Boydell Bats 5,000, Awards Aplenty, and The Problem of Cherry Picked Games | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In a BGG blog post titled “It’s the Stupid Economy“, Cherry Picked Games‘ creative director Alex Jerabek explains why tariffs on games produced in China — as damaging as they might be — are only one of the financial concerns that game publishers face on a regular basis.

The whole post is worth reading, but I wanted to highlight a few parts, such as Jerabek’s comment on crowdfunding: “[T]he cost to run a successful campaign nearly eclipses the cost of making a game.”

And on inflation: “Far Away‘s MSRP will remain $58 until we release a new edition. In the three years since the game’s reprint, inflation has hit the U.S. and other markets hard. All the infrastructure we need to sell games is more expensive (web services, shipping, promotional materials, convention costs, etc.) This greatly flattens the tail of your sales distribution graph.”

And on non-tariff costs that come out of nowhere: “Our first major distributor, Funagain Games, went bankrupt right as Hair of the Dog reached their warehouse (hopefully a coincidence). This forced us to ship all the product to a new partner, which cost us about $15,000 and damaged around 200 copies of Far Away and Hair of the Dog. (The alternative was destroying the games – an equally unappealing choice.) This removed any possibility of profiting from Hair of the Dog.”

And while Cherry Picked picked up US$22,176 in a Q4 2024 Gamefound campaign for Far Away: Corporate Espionage, that money “was already earmarked before the new tariffs on Chinese goods and whatever fresh hell awaits us in the freight shipping world. The next challenge is to sell the remaining games before they lose value, before people lose interest, and before some external force destroys them.”

▪️ Several indie game markets that mirror the format of Tokyo Game Market — but on a vastly smaller scale — have been set up for creators to show off their works. PAXU’s Indie Games Night Market in December 2024 might be the most prominent example, and designer Chris Wray wrote about the experience for BGG News.

Game Market West first took place in October 2024 — here’s a recap of that event — and the next one will be held on March 23, 2025 in San Jose, California. Okay, not much time for you to get there from the posting of this item, but you can follow the site for news of future shows. More than two dozen games and their creators will be hand, such as Ron Sierra‘s card game Takeover that he recently wrote about for BGG News, and Tom Lehmann will be hand to sign games and (it’s rumored) dance the watusi.

PNW Tabletop Game Market will take place at PAX West in Seattle on August 30, 2025 and will feature up to twenty designers, who are asked to bring 20-50 copies of each game. Applications from designers will be accepted via the link above through April 18, 2025.

▪️ Yet another BGG user on Reddit has “used an algorithm to remove BGG’s bias” from the game rankings, with the results naturally showing bias in other directions. In a discussion group about this post, I gave a much shortened version of my 2021 post “Choice and Bias: Why New Games Top the BGG Rankings“, writing that “Ratings reflect the raters, so if you want to combat ‘bias’ in BGG ratings, then get ‘normal’ people to rate games on BGG.” I concluded by writing: “Until UNO is #1 on BGG, all of the rankings are a lie.” This leads into our next item…

▪️ The Toy Foundation announced the winners of its TOTY (Toy of the Year) awards at the opening of NY Toy Fair 2025 in February, and the game of the year winner as voted upon by the public at large was UNO: Show ‘Em No Mercy by Nick Hayes and Mattel.

▪️ The Origins Award finalists for 2025 have been announced by The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design, with ten entries each in five board game categories: gateway, party, co-op/solo, light strategy, and heavy strategy. That’s a lot of finalists!

On top of that, seven other categories — miniatures core product, miniatures, miniatures paint/hobby accessory, constructible games (fixed), constructible games (randomized), RPG core, and RPG supplement — have ten finalists of their own, except for RPG supplement, which has only nine. In total, should you be attending the 2025 Origins Game Fair, you can contemplate 119 items for possible award reception.

▪️ In February 2025, the winners of the As d’Or — France’s “game of the year” award — were announced on the opening night of the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes, with Odin from Yohan Goh, Hope S. Hwang, Gary Kim, and Helvetiq taking home the top prize by beating Captain Flip and For the Crown. (You can read about Odin‘s creation in this designer diary.) The other winners:

• Kutná Hora: The City of Silver from Ondřej Bystroň, Petr Čáslava, Pavel Jarosch, and Czech Games Edition won the “expert” category over Daybreak and Sankoré.

• Behind from Cédric Millet and KYF Edition won the “initiate” category over Harmonies and Kronologic: Paris 1920.

• Opération Noisettes from Emilie Soleil, Jérôme Soleil, and Auzou won the “children’s” category over Mimose & Sam et le Voleur de Fruits and Spotlight.

▪️ Finally, belated congratulations to Scandaroon designer Tony Boydell on reaching five thousand posts(!) on his BGG blog, Everyone Needs a Shed, on February 24, 2025.

As the only other person with a BGG blog that has hit that number, I admire his consistency, which has involved him posting pretty much once a day since his debut on March 8, 2011. (Exactly 5,128 days have passed between that date and today, March 21, 2025.)

In addition to designing games, Boydell runs The Museum of Board Games in Newent, Gloucestershire, UK. Tons of oddball games await your viewing should you stop by…