We received the following press release. --RL The Strategy Gaming Society is extremely proud and excited to announce the recipients for the 2002 Gamers' Choice Awards, a set of awards which recognizes outstanding strategy board games in three categories. This year's recipients are: 1) General Strategy, Multi-Player category: San Marco. Set on the enchanting island of Venice, this Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum design uses a very clever idea not often seen before. Each turn a player is given a set of cards, some good, some bad. It's his goal to split these into two sets. Another player then chooses one set leaving the other to the "divider". Dividing the cards can be agony! You want to split them up so that your opponent gets the least advantage possible while leaving yourself with good cards. The game is released by Ravensburger and is the first Gamers' Choice Award for the design team of Moon & Weissblum. 2) General Strategy, 2-Player category: Dvonn. The latest in the Gipf Project of games from designer Kris Burm and released by Rio Grande Games and Don & Co. The game starts with players placing disks on an elongated hexagonal board. Once this is filled up players move their pieces creating larger and larger stacks. When you move a piece it must move exactly the number of pieces in its stack and must "capture" another stack. This often means that larger stacks are weaker as their number of moves gradually decreases. Further complicating maters is the fact that each stack must remain connected to one of the three special "Dvonn" pieces scattered about the board. Since these pieces can become part of a stack (and therefore moved around the board) this is a lot trickier than first appears. 3) Historical Simulations: Wilderness War. Designed by Volke Ruhnke and released by GMT Games, Wilderness War is a two player game on the French & Indian War, 1755-1760, in which Britain wrested control of North America from France. Commanding French or British forces in North America, a player must defend their frontier, raid their enemy's frontier, build chains of forts to extend their control into the wilderness, besiege and assault enemy forts, recruit Indian allies, fight and win land battles all while dealing with events occurring in Europe that affect the war. The full war or shorter sections can be refought. The game uses the popular card-play system pioneered in We the People. The Gamers' Choice Awards are sponsored by the Strategy Gaming Society, the oldest continuous gaming organization in the United States. The SGS serves to bring together people from all over the world in mutual enjoyment of our small but intensely-lived hobby and help spread the word about the wonderful world of strategy gaming. Back to 2nd Quarter 2002 List of News Items Back to Master List of News Items Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com