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The results are in! We’ve printed, played, analyzed, and discussed all 12 of our finalists and one thing’s for sure: we had a lot to talk about! In our finalist announcement we touted the sheer variety of games on hand. That variety made for excellent and lively debate among the judges, with no one game standing out as the clear consensus winner. Unfortunately we had to make some very tough cuts to get down to our Top 3.
So without further ado, here they are!
RUNNERS UP
Bad Robots by Marceline Leiman
This draft-and-upgrade game about robots making pizza poorly wowed the judges with its smooth gameplay and clever drafting loop. Robots are drafted to a player’s tableau, harvested for resources to upgrade other robots, and then returned to the draft row. This maximizes the impact of each card in play by giving it several cycles. In a slick twist, robots which have been upgraded maintain that upgrade when they get sent back to the row, creating a natural “leveling up” that lets the game build steadily to its finish. Bad Robots is a fantastic game that rewards both strategic and tactical play without using up all your processing power.
The Daily Weather by Ian Tarter
The Daily Weather achieves something we didn’t expect to see in this challenge: a game we want to play all day, every day! Each day’s unique setup creates a brand-new puzzle to solve by overlapping cards following strict constraints. With only 5 cards to use in finding a solution, those puzzles can be devilishly difficult! But it’s the additional scoring and the ever-changing setups that make this game so moreish. A game that promises a big hook needs to deliver on it, and The Daily Weather manages to do that extremely well.
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AND THE WINNER IS......
Everything Machine by Connor Wielgosz
Everything Machine hit on every cylinder for our judges: simple rules, deep emergent gameplay, a light but fun theme, and a smart way of using the 9-card limitation… What more could we ask for? This accessible party game tasks players with running lines of code, using the creative answers to narrow down which descriptive words are in each line of the grid. That simple premise allows players to run wild with their clues and kept our judges coming back over and over to figure out whether cacti are edible or inedible, what separates an old refrigerator from a new one, and a thousand other questions that might help us deduce the right words. It’s a game that lives above the cards, a deeply human game about an annoyingly obtuse machine, and we simply couldn’t get enough of it.
Congratulations to everyone who entered our challenge, and especially to our Top 3! It’s been fantastic to judge all of these entries, so we’re already looking forward to our next challenge….
If you want to stay up to date on the latest challenges, join our amazing community at the Button Shy Games Discord: https://discord.gg/GBuNQ4SGFp
