Overthinking it: A very brief look at the CSRs and 2024’s nominees

   

Where it all started.

Note: I wanted to get this posted about two weeks ago, but it’s taken a bit longer to recover from the lingering COVID brain-fog than it did the last couple of times. As is is, I'm kind of glad it's taken this long because I was able to include some late-breaking news. Advance apologies for any incoherence in the in the current post. I have a several thoughts about the Charlies generally and a couple of specific issues, and I hope I can relate at least some of them in in a sensible manner. I haven't covered everything here, so if there's some interest I might revisit the general subject of the awards in the future.

At time of posting, you may be out of time to cast a vote in the Charles S. Roberts Awards for 2024. I’ve talked in a previous post about what I think the value is of having a system of awards like this, and the Charlies in particular. Several broader awards systems, such as the Golden Geek Awards managed by BoardGameGeek.com, have a wargame category, and some of the European conventions give out a Game of the Year award, and I believe there is still a Wargame category in the Origins awards. But the CRSR Awards are the only broad set of awards for board wargaming that I've come across (if you know of any others, please let me know).

First of all, I’d like to say congratulations to all the designers, developers, artists, and publishers whose games have been nominated for an award, some for multiple awards. The selection panel is made up of a mix of designers and players, so it's broadly a peer recognition process. 

CSRs by the numbers

If you’re a reader of A Fast Game, you should already know I’m a bit of a data wonk. I did a little basic number crunching around the game nominations because I can’t help but. I don’t think anything in the results will shock or surprise the worldly reader, but I think it’s nonetheless worth considering.

The first Charles S. Roberts Awards were given out in 1975 (for 1974 releases). That year the two awards for Best Professional Game and Best Amateur game went to John Prados for Rise and Decline of the Third Reich (Avalon Hill, 1974) and Tom Eller for Manassas (Historical Simulations Ltd, 1974) respectively.

Over the years, there have been changes to the CSR Awards categories in response to the development of the hobby and the changing nature of game production. In 2012 – the last year before a hiatus of six years – there were fourteen categories awarded. With the resumption of the awards, category creep set in – no format preference let behind – with 2019 offering twenty-seven categories, and 2020, that number increasing to thirty, including matching period categories for computer games, and others for Postcard Games, Print and Play Games, as well as separate awards for Best Original Cover Art and Best Game Components, and while maintaining the separate categories for best Professional and Best Amateur Wargame Magazines.

In the last few years, the unruly spread of categories has been arrested, and under a revised charter, a new refined set of categories has refocussed the CSR Awards on their original goal, celebration and recognition of excellence in tabletop board wargames. The categories are now split over three category sets, (broadly historical) Period, Mode (which is a catch-all for categories that wouldn’t sensibly fit into the Period group), and Capstone. The Capstone Awards recognise various individuals in particular roles in game design, as well as the Game of the Year.

In this analysis I’m only considering the categories that identify individual games. These are all eight of the Period categories, seven of the eight Mode categories (leaving out Magazine of the Year, but I’ll probably come back to this one later), and three of the Capstone Awards; the Redmond A. Simonsen Memorial Award for Outstanding Presentation, the Chad Jensen Memorial Breakthrough Designer Award, and the Charles S. Roberts Game of the Year. I’m not going to go too deep into the qualities of the individual games here (though I will likely get around to reviewing some of them eventually). This will just be a pretty basic presentation of data, focussing mostly on the publishers, and some thoughts on what we can draw from the information.

Our favourite past times

Before we dive into the business side of the games, a quick look at the breakdown of the periods the nominated games fall into, as defined by the award categories. There aren't any surprises here. In fact, I was a little surprised by how closely the proportions of games nominated seemed to match the general proportions of game preferences from informal surveys on Facebook and elsewhere.

As you might expect, World War II males up the lion's share of individual titles at 23% (and over a quarter of the nominations). The next highest being World War I, which, to be honest, was a little surprising, given  received knowledge that WWI games are unpopular. As usual, the American Civil War gets a strong showing. Worthington alone has two games dealing with the Battle of Gettysburg - Gettysburg 1863 (Worthington Publishing, 2024) and Gettysburg: a Time for Heroes nominated in the same year.

To be honest, I'm a little shocked by the low showing for Napoleonic games; 8% translates to just five games, although I, Napoleon helps bring the nomination rate up to a more respectable level. Gunpowder is my go-to period of late, mostly nineteenth century battles. The nominative period seems to have a strong showing, until you take into account that it covers a period from roughly 1450 to 1910, with just the Napoleonic and American Civil War games removed. Still 11% isn't to be sneezed at.

At 11% (seven games nominated), the Modern period makes a respectable showing. This includes two Vietnam games, Purple Haze (PHALANX, 2024), and Rifles in the 'Nam (Tiny Battle Publishing, 2024), as well as counterfactual games like The Enemy is at the Gates: the Battle for Berlin (Compass Games, 2024). The "Other" section of the chart is a catch-all for the SF&F games like Burning Banners (Compass Games, 2024) and Undaunted 2200: Callisto (Osprey Games, 2024), which I have to admit, is a very fun game.

Overall recognition

In all, sixty-two different games received one or more CSR nominations. That’s sixty-one titles that were released over the twelve months of 2024 (I know there’s a discrepancy there, I’ll come back to that later as well). Five dozen (mostly) new games is a good start. If you played a new one each week, you’d be busy for nearly fourteen months straight. I don’t know anyone who would be going out and grabbing all sixty-two of these games (with the possible exception of Meandering Mike), but think it bodes well for the hobby that there is such a representative spread across the games. 

I’m not privy to the selection methods used by the Nominating Committee, but I’d wager that for each category there would have been some hard choices over what didn’t get a place at the table, so to speak. Some categories would be, by their nature, a little more thinly represented, while others – say World War II, or Tactical – would offer an embarrassment of riches to plough though in any given year.

Among the game-specific categories, those sixty-two nominated games shared ninety individual nominations between them, but the spread wasn’t quite even. Twenty titles garnered nominations in two or more categories. Ted Raicer’s I, Napoleon (GMT Games, 2024) received the most love from the Nominating Committee with four nominations. 

Titles gaining more than one nomination. 

  

Six games received nominations in three categories, while the remaining thirteen more received two category nominations each. This is partly a product of the nature of the categories. I, Napoleon has been a nearly universally lauded game that is a natural fit for both the Best Napoleonic Game (the clue is in the name) and Best Solitaire or Cooperative Game categories, and the Nominating Committee saw fit to include it in the running for the Redmond Simonsen Memorial Award for Best Presentation (there’s no denying the whole tableau looks striking on the table), and Game of the Year. There’s no denying it’s been a very popular game – GMT has already posted a second printing on their P500 list, as well as an expansion. And any public vote award, at least in part, is a popularity contest.

So, this year, 32.5% of the nominated titles received 53.3% of the nominations. This isn’t unusual.  There is always a game or two that stands out as being special for whatever reason. I think this has less to do with hype than that some games broader just come along at the right time to garner a broader appeal for whatever reason. I don’t think there are any conspiratorial elements at work, no backroom shenanigans. I’d suggest the current arrangement of award categories has helped to smooth out the worst of the spikes in nominations for single games.

   

Publishers

Thirty-two different publishers had games nominated across the title categories. Of these, the usual suspects stood out. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that GMT Games gained the highest number of nominations and the highest number of nominated titles with twelve. Next was Compass Games with six titlea receiving nominations. I haven’t done any kind of analysis on number of releases, but my back-of-the-envelope estimare would put these two companies being responsible for around 35% of the total wargame title releases among US-based companies in a given year. 

The third highest count by titles nominated was Worthington Publishing. Again, this doesn’t surprise me; for a small publisher (essentially Grant and Mike Wiley and Sean Cooke doing the lion's share of the work), Worthington has maintained an impressive output of generally well-received games.

Publishers by number of titles nominated.

 

Just happy to be nominated

The remaining forty-two received a single nomination each. I don’t think this is a first-time nomination for any of these publishers. I may be wrong about that; I haven’t checked back, but I’m pretty sure Thin Red Line, White Dog Games, Europa Simulazioni and Three Crowns Games have all had games nominated in previous years, and Conflict Simulations Ltd received nominations for two games in last year’s CSRs. It may be a first for CMON (some of us remember them as, Cool Mini or Not) with their nomination for Dune: War on Arrakis (CMON, 2024), but they sit more comfortably in the family game space and may not even be aware of their nomination.

Another point of interest is the growing representation of non-North American publishers. A little over 40% of publishers represented are European, and four of the titles receiving multiple nominations came from European publishers. Companies like Vuca Simulations (Germany), Phalanx (Poland) and Sound of Drums (Switzerland) have been setting a high bar for production quality in recent years, while smaller publishers like Three Crowns Games (Sweden) and Europa Simulazioni (Italy) with a proven track record of quality titles are now getting some visibility outside the Continent. European publishers have been showing up among the nominations for the last several years, but this is a convincing turn-out for 2024.

Um, about that…

An anonymous comment* on a previous post I made about the awards alerted me to the fact that one of the nominees for the Best World War One Game category being ineligible due to is not having been released. The game in question, Italian publisher Aleph Game Studio’s Aces High (Aleph Game Studio, ~2025), was slated for release in 2024 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. I’m not privy to just how games are selected for consideration, but in this case, prototype copies had been circulated and there was apparently a lot of people playing the game at conventions and such. The BGG page for Aces High lists it as a 2024 release, which had been the publisher’s intention. But in mid-May (about a fortnight ago), an update on the Kickstarter campaign page mentioned (somewhat predictable) delays in the manufacturing process, and projected a delivery for later this year. So, where does that leave the nomination.

I put the question to Gary Mengle (YouTube’s Ardwulf) at the end of his Counter Clipping show last week. Gary is a public face of the CSR Awards, and usually makes the broad announcements on the official Facebook page. He said that a mistake had been made adding Aces High to the list for consideration, and that a statement would be forthcoming from the Charles S. Roberts Award Board of Governors as soon as a meeting could be convened to discuss the matter.

In this instance, a mistake was made. So far as I’m aware, this is the first time this has happened in the history of the CSRs, but don’t quote me on that. So, it stands to reason that there is no established protocol for deal with a situation like this.

There are a lot of people involved in the CSR Awards, but they’re all volunteers with jobs and other responsibilities. While unfortunate, I don’t think this casts a shadow over the Charlies. And knowing some of the folks involved, I’m sure steps will be taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

UPDATE: Overnight Mr Mengle has posted regarding the situation on the CSR FB group. The board has taken the position that, as the game was not released in the 2024 calendar year, it cold not be considered for the category award, and has been removed from the selection. Aces High will still be eligible for nomination next year for the 2025 awards, assuming it does get a release before December 31.

Omissions and oversights

It’s the nature of awards that for every nominee, somebody can point another two or three titles that merited a spot on the list but was overlooked. Not everything can make the cut, but I can’t adequately express my disappointment that Danny Parker’s The Last Gamble: The Ardennes Offensive, December 1944 (Compass Games, 2024) didn’t make the cut for Best New Edition of a Previously Published Game. I don’t own the game (again, it’s on my to-nab list), but I haven’t seen the wargame commentariat of such a unified view of the qualities of a single game, well ever. Mr Parker is both a wargame designer of note, and a scholar of this particular chapter of World War II, with a half-dozen monographs and edited essay collections to his name. The Last Gamble will likely be the last word on the Battle of the Bulge for twenty years; it deserved a nod.

I also think it’s unfortunate that Paper Wars (Compass Games) once again didn’t make the short list for Best Wargaming Magazine. The last time Paper Wars was nominated was the 2020 CSRs. I don’t think there is any particular prejudice against Compass, but the couple of Paper Wars magazines I’ve read have been worth the time, the games are solid, and the magazine’s scope is broader than an in-house organ like Strategy & Tactics (Decision Games) (and that’s not to say I have a problem with S&T or World at War – these are my most regular magazine reads). I think every title on the list of nominees deserves a spot, but I also think it’s time to let Paper Wars back in from the cold.

One last thing I’ll mention in closing. One wargame designer of my Facebook acquaintance wasn’t aware of the nominations he’d received until nearly half-way through the voting month, when I wished him a happy birthday and congratulated him his recognition. Mr Mengle made an announcement on the first of May on the Charles S. Roberts Awards Facebook group – and probably elsewhere – and it was reposted in a couple of relevant groups that I saw at least, but as I write (March 30), there still hasn’t been a new post on the CSR Awards website (actually nothing since the announcement of the 2023 award winners last June).

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I've barely scratched the surface here. There are a lot of other games I would have liked to see get some recognition – John Poniske's Flanks of Gettysburg (Compass Games, 2024) is just one that springs to mind – but everything is nominated, it diminishes the value of a nomination. 

Again, apologies for the rambling, diverging trail of thoughts presented here. I maybe should have called it Meditations on a Theme. If you've read this far, I hope you've got something out of it.

I'm still a big believer in importance of awards like the Charlies. I think it's essential to celebrate fine work with recognition. As marginal a hobby as wargaming is, it's further fragmented by historical and stylistic preferences, physical isolation, and the same time constraints that affect other aspects of our lives and well-being. If they counted for nothing else, the Charles S. Roberts Awards provide an anchor, a centre of gravity for us to come together around and know we're all a part of a like-minded community. I for one could use a little more sense of community.

 

* Nearly all the comments I receive are anonymous. If you’d prefer to stay anonymous, that’s cool. But if you’d like to hear back from me, leave a name or somewhere I can reach you. I’m always happy engage. I’m on FB under my own name, and I think my email address should come up now in the bio-notes (to-right corner of the page).