again, total me-bait, but beyond that: the writing's first-rate; the roles are clearly defined, yet roomy enough for personalization; the special powers are brilliant; the plot is wonderful. Absolutely terrific game.

It is very hard to just pick one from among these games, which I really enjoyed reading! Are You There, God? It's the Quarterly Earnings Report takes the #1 spot from me, narrowly -- a night where I played both that & The Elect would be a super fun night for me.

They Say You Should Talk to Your Plants is a beautifully quiet game about loneliness, the passage of time, and the conversations one has with their plants. Throughout the game, each player experiences existence both as the human protagonist who is navigating the hurdles of life and as one of the protagonist’s attentive plants. We appreciated the unique role that silence plays in emphasizing the simultaneously sweet and isolating experience of talking to an audience who can’t reply in turn (for the most part!). This game is ultimately about caring for each other, whether you are a withering plant or a lonely human.

Outscored is a LAOG about a group of kids attempting to apply for university, while having to rate one another based on behavior to determine a social score (very relevant!) It integrates the clever use of computer lighting. When played in a dark room, the colors from the players’ screens reflect onto the players’ faces, providing an unsettling look into the universe. Play is sandwiched between video diary sessions (vlog-style). We’re very excited to play this game over video chat!

The Stars Recall Our Passage gives two players the chance to explore and study history through complementary views of the same mysterious objects - Constellations assembled across a dark room with flashlights. It gives a truly unique take on how to prime players' collaborative and creative output through visual and historical interpretation. We're excited to shine our flashlights around a darkened room to construct our history together.

Alexa Kirchner’s The Court of Ferns is a hilarious bureaucratic nightmare. It plays with frustration in a truly absurdist way and, as is fitting with the bureaucratic theme, uses signage as an in-game means to introduce additional players into the mix. We felt that this game was wonderfully silly and approachable for players who might be wandering by wondering what on earth they are witnessing.

"Never acknowledge the apocalypse. That would be impolite." This Is Fine is the kind of game that so very much inspires us that we invent a new category for it. In this case, a lot of y'all were designing with the end of the world in mind, so we came up with the Best Apocalyptic Game award. This game is the one that best expresses that unique feeling of simultaneously having to bow and scrape in the neoliberal corporate dystopian present and having to live with the knowledge that it's all so freakin' pointless because the world is ending. A straightforward, tight design that welcomes new players and lets players play close to home without surrendering them to the crushing terror of it all.

It's hard to not be charmed by Small Monsters, a game that boldly declares we must all end the game having consumed each other or fall pray to larger monsters. As our monsters merge, so do the players, creating more and more absurd joint creatures. It's fun while also having players have to routinely touch genuine human moments through the sharing of secrets as monsters merge. We can't wait to play, as our multi-headed creatures stomp, dance, and snort in an attempt to convince the others' to join.

Martin Tegelj's Polka Pillow Production checks off all the boxes for a topic no one writes games about - Slovenian folk dancing and Warsaw Pact era worker's co-ops, deleriously mashed together in a nostalgic game that will have you dancing and yodeling to polka music while you feverishly manufacture socialist bedroom staples. We've never seen anything quite like it, and this short, sweet game had the Committee eager to kick out the accordion jams and sew up some pillowcases for the collective.

Life Lessons takes place across six life drawing lessons, but it isn't a game about drawing. It's a game about the connection between the act of creation and the social milieu one finds oneself in. Through play our characters - and maybe our players - will open up to one another and learn more about themselves and others. Through a series of short, contemplative scenes and simple structured mechanics, Life Lessons offers a surprisingly immersive experience sure to challenge and delight.

In Fork Creek Almanac, Matt Jent and Alex Dodge offer us a beautiful and melancholy game set in a graveyard with a wide range of tombstones in it - two to twenty, to be exact. An elegant game focused on memories lost and regained, Fork Creek Almanac is elegaic and sincere without drifting into maudlin or campy territory. Fork Creek Alamanac is a game that will reward different player counts with different - but equally meaningful - experiences.

Daniel Eison and Sam Zeitlin's game Heroic Measures brilliantly positions a heavy topic - end-of-life decision-making and care - at a genre remove that allows players to approach it this intense subject with both safe detachment and seriousness of purpose. Krondar the Mighty is dying, and all the magic in the world isn't going to save him. It's time to make the hard choices and have the hard conversations about what the greatest barbarian this side of the High Forest would want as his life slowly slips away. The Committee could see this being played to help people appreciate the gravity of end-of-life decisions, and learn how to make them with clarity and compassion.

Can a nation gifted agency build a truly shared future? That's the core question asked by Andrea Morales Coto's game Torch. As a new (and, eventually, not so new) nation experiences everything from trepidation to bloodlust, players gain insight into colonialism and its often ugly aftermath. When the torch goes out, a story ends and a new one begins...

The We-Ness is a game where players take part in becoming a small colony through language. Through experimenting and restricting the "I" when speaking with one another, The We-Ness creates a singular organism with its players. This was such an interesting game on how we speak with one another shapes our culture and identity within that culture. This is a game that will challenge and thrill players as they become a part of a hive.

Hope is right there in the title. Like a non passive-aggressive The Quiet Year, One Year focuses on building, growing, and managing change without an immediate descent into bloody conflict. It does this elegantly, while still scratching that itch of player creativity while constraining the directions it might go in. The judges’ comments all remarked on this game’s genuinely hopeful gentleness.

When the artist hydra's creative visionary head, Elder Acid is lopped off by an interloping adventurer, the remaining heads have to rally the new headlings to their deadline for the famous Monster Gallery. In this game, Kitty Stoholski has created something exquisitely gripping and eminently playable. We can't wait to not only play ourselves, but tell new players about this game. The great hook and guided collaborative artmaking make us confident that new players will immediately find something to latch onto and never feel bored or lost.

Finally, a game about K-pop! Clio Yun-su Davis’ The Long Drive Back from Busan is about the relationships between bandmates in a K-pop group, as they go through the stress of dealing with fans and their manager. The game combines some of our favorite mechanisms in role-playing and even leaves behind a video artifact of the players to leave for their “fans”. It’s a game about rising to the top of an industry, while making personal sacrifices on the way, a theme that isn’t explored enough in larp. We love this!

Tightly written yet expansive, Jefferson Lee’s dystopic cold equations struck as as both chilling, realistic, and ultimately thrilling to play. Lee presents a near-future America that is not just in decline, but in collapse - and as players we are not in a position to fix anything, merely mitigate the damage as best we can. The end result will be millions dead, but that may be bitter mercy given the alternatives. An unrelentingly rough game that straddles the line between tabletop and freeform larp in a fun, challenging way, Under A Broken Flag feels like a game our national leadership might already be playing.

A game so exciting and unique we gave it its own category, previous Golden Cobra winner Jeff Dietrele’s Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller combines strange, asymmetrical gameplay with a witches brew of apocalyptic tropes and genuine human connection. We were universally enthusiastic about the game’s core affordances - distributed play, perhaps via Skype, and intimate, disembodied conversations as the world literally ends. No game made us want to stop deliberating and immediately play it more than Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller.

Living Spaces Dead Spaces takes the normal everyday motions of living people, and contrasts them with what those who have passed on will cling to and resonate with. A non-narrative, dialogue-light game that is full of motion, combining deep, contemplative character play with patterns and motion. Creating a greater whole out of the minute actions of each participant, it is a ballet of attachment and letting go. The game takes an uncommon approach to in-character experience, and also uses subtle but strong cues for player communication. When it is really humming we can see this game being a profound, physical and deeply symbolic play experience.

A game structured by the Polish Catholic tradition of "Wigilia" or Christmas eve, where this family is visited by the spirits of their departed grand parents. A thoughtful, uplifting, and community affirming game that incorporates Magical Realism into the unfolding process of grief and familial care through a magical plant. We loved the details of this cultural tradition, and the thematically appropriate use of affectionate touch--while providing tools for calibration and opting out. This is a heart-warming game that we hope will continue to be developed. Some more dimension to the characters would round out what is a very solid game.

Our selection for Funniest Game is an exuberant send up of phallocentric culture and corporate politics that takes a simple but clever joke and really commits to the bit. The clear, concise rules set players up for over the top physical comedy with almost no prep required (apart from sourcing a variety of brightly-colored balloons). Both hilarious to read and promising some very fun times in play, Big Dicks hits the mark.

A soft, thoughtful game about a last gathering of friends after graduating from high school. On a warm August evening somewhere in the South they gather around the porch and drink iced tea, watching the sun set over the trees and on the end of an era. Each has a burning question locked behind their teeth. Will it find breath before they have to move on? Slightly bitter, slightly sweet, this game has a cozy feeling about it while still being concise with its delivery. It provides the portrayal of a very atmospheric type of conversation in an organic and easily playable way--with a great story and a structure that rises to match it. We're excited to play this one right out of the box.

Star Level 10 shone with sheer joy and love. Players are ghosts who have died— but that’s okay!— because they are about to be reborn. As the ghosts wander, they gather physical pieces of stardust and use it to share positive memories with one another, blessing the recipient with that experience in their new life. So often our games are about difficulty, but Star Level 10 was so suffused with positivity, earnestness, kindness, hope, collaboration, and constructiveness, we were utterly swept up in its charm. The result is a game that manages to be profound without pain, very thoughtful, and eminently playable… for anyone who owns at least 50-100 dice. The meltingly adorable illustrations are also not to be missed.

We didn't ask for a game that could be smoothly adapted into a fun and educational romp for kids (and lighthearted adults), but that's exactly what we got! In this game players work together to create their very own species of dinosaur through entertaining exploration. When we imagine people playing Let's Be Dinosaurs it's easy to see how it could be used to illustrate lessons on ecology, the environment, animal behavior, and yes, actual dinosaurs! We're incredibly impressed by this first time designer and cannot wait to see more. (Side note, this designer is NOT related to our judge Strix Beltrán, at least as far as anyone knows, including them.)

We loved this game for its brash innovation. They're Onto Me is a single player game that explores the boundaries of pervasive play over a period of 4 convention days or 12 regular days. Conspiracy theories, parasitic alien lifeforms infiltrating our society, and the tantalizing possibility of a piece of ephemera for all to see. Grab a smart phone, follow the prompts, and if you're brave, upload the results to YouTube. If you're into shows like Lonelygirl15 or Carmilla you'll especially love this. At least one of the judges is planning to play immediately.

In 1952 London, the tearoom trade blossoms. The Countess Dillymore reminds us that we may have “forgotten that these particular queer men existed,” and perhaps we have. Countess Dillymore’s Too Much Slap on the Ecaf is an intimate larp about homosexual men hooking up in 1950s rural England. We saw this game and were immediately hooked by its solid intensity. But what sold us on it for this particular award was the tender and highly subjective portrayal of closeted queer men. Written as a letter from Dillymore to an anonymous audience, the game itself takes the induction into the social life of queerness quite seriously. Each player sets up three scenes laden with all the negotiations and emotions of men having sex with each other in the only places they can. Then the players show intimacy through their characters along negotiated physical boundaries. We see so few games these days with such an earnest, no-nonsense portrayal of the world before Stonewall and Pride.

Formal dinners are one of those social occasions in which the rules are different everywhere you go, but are somehow all the same. Eduardo Caetano has hacked the dinner party game genre into something wondrous and fraught. Francis has invited to dinner several people close to him, only they didn’t know that he’d be running so late. The game consists of that awkward period before the real party happens, when people haven’t yet decided how the evening will go and when intimate secrets are revealed. “A kind of dinner larp freeform,” This Folks At the Dining Room uses the core elements of formal dining – making toasts, hearing a certain background song play, passing food – into functional game mechanics that enhance the mood. We are excited to prepare meals with our friends, and then have them deal with some potentially romantic and luxuriant fiction as part of the main course.

Have you ever wanted to be part of a murder? Of crows, that is! In A Crow Funeral, players take on the roles of a community of crows that have discovered the body of one of their own. As they crowd around in a mournful-yet-raucous circle, the crows must determine how their friend expired. In the opening explanation of the game, Timothy Hutchings states “there is no conflict resolution mechanic.” This statement is three things: true, untrue, and sneaky. This game’s deployment of touch is both simple and entertaining, and you’ll find that conflict most definitely gets sorted out. This game is fun, light, and great to play in public spaces.

Previous Golden Cobra winner Heather Silsbee returns with a sometimes searing, sometimes thoughtful, and always playable game about women with social anxiety. Many Golden Cobra games this year address empathy directly, but Just Lunch stands out as a game that combines visceral empathy with sharp, engaging gameplay. Just Lunch is for three people, and like the title says, it’s just lunch - but “lunch” is a minefield of energy-draining triggers for the anxious. And these women are anxious. This game captured the dynamics of social anxiety in casual interaction so well that some of us winced just reading it, and its effectiveness at evoking empathy played out by teaching us new things about how social anxiety works. We particularly liked Just Lunch’s careful framing, which provides both context for players unfamiliar with social anxiety and useful tools for exploring it in safety.

In Her Inner Dead Ends, Francesco Sedda and Francesco Zani present a simultaneously languid and thrilling rumination on fandom in all its troubling complexity. We all love the fictional universe created by fictive author J. S. Hunts, of course, but when two superfans meet in real life for the first time all bets are off - because their online community has literally been erased. Anyone who has ever taken a deep dive into online community (and that includes all the judges, and probably you) will easily identify with the themes of Her Inner Dead Ends - belonging, dissolution, grudges old and new and identities that may not be as secure as they appear. The online personas that the designers have crafted are absolutely spot on. Tightly written and full of simple, elegant mechanics, Her Inner Dead Ends promises a satisfying play experience for two jaded J.S. Hunts enthusiasts.

Sara Williamson's game is a pleasure to behold. Cleanly written and expertly organized, with thoughtful incorporation of best practices, it's the whole package when it comes to game design done right. The game itself is a hilarious romp of mismatched personalities trying to find love—as organized teams! We won't spoil it for you, but this one game you don't want to miss out on playing.

Ever want to play a game that is a cross between a Charlie Kaufman film and a Virginia Woolf novel, via the muppets? Group Date may just take you there. Sara gives us a great mixer game, that looks to be as perfect an ice breaker as it is an advanced class in personal reflection and relationship analysis. All with a light hand, a sense of humor and clear rules for keeping yourself and each other comfortable and safe.

Group Date appears to have burst forth from its author's brain fully-formed. Incorporating best practices from the Nordic and American larp/freeform communities, it firmly-but-politely guides new players into the activity of emotionally-heavy role-playing. Many dating RPGs were submitted to the Golden Cobra contest, but this is the one that I'd run for both my students and my grandmother in the same session. (Actually, maybe that'd be kinda weird.)

Group Date takes a very familiar live action conceit - the dating larp - and hones it to a razor sharp edge of fun. Sara Williamson's well-written and carefully organized game is instantly accessible, easy to implement and iterate, and promises total n00bs a good time.

"Three former superheroes walk into a bar...." and the game plays itself from there. A catchy premise that anyone can jump into, with crystal clear play designed to have a payoff every time. Unheroes takes the real world and warps it into the setting for a pervasive freeform larp about power, responsibility and second chances. A tightly written game, with great awareness of player safety and accessibility.

Unheroes gives us the rich inner lives of superheroes without any of the messy power-point-allocation baggage. From the suspense beats to the time-activated powers, this game is above all cleverly paced and ready for unexpectedly public superhero play. Bravo.

Joanna Piancastelli's game of amnesiac supers, Unheroes, builds on a rich tradition of conflicted bricks and speedsters, humanizing these colorful protagonists and expertly adapting their tropes to the contest parameters. The result is a smart, assured and very playable game that will be appealing to anyone who has ever read a comic book.

Unheroes is about a world where the past has been erased, but comes creeping back anyway. Amnesiatic protagonists discover their super hero past, and the fact that as super heroes they seriously screwed up. With incredibly solid design and a captivating narrative not rooted in whether the Hulk can beat Thor, it's an inviting game that is a fine cap on the current tradition of super hero freeforms.

A meditation on memory and identity that cleverly taps into our emotions to make our experience of the world the playing field. A reflective amnesia game that foregrounds the quiet exploration of self.

Glitch Iteration immediately starts building a world before any of the characters can figure out who they are or what's going on. Actually, that's kind of the point. This is not so much a game, as a game coupled with a whole new worldview for public spaces. It does what freeform does best: transform our bodies in spaces into things of anxiety and wonder.

Glitch Iteration not just embraces the contest challenge of "must be playable in public" but transforms public space into a weird wonderland where every stranger, and every contour in the landscape, is suddenly part of your collaborative machine-ghost. It's elegant and beautiful. Underneath its sci-fi trappings it is a game about memory and loss and ethics and, possibly, regret.

Jackson Tegu's game flattened us all with its ability to so elegantly tackle the issues of identity and meaning while harnessing a public space for play. Technological, transhuman, and boggling in its layers, the game is beautiful and vivid and like nothing we've ever seen before.

A refreshing and thoughtful metaphorical freeform larp that keeps us moving forward in thinking about the potentials for role play. Throwing out assumptions left and right, like the need for plot, action by the players, people as characters, and focuses on stillness, interior play, subtle changes in position and being with the people and issues around us.

Still Life gives us the opportunity to larp as the inanimate, to live and breathe passivity for 2 hours without being bothered to make a power play or do something beyond simply communicating (and building from there). We as judges insist that this game be played.

Still Life grabbed each of the judges immediately and wouldn't let go. We kept returning to Still Life and marveling at it. While many contest entries tread familiar ground, the designers of Still Life took the weird path into rocky country (sorry). This weirdness pays off immensely in a game that is at once bonkers and full of strange pathos.

Wendy Gorman, David Hertz, and Heather Silsbee's game is instantly inspiring. It's so cunning in its vision that each judge wanted to play it almost at once. Many of the structures of play that are usually taken for granted are effortlessly tossed out the window by this game, and players are left with a broody and subtle experience. Who knew it was possible to yearn so hard for the experience of pretending to be rock! We would have said it couldn't be done, but with Still Life we have been proven wrong.