Whew! Another great year of Game Chef wraps up with the posting of the final judging results. Congratulations to the winner and everyone else who participated. Thanks for the biggest year of Game Chef yet! Special thanks also to Mike Holmes, who came out of retirement as Master Chef to share his wisdom one more time, and to our Italian counterparts—Giulia Barbano and Mario Bolzoni—for holding things down on the Italian-language forums. I’m looking forward to playing some of these games this coming summer!
Winners Announced Tomorrow
Apologies for the delays, but Mike and I have finally gotten on the same page. I’m just editing our comments right now and will post them tomorrow. I would post them today, but it’s my 30th birthday and it just ain’t happening. We very much enjoyed reading all of the finalists and the winning game was both unanimous (crazy, right?) and a landmark for Game Chef in several respects. More tomorrow!
Preliminary Results
So I went ahead and ran the results of peer-reviewing and voting, despite still missing a couple votes. At this point, the remaining votes will either add a new runner-up or move a runner-up to a finalist, and we will deal with that when and if it happens (only a slight chance of either, I think).
Game Chef 2012 Preliminary Results
Congratulations to all participants and I look forward to begin reviewing the finalists with original Master Chef Mike Holmes. There’s a few games that didn’t make it to the finals that I want to look at too, because they caught my attention, but that’ll have to wait for now.
Reviewing Begins!
After a couple of debacles, we’re finally ready to officially kick-off peer-reviewing. One debacle is that the keyboard on my laptop stopped working, so I’m typing this on my girlfriend’s computer, whose “wireless” card has to be manually plugged into the router to get internet access.
The other debacle is that I avoided two problems related to chefs submitting multiple games but fell into a third, unanticipated trap. To quote the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, it’s always those “unknown unknowns” that get ya! Consequently, while nobody is assigned to review their own game, a few games have been assigned to be reviewed by the same person multiple times. If this happens to you, contact me (jaywalt, gmail) and we’ll work something out.
If you happen to be assigned the game of a close friend, or one that you assisted during the design process, there’s already active threads on both Story Games and The Forge for trading review assignments.
If you have any other concerns or issues, please let me know, but be patient! I still have to eat, sleep, and go to work like normal (I know, crazy, right?) and may not be able to address your problem immediately, especially due to my lack of a functional computer.
New Record: 97 Games
Congratulations, folks! I think everybody’s listed now.
Next up: making sure all the links work and assigning peer-reviewers. Hopefully that’ll be done sometime tomorrow! (In future years, we might think about instituting a “submit only your best game” policy, due to the complications created by submitting multiple games. It boosts our “numbers,” but slows down the admin and reviewing process considerably. Still, I am super impressed with everyone who submitted more than one game. Hats off to you!)
