State of Play: Charles S. Roberts Award Winners Announced (and a quick status update)

 

 

So, the winners of the Charles S. Roberts Awards for Excellence in Conflict Simulation have just been announced this morning, my time (you can catch the video presentation here). A couple of surprises (well, I was surprised), and some personal predictions came to fruition (I thought the Wargame of the Year would come down to either Carl Fung’s Valley of Tears (Multi-Man Publishing, 2023) or the eventual winner, Downfall: Conquest of the Third Reich (GMT Games, 2023).

Game of the Year. I have it, but I haven't even punched it.
I suppose now I have to write something about it.

A quick analysis of the results shows sixty games were nominated. Many of these were nominated for multiple awards; Red Strike (Vuca Simulations, 2023) and We Are Coming, Ninevah (Nuts! Publishing, 2023), each received four nominations, while Downfall, Europa Universalis: the Price of Power (Aegir Games, 2023), The British Way (GMT Games, 2023), and the two most recent Levy and Campaign series releases, Inferno (GMT Games, 2023), Plantagenet (GMT Games, 2023) each received nominations in three different categories. Another twelve contenders received nominations in two categories. Downfall and Red Strike were the big winners. Downfall won three awards in all, taking the Best WWII Game and Best Strategic-Level Game categories, as well as earning Game of the Year, while Red Strike took out a whopping four awards; it was awarded Best Operational and Best Hypothetical Game awards, while its designer, Yves Rettel, was named the winner of the Chad Jensen Memorial Breakthrough Designer Award (this category had previously been called the Charles S. Roberts Memorial Award for Best New Designer), and artist Pablo Bazerque was recognised with the Redmond A. Simonsen Memorial Award for Outstanding Presentation.*

The biggest winner, with four awards. I have to be honest - when I first heard
about this, I thought "Hmph, another Cold War gone hot: game." But from what
I've seen of it on BGG and YouTube, this one looks special. 

This year felt like a particularly strong field for the Charlies, but the selection wasn’t without some controversy. I was surprised when, after the overwhelmingly positive reception it received Mike Rinella’s solitaire game, Stalingrad: Advance to the Volga, 1942 (Revolution Games/Take Aim Designs, 2023) didn’t get some love. But the biggest surprise for me was that there were only three nominees for Best American Civil War Game, with the gong going to Grand Havoc: Perryville 1862 (Revolution Games, 2023), the latest in the Blind Swords series. It must be an artifact of different companies’ production processes. This time last year, I was looking forward to Allen Dickerson’s GBACW contribution, By Swords and Bayonets (GMT Games, ~2024) making a 2023 release. I haven’t given up hope for seeing it out this year.

1562: Beginning of a Tragedy (Serious Historical Games, 2023), the third volume
in Phillippe Hardy's Par le feu, le fer et la foi series, and nominee for Best
Gunpowder or Industrial Era Game. This is a really interesting series
with a refreshingly playable system, covering an often overlooked
historical period in tactical detail. What's not to like?

Last year I declared some big intentions about reviewing all the CSR-nominated games I owned, but with the best will in the world, I didn’t get all that far on my list. Of the 2023 nominations, I currently possess just nine (well eight, but I have a copy of Ray Weiss’s solitaire game, 1854: the Alma (Conflict Simulations LLC, 2023) on its way, along with a couple of other titles. Even before the nominations were announced, though, I already had another seventeen titles on my wish-list. I’m not buying games as voraciously as I have been the last few years, and I’m trying to spend more time with the ones I have been getting (though that’s been difficult of late). With my Second Quarter Report looming and only five of my promised twenty game reviews for the year in the can, I’ll have a busy few months ahead.

1854: the Alma. CSL had this and The World Undone: 1914 - Serbia
(the third game in the 1914 Eastern Front trilogy) nominated this year,
a first for the small publisher. Look out for a review of 1854: the Alma
in the next couple of months

***

As I wrote at the end of last month, my wife and I both experienced our second round of COVID. I didn’t bother going to the doctor after testing positive, but Jess has Multiple Sclerosis, so her GP was monitoring her state with regular blood tests. The whole story was more complicated. The COVID contraction was on the back of an earlier unrecognised viral infection (probably another new and different influenza strain), which left her (and me) weakened and open to the COVID infection. After a week and some we were both testing negative for COVID, but Jess’s latest blood test presented with another, different viral infection, not as sinister, but debilitating on the back of the other two. I was about three days behind Jess at every stage of the ride, so the couple of weeks of quiet on the blog front turned into the better part of the month, apart from a quick unboxing of Boots on the Ground (Worthington Publishing, 2010) I wrote up to note the Kickstarter campaign launch for a new, deluxe edition of the game, during a brief Indian summer of symptom alleviation (at time of posting, there's still about a week and a half left of the campaign).  

The fact is, the whole procession laid me low; I couldn’t concentrate well enough to read back-issues of Strategy and Tactics and Paper Wars, let alone get anything to the table. But I’m starting to feel better overall and hope to get back to posting two to three times a week again soon. Fingers crossed.

 

 * Note: I've edited this post to include Pablo Bazerque's Outstanding Presentation award for his work on Red Strike, which I'd missed in my initial tally of the results. Congratulations, Pablo! From what I've seen of it on other people's tables, Red Strike looks amazing.