Looking back on the first ICE Awards experience, there are many thoughts I have about how we can approach it next year. Please give your own comments. Eligibility - I think the way we did it this year worked well; that is, a game is eligible if A) it is an amateur effort, ie designed by a fan as opposed to being published by Looney Labs; B) it appeared during the previous calendar year. - I believe that we can require that eligible games appear on the IcehouseGames wiki. If anyone is aware of a game that appears anywhere else (like BoardGameGeek, or individual websites), it is a simple matter to add a wiki page pointing to it. - I have mixed feelings about limiting finalists to one game per designer, but I ultimately agree with it. However, I do want to leave the culling of multiple entries as late as possible. If a designer has come out with several good designs in a year, I for one would like to know about them, and the designer deserves the recognition of having multiple games making the semi- or quarter-finals. - If a game from an earlier year has been significantly revised, I'm willing to have it be considered eligible for an award in its revised version. Nominations - Because of the short time this year, we had to go through the list ourselves. In the future we should let people nominate games they think worthy of consideration. I don't care if it's the designer or someone else who nominates a game. Perhaps we could add a wiki page for nominees from the previous year, so people can list them there. (The "New in 2009" page served that purpose this year.) - It would be good to have a better system of being aware when new games are added to the Icehouse games wiki, so we can start playing them and giving feedback once they appear. - In particular, I would very very much like the wiki to keep track of the users' emails, like the Rabbit wiki and many other wiki sites do. This would enable us to be notified by email when our pages on our watchlist change, and contact designers of games (we never did contact Robert Dudley, designer of Infiltrate and Stack Control), and probably other important things. Ryan, is it possible to add the email ability, or is that something that must be decided when the wiki software is installed and unchangeable afterword? Judging - I think it worked well to have volunteer Iceheads sift through the nominees, to come up with the semifinalists and finalists. It would be nice to have a bit more participation, though. - Having Origins in June leaves lots of time for judging. One way of handling it that occurs to me is to have the nominees added to the BGG database, and people can rate them there; this would help with the winnowing process and allow lots of people to participate easily. - I would be good to allow a longer time for the finalists to be played and evaluated; at least one month, perhaps two. Participation - Many of us would like to see these awards become an annual tradition, both to recognize and to encourage the creative efforts done with pyramid games. Given the short time involved with this year's effort, I jumped in and did much of the work. I'm glad to have done it, but for the sake of continuity we'll need to set up system with different duties spread around, so that as individuals come and go, the awards continue. So, what do you all think? Bryan