The Winner of the MGSN Game Jam

And the winner of the inaugural MGSN Game Jam is….

Rokumon by Charles Ward

Rokumon by Charles Ward is the winner of the 2020 MGSN Game Jam.

While there could be only one winner, there were many fantastic entries and we had a great time making and playing them. We were struck by the vital conversations generated by John Baluci’s We Can’t Win, a game inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and designed to be deliberately unfair in order to demonstrate how rules, applied unequally, can have dramatic consequences for a player’s actions. The panel also particularly enjoyed the playability of Soda, a roll-and-write from Nino Junghans that rapidly becomes a brain-melting puzzler, and the innovative design of Sam Meech’s Fair Isle 40, a pattern matching game where players compete to knit the best pattern over 4 rows of cards.

Judging the games was a thoroughly enjoyable process that sparked much dialogue between the panel. In choosing our winner, members of the MGSN ranked each entry according to the following categories: Gameplay, Accessibility, Rules, Design, and Print and Playability. After playing and ranking all of the games, we met to discuss which games we thought stood out in terms of their scores, as well as those that were particularly innovative, thought-provoking, or just darn good fun to play. With the scores in, and after much discussion, Rokumon arose as a clear winner.

Rokumon - printed and read to play!

Rokumon is a 2-player strategy game based on 100 years of samurai history, in which players play through six acts to determine who will be the new Shogun of Japan. The judges praised the exceptional aesthetics of the game’s design, the clarity of the rules, the ease in which could be brought to the tabletop, and surprising depths of strategy that its minimalist components enabled.

The black clan claims victory in Act 1 of Rokumon by having three of their warrior tokens on a single coin card (top left).

You can play Rokumon, and all of the other entries, for free by clicking on the button below.

Congratulations to Charles Ward – the MGSN Golden Meeple will be on its way to you shortly.

Finally, thank you to all of the game designers who took part in the competition, to the judges who played through them, and to our panel of experts who produced such an insightful series of game design videos.

Thanks for playing, and see you all again next year…