Tabletop gaming’s most eclectic prize, the Diana Jones Award, has unveiled the latest clutch of finalists for its annual celebration of excellence in the field of gaming.

Price Johnson, the new CEO of Gloomhaven publisher Cephalofair, is among the five finalists for this year’s award, as are miniatures game Trench Crusade and Minnesota-based game retailer Mischief Toy Store.

They are joined by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle’s board game Molly House, which explores the joy and fear experienced by gender-defying Londoners in 18th century society, and Rob Wieland, a much-loved TTRPG designer and journalist who died last October aged 47.

Price Johnson’s nomination comes less than two months after the long-time Cephalofair COO was promoted to CEO at the publisher – with Isaac Childres, the company founder and designer of its runaway successes Gloomhaven and Frosthaven, stepping back to focus exclusively on game design at the company.

Johnson has been a high-profile voice in campaigning against tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump over the last year, aiming to highlight the heavy financial burden it has placed on tabletop game publishers – many of which rely on Chinese manufacturing for their titles.

The Diana Jones nominations committee praised that work, saying Johnson’s appearance on multiple national news outlets, “consistently and clearly explained how the tariffs posed an existential danger to many companies in the adventure gaming industry”.

Mischief Toy Store in the Twin Cities was also selected for its involvement in a lawsuit against the US tariffs last year, as well as its work battling activity from anti-immigration ICE agents.

The committee said that hours after criticizing ICE in a TV interview the store was targeted with a surprise audit, but resisted turning over their employee records to DHS.

It added, “They have been printing ICE OUT posters to distribute as fast as they can and have organized a network of 3D printing hobbyists to distribute thousands of ICE whistles.

“Amid the chaos in Minnesota, they had to suspend online ordering, and their website directed folks to support local immigrant rights organizations instead. They work hard to make space at the gaming table for everyone.”

Trench Crusade, which focuses on an alternate 1914 in which humans have been battling the forces of hell for 800 years, was picked out by the committee as “a triumph of community and creativity”.

The Factory Fortress-published title was built around initial sketches and lore created by artist Mike Franchina, who later teamed up with sculptor James Sherriff and game designer Tuomas Pirinen to design the game.

Diana Jones’ nominations committee described Rob Wieland as “a relentless advocate and promoter for the entire tabletop gaming community for years”.

It said, “He served as a mentor to countless others, and he brought the industry to wider and greater awareness through his work with Forbes and other publications.

“In addition, he regularly hosted on-stage sessions of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen at conventions to raise money for charity.”

The 2026 Diana Jones Award ceremony will be held in Indianapolis on July 29 at its annual gathering of tabletop games industry professionals, marking the unofficial kick-off of Gen Con.

The award aims to celebrates “everything that’s the best about gaming”, with previous winners across the award’s 26-year run having included Blood Rage designer Eric Lang, Nigerian games industry publisher and evangelist NIBCARD, and the entire ‘actual play’ movement of people livestreaming and podcasting roleplaying games.

Last year’s award resulted in a tie between Daybreak, the climate change-themed board game designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, and Rose Estes, an early TSR employee who went on to write the Endless Quest series of choose-your-own-adventure game books.

The original Diana Jones award trophy was a clear lucite pyramid containing the burned remains of an Indiana Jones roleplaying game from the 1980s – one element of which spelled ‘Diana Jones’ after the preceding letters were burned away.

That trophy was lost in the post six years ago during the traditional handover from one winner to another, never to be recovered – but a replacement trophy has now been created by the organisation.

The Diana Jones Award also runs a separate emerging designer programme prize, which aims to help up-and-coming creators via a $6,500 prize package that includes an all-expenses trip to Gen Con.

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The Diana Jones Award committee has picked a trio of TTRPG creators as the latest winners of its emerging designer program, who will each receive a $6,500 prize package that includes an all-expenses trip to Gen Con.

Glaiza Champion, J Strautman and Kodi Gonzaga will also receive one-year memberships to trade bodies GAMA and the Tabletop Game Designers Association through the award, as well as prizes including prototyping credit at The Game Crafter, an online badge to Protospiel and a game demo spot on Gen Con TV.

The emerging designer program, now in its sixth year, seeks to amplify the voices of up-and-coming tabletop creators, with a particular focus on designers from marginalized communities.

Filipino-American designer Glaiza Champion describes themself as a ‘third-culture’ kid whose experiences span Brunei, Cambodia, the Philippines and Korea.

Champion is a game designer, writer, performer, podcaster and variety streamer, whose work is rooted in tabletop roleplaying games and storytelling – with designs to date including Beef, Missing Month and Meet Your GelCub.

Toronto-based RPG designer J Strautman, who also works under the name Yes No Goodbye, combines game design with a career as a professional musician.

Strautman has released the GM-less zine-sized RPGs Contact and Insatiable Cravings, and in 2025 co-released A Fool’s Errand through Planet Arcana Games.

Alongside their design work, Strautman tours internationally as a professional bass player, and co-hosted, and scored and edited the tarot-infused science fantasy actual play podcast Planet Arcana.

Los Angeles-based designer Kodi Gonzaga began designing games in 2018, and has since created a growing catalogue of tabletop RPGs including Extra Ordinary, Misfits & Mayhem SRD, Down the Road Through the End of the World, Voxinn: A Firebrands Hack and In This Echoing World.

Gonzaga is also a creative writer, actual play performer, Big Bad Con POC Scholar and former IGDN convention coordinator.

Other finalists in this year’s competition included Wyrmspan and Apiary designer Connie Vogelmann, Cretaceous Rails designer Ann Journey, and Elijah Djan – the co-creator of FinMaster, a game designed to help teach families about investing and enable positive discussions about money.

Also making the list of finalists this year was board game designer Gene Koo, who works to promote tabletop game designers based in the Washington DC metropolitan area.

Last year’s emerging designer program winners were High Tide designer Marceline Leiman, Ashraf Braden, Elliot Davis and Lyla McBeath Fujiwara.

Speaking to BoardGameWire after being selected last year, Leiman said the award had enabled her to attend Gen Con at a time when financial pressures and industry uncertainty would otherwise have made the trip impossible.

“Gen Con is an incredibly important convention for freelance designers to get their work noticed and signed,” Leiman said. “This amazing opportunity for underrepresented and underprivileged folks represents a great step in equalizing this dream of a creative field for all.”

The Diana Jones emerging designer award program was launched in 2021, with Jeeyon Shim picking up the inaugural award.

The emerging designer program is part of the wider Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, which was founded and first awarded in 2001.

That award is presented to the person, product, company, event, movement, concept or any other thing that has, in the opinion of its committee, best demonstrated the quality of “excellence” in the world of hobby-gaming in the previous year – and is traditionally hugely wide-ranging in its choice of candidates.

Previous winners across the award’s 22-year run have included Blood Rage designer Eric Lang, Nigerian games industry publisher and evangelist NIBCARD, and the entire ‘actual play’ movement of people livestreaming and podcasting roleplaying games.

Last year’s Excellence in Gaming award was deemed a tie between author Rose Estes and the climate action-themed board game Daybreak, designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace.

The post TTRPG trio triumph in latest Diana Jones emerging designer program, win expenses-paid trip to Gen Con first appeared on .

Astrolabe, a Persian folklore-inspired game which tasks players with hunting and binding demons using the titular instrument, has won this year’s Cardboard Edison Award celebrating unpublished board game designs.

The debut design from Iranian video game veteran Yasaman Farazan was praised by judges for its “genius” action selection system, which makes use of a physical ‘astrolabe’, calling it “thematic, toyetic, and an absolute joy to engage with”.

Farazan’s design took first place out of a record 396 entries this year – a total which has almost quadrupled since Cardboard Edison unveiled its debut award winners a decade ago.

Part of that growth has been down to the competition’s pedigree of winners that have gone on to be published by well-known studios.

They include Winter, published by Devir, Castell from Renegade Game Studios and Umbra Via from Pandasaurus Games, as well as 2023 champion Diatoms, which followed a successful Kickstarter campaign with retail publication by 25th Century Games in partnership with Ludoliminal.

Second place in this year’s competition was Limelight, a push-your-luck deckbuilder by Cameron Fleming about staging a Broadway show, while third place went to Luke Wolyncewicz’s Braggin’ Wranglers, which sees players attempting to catch wooden animal meeples using an adjustable lasso.

Hatchlings, a game by Alan Leduc in which players try to get baby sea turtles to the ocean using “unique and clever” movement queue mechanism, placed fourth.

This year’s 20 finalists also included a magnet-based vertical castle-building game and a medium-weight strategy title centred around wedding planning.

More than 80 judges took part in this year’s award process, including The Search for Planet X and Fromage designer Ben Rosset, Elysium and Next Station: London creator Matthew Dunstan and High Tide designer and Diana Jones Emerging Designer award winner Marceline Leiman.

Last year’s Cardboard Edison was won by Dot Com, an economic strategy game which uses an app to run players’ money supplies down in real time.

The game, designed by former Ravensburger game development intern Sammy Salkind, puts players in the shoes of startup founders battling to build their internet startups during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Cardboard Edison was launched in 2012 as a board game design studio and hub, which has since expanded from a well-read industry blog into a vast repository of information for board game designers.

Suzanne Zinsli created the Cardboard Edison Award a decade ago with the help of fellow Cardboard Edison founder Chris Zinsli.

All of the finalists from this year, and the pitch videos of their designs, can be viewed below this article.

Cardboard Edison finalists 2026:

Winner: Astrolabe by Yasaman Farazan
2-5 players
45-90 minutes
Players are exorcists in a Persian folklore world, using astrolabes to read the stars, hunt
demons, and bind them into artifacts. Each round, players secretly rotate their astrolabe to
choose an action, a number, and a time of day, then reveal and resolve actions in ascending
order.
Pitch video

2nd Place: Limelight by Cameron Fleming
3-6 players
45 minutes
Limelight is a push-your-luck deckbuilder about staging a Broadway show. Over three Acts,
you’ll audition talent, hire crew, and rehearse your show, trying to achieve the perfect mix of
cards on Opening Night.
Pitch video

3rd Place: Braggin’ Wranglers by Luke Wolyncewicz
2-8 players
15 minutes
Braggin’ Wranglers sees players catching animals to score points using a unique adjustable
lasso—but there’s a twist! Turn order is decided by your lasso size, which you secretly set at the
start of each round!
Pitch video

4th Place: Hatchlings by Alan Leduc
2-5 players
30 minutes
You’re a Nature Spirit with one job. Get your baby sea turtles out of their comfortable nest,
across the beach, and into the water where they belong, thus earning praise from Mother
Nature. It would be easy if it weren’t for the relentless bully Steven Seagull and the other Spirits
competing for glory.
Pitch video

Other finalists:

Black Ruth of Dogtown by Keith DeViere Donaldson
1-4 players
30 minutes
Black Ruth of Dogtown is a procedural oracle system driven by a circular mancala drafting
mechanism, where players construct a three-by-three grid to optimize set collection and
speculative scoring in service of a final narrative divination resolution.
Pitch video

Catacombes de Paris by Nicholas Henning
2-5 players
70-110 minutes
In Catacombes de Paris, players take on the solemn duty of transporting the remains of millions
through the bustling streets of 18th-century Paris to build their personal ossuary in the famed
Catacombs. This highly thematic experience combines a strategic pick-up-and-deliver system
with an engaging polyomino mini-game for building out your ossuary board.
Pitch video

Deductive Seasoning by Eric Ledger
2-5 players
20-40 minutes
Deductive Seasoning is a family-friendly deduction card game where you are a food scientist
who has concocted a dish using a secret ingredient from the Periodic Table of Flavor. You must
figure out other players’ secret ingredient through careful play and observation.
Pitch video

Goa Kranti by Andy Desa
2-4 players
60-90 minutes
A cooperative game about an overlooked chapter in history: Goa’s struggle for independence
from Portugal (1932-1961). Players embody historical freedom fighters choosing between
violent resistance and peaceful satyagraha. Core mechanisms include push-your-luck resource
gathering, deck improvement, and bag-building for a pivotal mid-game check when India gains
independence.
Pitch video

Hybrid Hijinks by Jena Keesee
3-5 players
60 minutes
A competitive game, creating hybrid creatures and utilizing variable, configurable player powers
to impress visitors and earn the most approval for shifting prowess.
Pitch vide

Ladybugs by Michael Posada
1-4 players
30 minutes
Push your luck by rolling dice that represent a colony of ladybugs flying over a field of flowers.
Your rolls determine which flowers you add to your garden, which scoring conditions you unlock,
and how many points you earn.
Pitch video

Match Patch by Jack Rosen
3-5 players
20 minutes
Match Patch is a game about the benefits of farming using companion planting methods.
Mechanically, it is a card-matching race game where players try to diversify their harvested
crops.
Pitch video

Midnight Spawn by Jayson Farrell
1-4 players
60 minutes
Midnight Spawn is a game about the mysterious and incredible deep sea. In this game you’re a
researcher in your deep-submergence vehicle, or DSV. You’ll discover strange creatures and
observe them eat or move other creatures, manipulating the shared board. You can also
upgrade your DSV with tech cards or boost your score with research cards.
Pitch video

Moonforge by Pawel Owsianka
1-4 players
90 minutes
In Moonforge, players command large space facilities capable of capturing asteroids, extracting
valuable resources (energy, metal and minerals), and upgrading their operations with new
modules and functions. Resources can be sold for currency points, while depleted asteroids
contribute material toward the creation of a new moon.
Pitch video

PiramiDuel by Guillermo Viciano
2 players
20-30 minutes
A game for two players where you will explore Ancient Egypt, fighting to claim the most
influential pyramids.
Pitch video

Possessions by Dan Nichols
2-4 players
60-90 minutes
Possessions is a competitive strategy game where you play as ghosts with one hour to finish
your unfinished business and fulfill your final wishes. As the clock ticks down, strive to get the
most value from your secret ambitions by possessing your family’s last living heirs.
Pitch video

StrongHolds by Nelson de Castro
2 players
40-60 minutes
StrongHolds is a competitive castle-building game featuring magnetic tiles that allow players to
build vertically unlike any other game. Harness your creativity and vision as a Medieval
Architect, while sabotaging your opponent by tossing and sliding siege tiles to topple their
progress.
Pitch video

The Leftovers by Larry Ted McBride
2-4 players
25 minutes
The Leftovers is a cooperative trick-taking game of community deck-building, resource
management, strategy, and story. With your party of magical foodfolk, you will work together to
complete objectives and avoid vicious food fiends as you explore the abandoned halls of the
Enchanted Ladle.
Pitch video

The Roots of All Evil by Dean Burry
2-4 players
15-20 minutes
Be the first animal cultist to summon the tree demon Blackthorn by creating ever-expanding
rings of root cards in which to place your sacred offerings.
Pitch video

The Wedding Planner by Jose Lema
2-4 players
60-90 minutes
You just got engaged! Now you have 12 months to plan the wedding of your dreams. The
Wedding Planner is a medium-weight strategy game that captures the authentic pressure of the
process: an overwhelming workload, finite resources, and the constant tension between vision
and reality.
Pitch video

Wunderkammer by Rosco Schock
2-4 players
45 minutes
Wunderkammer is a set collection style game with a unique simultaneous silent auction
acquisition mechanism. Each curiosity that you collect also has two attributes so the scoring of
your collection is scored in each dimension.
Pitch video

The post Iranian designer’s Persian folklore game about exorcising demons wins 2026 Cardboard Edison Award, which celebrates the best in unpublished designs first appeared on .

Another year has passed, and it's once more time to announce the winner of Tabletop Games Blog's highly sought-after and extremely prestigious Top Table Award of 2025. The top slot for this year will join the hall of fame alongside previous years' board games that made it to the number 1 spot on the podium. The winner of the 2025 award will be in the company of Charms, Enemy Anemone, Pax Pamir: Second Edition and others.

The post Top Table Award 2025 (Saturday Review) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

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