Welcome to the renaissance of tabletop games!
While the beloved medium has never truly disappeared, the early ‘00s made it look almost like the practice of sitting around a table with a group of friends with a game board or a deck of cards would be passed over for the more in-fashion choice of sitting across a monitor and cussing into the microphone of your headset as you got yourself gunned down in some video game.
Thankfully, that’s not the case and independent companies like Singapore’s Excaliburp are out to show you just what old school tabletop gaming can do with their pilot project now on Kickstarter!
Introducing The Award Winning Game, a card game that allows you to set up your own advertising agency, hire talents (you get to get rid of them, too), make money and, of course, win awards! (Which is obviously the whole point of the game.)
And if that wasn’t good enough, you get to even screw over your friends and prove yourself to be a grade ‘A’ asshole!
While the concept of the game seems to run the risk of appealing only to those who are industry savvy, the use of popular brands and highly interactive gameplay makes it far more accessible and entertaining to the layman. Along with the comical “Trump” and “Scandal” cards that add the aforementioned interactive aspect to the gameplay, The Award Winning Game’s well-used parodies adds an additional layer of fun for the players by giving them a reason to actually study every card that comes into play for a little hidden joke or nugget of familiarity.
Most remarkable, however, is that for a card game that isn’t of the traditional fantasy or adventure genre, The Award Winning Game still goes the extra mile by not only developing a mythology of sorts for their fake brands and awards, but also a little animated short that proves that all of us have the ability to love screwing over our friends for the sake of awards… yes, I’m a horrible person… but hell, the game’s undeniably fun… if you’re willing to lose a few friends along the way.
For more on the different types of cards and their functions, check out The Award Winning Game’s website, or just head on to their Kickstarter page for information on how to support them.
For AU$10 (~S$10) you can get the print-and-play version of the game as a PDF, and at AU$45 the actual physical edition is yours.
Unfortunately, the Early Bird edition of the game have all been snapped up, but if the quality and packaging of the test deck was any indication, the $45 Kickstarter-exclusive price is worth every penny.