Anti-fascist Spanish Civil War semi co-op Land and Freedom wins 2024 Summit Award
The Summit Award, which aims to celebrate historical board games that have successfully broadened the hobby, has announced Alex Knight’s Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War as its latest winner.
Knight’s design sees players take control of three factions – anarchists, communists and moderates – who must balance working together to defeat the fascist forces while also pushing their own side’s claim to control the Spanish government.
The judges praised Land and Freedom for its unconventional design approach – particularly around the semi-cooperative aspect – its novelty of topic, its approachability to those new to historical gaming, and its playability at a range of player counts.
Land and Freedom, which is published by Blue Panther, was among four finalists for the award, alongside Stephen Rangazas’ design The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire, Halls of Hegra by Petter Schanke Olsen and We Are Coming, Nineveh by Harrison Brewer, Rex Brynen, Juliette Le Ménahèze and Brian Train.
Those games cover themes of insurgencies around British decolonisation in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus, Norwegian volunteers fighting numerically-superior German forces in the early days of World War II, and the Iraqi government’s campaign to liberate the western part of Mosul from Daesh forces in 2017.
Honourable mentions for this year’s award went to Paolo Mori’s Match of the Century and Scout Blum design Rising Waters – the latter of which was also nominated for the inaugural Zenobia Award, a trophy that aims to shine a light on diverse historical game designs from creators in marginalised groups.
Match of the Century focuses on the final of the 1972 World Chess Championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, while Rising Waters is centred on the flooding of the Mississippi Delta in 1927, which compelled African American families to fight the forces of nature in addition to racism from white landowners.
Knight took to social media upon receiving the award to say, “Extremely humbled by this tremendous honor.
“The Summit Award represents much of what I’m striving to do with game design. So many people came up to me this past weekend at PAXU with congratulations – I was honestly overwhelmed.”
Land and Freedom previously picked up a nomination for Best Strategic Game at this year’s Charles S Roberts Awards, while Knight was also nominated for the Chad Jensen Memorial Breakthrough Designers Award.
This is the third year the Summit Award has been handed out, following victories for Fred Serval’s Red Flag Over Paris in 2022 and Tory Brown’s Votes For Women last year.
Red Flag Over Paris is a two-player card-driven game depicting the two months of intense confrontation between the Communards and the government in Versailles during the 1871 Paris Commune, while Votes for Women simulates the political fight for American women’s suffrage between 1848 and 1920.
The award was created by San Diego Historical Games Convention, an organisation which aims to create a diverse and supportive gaming community dedicated to playing, discussing, designing, and promoting historically-based board games.
SDHist, which was launched mainly as a local wargaming group in 2015, is led by wargaming experts including Liberty or Death: The American Insurrection designer Harold Buchanan.
Award nominees are judged on ease of teaching, ease of play, novelty and uniqueness of topic, novelty of approach and effectiveness as a historical game.
