Welcome
Game Chef is an annual design competition for tabletop roleplaying games, challenging participants to write a playable draft of an original game in just one week, based on a theme and a set of “ingredients.”
As our 2006 nomination for the Diana Jones Award said: Each year the competition has spawned a number of powerful, widely diverse RPGs and semi-RPGs and is now one of the best break-in points for new game designers and small press publishers. One of its strongest features is its development of a community of review and interest in one another’s projects.
Game Chef has been a proud tradition for more than ten years now, dating back to primordial contests on the Gaming Outpost before being revived in 2002 by Mike Holmes on the Forge.
In 2005, Mike passed the baton to Story Games administrator Andy Kitkowski and the contest moved to 1KM1KT for two years. Andy shifted Game Chef to its own dedicated forum in 2007, and contributors produced 82 original games that year, our highest number yet.
The baton was passed to me (Jonathan Walton) in 2009, and I scrambled to put something together late in the year, leading to an experiment in aggregating RSS feeds. 2010 marked a return to both the Forge and 1KM1KT, as well as a return to Mike’s simpler 2002 rules format. And that brings us up to this year’s competition, Game Chef 2011, where I have put together — perhaps for the first time? — a secret cabal of past participants to informally advise Game Chef.
More information about the past years of Game Chef and their winners can be found below:
Game Chef before 2002 (????)
Game Chef 2002 (John Laviolette)
Game Chef 2003 (Walt Freitag)
Game Chef 2004 (Jack Aidley)
Game Chef 2005 (Mischa Krilov)
Game Chef 2006 (Moyra Turkington)
Game Chef 2007 (Fred Hicks, Remi Treuer, & Jess Hammer)
Game Chef 2008 (Nick Wedig, Dale Horstman, Mikael Andersson, & TomasHVM)
Game Chef 2009 (all 22 participants)
Game Chef 2010 (James Mullen)
Game Chef 2011 (Jennifer Hardy, Matthew Mazurek, Sam Liberty, & Kevin Spak)
