Summit Award reveals 2024 contenders which have best helped draw in players, broaden scope of historical board gaming

The finalists of this year’s Summit Award, which aims to recognise historical board games that have attracted new players or introduced new subjects or perspectives to the hobby, have been revealed.

Stephen Rangazas’ design The British Way: Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire is among four games in the running for this year’s prize, alongside Halls of Hegra by Petter Schanke Olsen, Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War by Alex Knight, and We Are Coming, Nineveh by Harrison Brewer, Rex Brynen, Juliette Le Ménahèze and Brian Train.

Those games cover themes including 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, disparate factions coalescing to fight fascism in 1930s Spain, 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.

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.

All four finalists will now be demoed at the SDHist Summit 2024 Convention between November 8 and 11, with board members, advisors and invited judges then voting on which game will win.

The winner is expected to be announced by the end of this year.