Essen Spiel, the big German tradeshow for the boardgames industry, is just about to begin. A lot of awards are announced in the weeks leading up to the show as a means of celebrating the year that was before shifting focus on all the brand new games surging onto the market for the holiday season. As a result, now's an excellent time to get a sense of the many Canadian games that have been receiving special recognition over the course of 2011.
I'd like to start right here with some Canadian-specific awards. I spent last weekend at FallCon in Calgary, where the Canadian Heritage Collection is kindly recognized as an official sponsor. For the past two years, they've run the Canadian Game Design Award to recognize new, unpublished Canadian designs and ensure they get into print. A single finished copy of 2010's winning prototype, Octopus' Garden (Roberta Taylor / Valley Games), was was flown in hot of the presses for the show and was looking gorgeous. Ask your distributors about it - it's a wonderful family game and should start finding its way onto store shelves soon. As it turns out, 2011's big winner, Undermining (Matt Tolman / Z-Man Games) will be on store shelves around the same time. Newly Canadian publisher Z-Man Games signed it after the game's entry into the contest and launched the game this morning at this year's Essen. Congratulations to Matt and Roberta, Valley Games and Z-Man! Having played both games in their pre-published form, everyone's in for quite a treat with these two well-deserving designs. Interestingly, both games were also manufactured by Vancouver's Panda Games. So congratulations to them as well. Also note that the Montreal-based Ludor Prize is in the final stages and will be announcing a winner any day now.
