Looking back I thought the first annual ICE Awards were a great success. I certainly would like to see us continue it again next year. The selection process seemed to work well. Volunteers screened the entries to narrow down the selection to a manageable size, then the group as a whole built a consensus as to which of the "semi-finalists" deserved to be "finalists". There wasn't any actual voting until the finals, but I thought it worked better that way than it would have any other way. If The Year of the Pyramid brings in a huge influx of people we might have to rethink things, but for now I'd say we should stick with what worked. I'm still convinced that three is the correct number of finalists. I actually only managed to play two of the three finalists before the deadline, but that was enough to cast a ballot. I'm not sure when the materials showed up in the Lab, but it could've been earlier. Looking forward What can we do to make things better next year? Presumably, if we have more time to plan, things will go more smoothly. Not that we had any major problems this year. For the pre-show evaluation, I think we would be well served to have a schedule, with more time for everyone to look at the games before we make our nominations. As I said before, I think the actual mechanics of the selection worked well, and I'd like to see us continue the same process next time. At the show, I'd like to arrange to have the materials on hand from the beginning. I don't remember seeing anything on Wednesday, when things were quiet and there might have been more opportunity for early birds to work the games into their schedules. Also, we might consider scheduling a meet-up time early in the week so that people can identify other people they might be able to play the games with. And we ought to do a better job of publicity. The thing that the ICE Awards can do that the previous awards did not do is reach out to the general public. We lose that if we do insufficient publicity. The signs were great, but that's really just a bare minimum. For example, the awards GeekList should clearly identify "ICE Awards," which was not the case this year. And we should make sure we notify any relevant media outlets we can find. We talked about contacting BoardgameNews.com, but I didn't see them publish anything. Playtesting and feedback for games One thing that I liked about the IGDC was the feedback to developers. I am hoping that we can do something to maintain that. To avoid oversaturation, I think we should only have one award a year, but that shouldn't stop us from using the rest of the year to playtest and improve the games that are being designed. The idea that's been bouncing around in my head is to transform the IGDC into an "Icehouse Game Playtesting Forum." The IGPF would be a specific time that we set aside for people to playtest and comment on new designs that are coming out. We would schedule it soon enough that the designers would have a chance to incorporate the feedback into their games before the evaluation for the ICE Awards began. The result would be higher quality award winners, because the feedback would come *before* the awards, not after. There would not be any awards for games submitted to the IGPF. In fact, the focus should be more on recognizing the playtesters who provided feedback instead of the game designers. The more people we encourage to play the games, the better the games will be. How about, "Playtester of the Year"? As I see it, the process would be fairly informal. Designers could announce their games on this list, then all we would need would be a page on icehousegames.org that coordinated the testing effort (with feedback on the relevant game pages). Designers would be free to improve their games immediately if they got compelling feedback, and they would have time after the IGPF was over to polish their games in advance of the next ICE Awards. Calendar So here's my proposed calendar for the next year: August through October - Icehouse Games Playtesting Forum November through December - Nothing scheduled over the holidays First quarter - Origins scheduling January - Designers reminded to finish updating their games February through April - Preliminary evaluation of games for ICE Awards April 30 - ICE Awards semi-finalists selected May - Evaluation of semi-finalists May 31 - ICE Awards finalists selected Early June - Publicize ICE Awards and prepare materials for Origins Late June - ICE Award presented at Origins July - Plan for the next year I've heard rumors that Origins is moving to earlier in the year, as early as 2012. If it moves to the end of May, as rumored, we have enough slack in the schedule that we should be able to just push everything back a month to the beginning of the calendar year. In any event, it won't change for 2011. - Jeff