Six nominees for the 2017 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming have been announced — two board games, a card game, a role-playing game, a LARP, and a convention.

The winner will be named August 16, the day before the start of Gen Con, in Indianapolis.

The 2017 nominees are:

The Beast A card game by Aleksandra Sontowska and Kamil W?grzynowicz , published by Naked Female Giant

The Beast is an unsettling, erotic journaling game for one player. Each day for twenty-one days you turn up a card with a prompt on it and write a response in your journal. The game takes you deep into imagining a disturbing, secret sexual relationship you have with a beast. If there’s one thing you don’t see much of in hobby games it’s meaningful interior narratives, but The Beast‘s weird, unique brew of dark transgressions, playing as a fictional version of yourself, and journaling the results somehow surfaces real untold truths in us about how the world works, and how relationships work, and what’s important in life. The Beast is memorable, transgressive, and procedurally and thematically unlike anything else you may have played.

End of the Line A LARP by Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson and Martin Elricsson

End of the Line is the most interesting thing to happen in Vampire for a long while. It combines two decades long traditions of LARP, American Masquerade and Nordic style LARPing. This cross-pollination proved rejuvenating for the twenty-five-year-old system and mythos bringing it back to its roots of personal horror (everyone is prey in the World of Darkness) and simplifying and intensifying the interaction codes (new safety and calibration rules). Together these created visceral play experienced on both sides of the Atlantic, in Helsinki, New Orleans, and Berlin.

Gen Con A games convention

Gen Con is a fifty-year-old game convention originally organized in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, by Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax. Now accurately billed as ‘The Best Four Days in Gaming’, under the stewardship of Adrian Swartout Gen Con has become the key annual gathering for the entire worldwide tabletop gaming hobby. Not simply long-lived and highly regarded, Gen Con’s greatest impact lies in showcasing, year after year, the amazing diversity of gaming’s events, people, commerce, and camaraderie.

Gloomhaven A board game by Isaac Chidress, published by Cephalofair Games

In the dark world of Gloomhaven, players take on the roles of adventurers — each with their own unique skill set — to take on a sprawling adventure that sends you all over the expansive world. The game features a legacy-style, persistent adventure that spans nearly one hundred scenarios in which adventurers gain experience to unlock new abilities and eventually retire to be replaced by one of the game’s sixteen other characters. The fresh game mechanism of choosing two character powers per turn makes for tough choices when handling each challenge. Gloomhaven encompasses designer Isaac Childress’s lifelong dream of a ‘monster’ game in a huge box, with crowdfunding having made this game a reality and the success of the first printing drawing in tens of thousands of new supporters who also want to explore this unique and groundbreaking creation.

The Romance Trilogy Role-playing games by Emily Care Boss, published by Black & Green Games

Though a staple element of the stories we base our narratives on, romantic interaction was neglected in roleplaying practice–until Emily Care Boss trained her sights on this longstanding gap. Starting in 2005, her indie-format games Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon and Under the Skin earned acclaim, built a dedicated play community and blazed a trail for other designers. 2016’s publication of the gorgeous, much expanded valedictory collection, The Romance Trilogy, acts as both a mission statement and a platform to further explore the implications of the original three games. Its publication gives the committee the opportunity to recognize Emily’s enormous contribution to tabletop roleplaying.

Terraforming Mars A board game by Jacob Fryxelius, published by Fryxgames

In Terraforming Mars you play corporations hired by the government in the 25th century to prepare Mars for human habitation. The scope of the setting is mind-boggling, with each turn representing one generation of human life, and progress measured by oxygen content in the atmosphere, average surface temperature, and bodies of water. Every turn each player can acquire up to four new cards representing technologies, events, industrial complexes, and epic projects that facilitate a dramatic expanse of options, like building cities, introducing plant life, hurling asteroids at the surface, or mining the moons of Jupiter. A large stack of cards to draw from guarantees that no two games are the same, and the new draws each turn mean new options throughout the entire game. There are numerous fun little combos, enough that everyone will get a couple of them going, without any of them being game-breaking. And, unlike many development games, Terraforming Mars lasts enough turns that you’ll have time to actually use your combos–which makes the game incredibly fun even when you’re losing.

[Via SF Site News.]