The Meeples Choice Awards (MCA) for the 2021 calendar year have been announced. The voters’ three favorite games from last year are:
ARK NOVA
CASCADIA
THE CREW: MISSION DEEP SEA
Imperial Steam was the closest contender to the winning games. The other titles that finished in the top 10 were Golem, Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition, Boonlake, Free Ride, Hadrian’s Wall, Azul: Queen’s Garden, Imperium: Classics/Legends, and So Clover!.
As it turns out, all three of the MCA winners were also honored earlier with Golden Geek awards. Cascadia, Mission Deep Sea, and Ark Nova won Golden Geeks for, respectively, Light, Medium, and Heavy Game of the Year. Cascadia is also one of the SdJ nominees and the incredibly popular Ark Nova may well grab a bunch of other awards before it’s through. The gaming award season has just gotten started!
Ark Nova dominated the MCA voting, with half of the voters listing it as one of their three favorites from last year. It’s been a long time since a game has appealed that strongly to the voters.
Congratulations to designers Mathias Wigge, Randy Flynn, and Thomas Sing for their wins. As a group, they’re quite new to the designing biz: Wigge and Flynn won for their first published games and Sing only has a handful of other games to his credit (one of which, The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine, won a Meeples Choice Award back in 2019). Congrats as well to the winning publishers: Feuerland, Flatout Games, and Kosmos.
Thanks, Larry, for your continued efforts on this! From a selfish point of view, the Meeples Choice award reflect my tastes more than any other award or popularity contest. This means I will rarely be disappointed, either buying or playing, a game. I guess you can say that the MC awards save me time and money! :D Thanks!
Thanks, Chris. I always find the Meeple Choice award results to be interesting and well considered, which is one reason why I’ve enjoyed running them for so long. I agree, their perspective is valuable and I’m glad the group continues to support the process by taking the time to vote.
Three wonderful winners and my personal GOTY ended up in 4th!
Imperial Steam was also my personal GotY, Jeremy, and I was surprised and pleased that it did so well in the voting. I was also happy that Golem got so much support, particularly since it only recently became readily available in the States.