> 1. Who would like to help go through these games? > 2. How shall we rate them? When I originally proposed the idea, I envisioned it as an Excellence award. I think we should look at it through the lens of "if you could publish one game (and only one game), what would it be?" I suspect we will not have much trouble screening out most of the entries, because they are not yet of publishable quality. I feel strongly that this shouldn't just be "what was the best of the bunch?" If they're all crap, there should be no award. Even if they're all decent but none of them are great, there should be no award. I'm inclined to say that we should leave it open to all unpublished games, not just ones developed in the past year. That would make it harder, but not necessarily too much harder. Of all the unpublished games out there I know about, there are only a handful that I would consider to be in the neighborhood of excellent. So here's the vision: In five years, the award is well established enough that Games Magazine (or a similar publication) prints a small article about it and publishes the rules for the winner. Mainstream exposure. > 3. How many finalists shall we have? There should be 3 finalists. We are asking people to fit these games into their convention schedule, so there should be as few as possible while still giving them a reason to vote. The finals should be a simple selection. We don't want to make it complicated for people. We want to give them every reason to participate, and no excuse not to participate. If we want it to truly be about Excellence, then we should include "none of the above" in the voting options. > 4. When should the finalists be determined? Ideally, it should be a month in advance. We probably don't have time to do it that soon, so I'd say at least two weeks. We need time to prepare materials for the public portion of the process.