The Meeples Choice Awards for the 2022 calendar year have been announced.  The voters three favorite games from last year are:

HEAT: PEDAL TO THE MEDAL
CAT IN THE BOX: DELUXE EDITION
CHALLENGERS!

In a closely fought vote, Carnegie and Tiletum were the closest competitors to the winning games.  Rounding out the top 10 were Return to Dark Tower, Revive, Akropolis, Planet Unknown, and Dice Realms.

Heat’s appearance at the top of the list is not a surprise, as it has been the most popular of the games that debuted at the last Essen fair and broke into the Geek 100 a month and a half ago.  Challengers! is one of the three nominees for the SdJ’s Kennerspiel award and is considered the odds-on favorite to win.  Cat in the Box was originally released in Japan back in 2020, but with only a tiny number of copies, it was impossible to find.  Gamers only really became aware of it following the release of the Deluxe Edition last year.

So congratulations to designers Asger Granerud, Daniel Pedersen, Muneyuki Yokouchi, Johannes Krenner, and Markus Slawitscheck.  It’s a group that hails from all over the world–Denmark, Japan, and Austria–showing once again how international the modern gaming scene has become.  Congrats as well to the winning publishers:  Days of Wonder, Bezier Games, and 1 More Time Games.

Walking in Burano Roll & Write

• Designer: Wei-Min Ling
• Publisher: EmperorS4
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Says the publisher: “The citizens of Burano, a picturesque island in Venice, are known for their creative flair in decorating their houses, making them a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike.  Players select dice of different colors to decorate the houses with plants, curtains, chimneys… and of course, the annoying cats. This version maintains the neat scoring from the original game and adds a unique gaming experience of roll and write.  Based on the different decorations on the houses, tourists and inhabitants evaluate the players with points. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins.”

Walking in Burano is one of the many interesting small games from EmperorS4; and I was delighted to see that there is a new roll and write version of the game – though interestingly, it comes in nearly an identical sized box as the original!

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I finished designing First Monday in October in 2020 after years of working on the game.  Or I thought I was finished.  I had published the first designer diary that summer and a follow-up article about the game’s design a couple months later.  BGG News even covered the game that year.  The game just had to wait until the fantastic Shores of Tripoli and phenomenal Votes for Women were completed and delivered… but those productions were of course held up significantly due to the global pandemic.

In the meantime, I continued to play First Monday in October over and over just because I really enjoy it.  I made a game first and foremost that I would like to spend hours playing repeatedly for years.  I wasn’t really playing the game to develop changes, but just to have fun.  But then in mid-2022, I happened to play it with the brilliant Brian Mayer, designer of Freedom: The Underground Railroad, and he had a curious idea that stuck in my brain…