In about 12 hours judging will end for round one of The Board Game Workshop Design Contest.
We currently have 1,457 feedback forms submitted. Round one has been going great. The new software I found has helped manage things and make my job easier.
In some ways I’m surprised that this contest functions at all. It relies heavily on the generosity of the judges who volunteer their time. But more so, it relies on those judges delivering way more than asked.
Each judge is asked to judge at least one game and give at least two sentences of feedback. If that was all they did, we wouldn’t even get 2 judges on each game and the 2-4 sentences of feedback they received would hardly be worth the effort.
But luckily for the contest, the judges are great people that are invested in the process. The average number of games viewed by a judge is 9. Every game has gotten at least 12 judges to view it. And the average feedback length is 111 words.
Combined the judges have written over 163,000 words of feedback. It’s astounding. But it’s not just about the numbers. The feedback I’ve read is useful. It is both positive to support the designers and critical to help them.
And I’ve also seen a lot of agreement between judges on games. I believe that the truth is in the aggregate. That’s why I try to get so many judges on each game. If one judge says a game is good or bad, that’s how they feel about it. But if you get several judges agreeing, you might be closer to the truth of the game. And I think that getting feedback like that is really useful.
Tomorrow I get to do a bunch of work to organize the feedback and send it out to all of the entrants and announce the games that will move on to round two and take part in the new coaching system we are trying out.
Then I get to relax a bit while the semifinalists work on their games. And by “relax” I mean work on a lot of other projects.