What if the Ennies Reviewed Games From Two Years Ago?

I wrote this blog post around the time there was Ennies discourse, and then life got busy, so I'm posting it now.

One problem with awards like the Ennies is that it takes a long time to know if a game is good. It's not just that you can't play all the games in a year - you aren't even likely to hear second-hand or third-hand how it plays, from anyone but the game's creators or people in their circle. Also, the first year is when marketing and hype is at its peak.

I decided to go back 2 years and see what games held up. Specifically, the year 2023 (I'm not going to try to do the Ennies thing where it's split across years, because tracking down the month things are published is too hard). I considered three years, but way too much came out in 2022.

It turns out it's really hard to make a list of rpg books published in a given year. Kickstarters and early versions make publication dates ambiguous and some of you DID NOT INCLUDE A DATE OF PUBLICATION. So my list is very incomplete. It's also biased towards the kind of OSR and story games I'm interested in or that I hear about in communities that I'm in. This blog post would be most useful in making my point if I could somehow show you what publications you thought were really good in 2023 and how that compares to the ones you care about now, but you'll have to come up with this list yourself.

So here is my rough list of games. Games in italics won or were nominated for Ennies (I may have messed this up if they have a different definition of when a game was published than I do). Games in bold I've actually played or run. I have only done three categories which are not the categories in the Ennies.

Systems and Standalone Games

• Trophy
• Yazeba's B&B
• Liminal horror
• Shadowdark
• City of Winter
• Pasión de las Pasiones

Adventures and modules

• Reach of the Roach God
• Monster Overhaul
• Ultraviolet Grasslands
• Valley of Flowers

This list is a bit shorter because there are so many adventures and so I didn't track down as many publication dates as I could have. Also for whatever reason all the adventures I've actually run or played have been published before or after 2023, mostly before.

Solo Games

I don't see people talk about a lot of these, so these are exceptionally biased towards my personal preferences. I didn't go through all the journaling games I've played so I've focused here more on games with unique and interesting mechanics.

• Haxen
• One breath left
• Wreck this deck

Thoughts

I'm not going to say anything bad about any games, except to vaguely say that some big name games with a lot of money I never heard about again.Conversely, there are a few games on here I didn't hear about until years later (e.g. City of Winter), or which I dismissed at the time and later learned were more interesting than I thought.

It's also not completely off. For systems or standalone games, half the ones I listed were at least nominated. I'm left thinking maybe the Ennies have slightly more validity in predicting what games will be relevant for the long term than I thought.

But after doing this exercise, I do feel like two years has made a big difference in understanding the games of 2023, and I have a much broader and deeper view of what was published then.

Other Reasons To Talk About Games From Two Years Ago

As I went through some of my games, a few jumped out at me. These are games I don't know much about because I haven't heard people talk about them, and haven't played them yet. But they also are not games that I bought because of temporary hype - I'm still very intrigued by them. In particular, Beyond Crony Gron, Wulfwald, and Border Riding.

Games are often only present on social media very briefly, especially if you don't have much of a marketing budget or a huge social media presence. The player base may retreat to specific discords or other communities where those outside those communities stop hearing about them. It would be a shame to miss out on a game you might have loved because the collective attention of the community is only on the hot new thing. If we had something like the Ennies but looking 2 years in the past, we might do a better job of keeping good games alive for longer. But I'm not going to be able to organize that.

Published August 23 2025