This weekend, I decided to fire up some mowers, trim the weeds, and mulch up the leaves remaining in the yard, as a first shot in the annual War Against Leaves. I putted around, got the front yard done, went out back, and nearly lost the mower in the Swamp of Despair. I had to get a come-along to fish the damn thing out.
Anyway, while all this was going on, I was listening to podcasts. I'm way behind because I haven't commuted in several years. I listened to this one podcast about the Charles S. Roberts awards where the yay-hoos were saying things like "I don't know what the rules [of the awards] were, but..." and "I haven't played any of the games, but..." After all that, I got curious about the awards and looked them up to compare the categories over time.
<cue dramatic music>
So I built a spreadsheet. I hate spreadsheets. I used to be kind of good with Excel up to about 2003, and I use Gnumeric when I need it and LibreOffice when I'm doing something stupid like this. It's a horrible way to do calculations. But it did draw a nifty graph thing (which would be better if I could clean up the columns some). I've attached it the Excel version. The data is from Wikipedia, but seems to match the Wayback Machine's version of Alan Emrich's web page.
The neat thing is that, in '74-'75, there were Best Professional Game and Best Amateur Game. Then a couple of years of Best Tactical Game and Best Strategic Game. That didn't work either. So then they had 9 years of Best Pre-20th Century Game and Best 20th Century Game.
In 1987, it got broken into Best Pre-World War II Game, Best World War II Game, and Best Post-World War II Game. (There's a number of no awards in that last category.) In 2009, pre-WWII got broken into Best Ancient to Napoleonic Era and Best Post-Napoleonic to Pre-WWII Wargame. In 2019, the former broke into Best Napoleonic and Best Ancients to Pre-Napoleonic, I assume due to excessive moral, social, and physical pressure by Jim.
There were Fantasy/Science Fiction categories (sort of) between 1977 and 1986 (The War of the Rings! Car Wars! Wabbit Wampage!) and again in 2010-2012 and 2019.
Dean Essig has won the James F. Dunnigan Award for Playability and Design many times; I'm not sure if that's sarcastic or not.
Quite a few of the games seem to have passed the test of time. Many didn't. I'm going to have to check out 1990's Kadesh.
« Last Edit: March 09, 2021, 07:35:29 PM by mcguire »
"Man...knowing how to use the cards properly certainly changes how I play the game" -- judgedredd
Topic: The Charles S. Robert's Awards through time (Read 2810 times)