Game: Award Show

Thread: Re: Quick Comments

Gilby — 2007-11-08T04:06:08+00:00

anglotiger wrote:

Our solution on the night was that you had to have an outright winner or else no-one got a thing, but with hindsight that wouldn't work too well if you had lots of ties. In your situation, that would result in a 0-0 draw. OK in soccer, but not very satisfying even there, let alone here. So I think the better solution is that winning players split the spoils evenly, with any leftovers being discarded.

Oops. I never posted a response here. I contacted the company about this just after the game came out and that answer (split evenly, discard extra) is the official errata.

Thread: Filler with Imperfect Information and Interesting Decisions

sdonohue — 2007-09-09T03:27:24+00:00

Award Show is a light card game with some interesting mechanics. The basis of the game is secret voting but who each player wants to see win each round is hidden information. There are enough cards that can be cast as votes to make bluffing a good option and there are some powerful cards that can swing the game.

Components
The game comes with 100 cards in several different types. There are 6 company identification cards, 36 company award cards, 57 vote cards and 1 dealer/host card.
The game is nicely done. The box fits the cards nicely and the cards are nicely illustrated by Aaron Williams (of Nodwick fame). The cardstock is good and the cards have a nice feel when you shuffle and play them.

Setting/Theme
The premise of the game is that each turn you are randomly assigned one of six game companies and the goal of getting that company one of six awards that will be presented during the course of the game. The game has a good humor value, starting with parody names and including monkey illustrations of game company presidents.

Rules
The rules are fairly straightforward but do create lot of potential strategic choices.
Each turn one player is the dealer. He randomly hands out company cards to each player which each player keeps secret from the other. He then picks a category for the voting. He deals out the vote cards and the game begins. There are two types of cards in the vote deck – votes and events. Votes are for or against a company to receive the award. Events may be played as bluffs during the voting round or held to be played during the Awards Presentation
Play is pretty straightforward – you play one card per round until you choose to pass. Once all players pass, the voting round ends and you move to the presentation.
During the presentation, the players, beginning with the dealer, select one company to have their votes counted. As soon as the combined total of votes cast reaches 10, the award is made to the company with the highest votes. If the total votes cast does not reach 10, the next player chooses a company.
Once the total votes cast is at least 10, the player who controls that company collects the award cards for every company who has had their votes counted.
The vote cards are all collected as are the company cards. The next round starts over again, with a different award category. Once all six awards have been presented, the player who has the most award cards is the winner.

Observations
On the surface this seems like a simple voting game with hidden votes, but it’s not that easy. Because there are positive, negative, and neutral votes, it is difficult to tell if someone is backing a company or simply trying to appear to back one.
The other strategy kicker is in the awards phase. The goal is not to win the most awards, but to take the most category cards. What this means is that it’s better for me to have two or three companies counted without reaching 10 before we count out the votes for my company. The risk of course, is that if I have the most votes but the companies that get counted first manage to reach 10, it doesn’t matter – once 10 is reached the award is presented and the uncounted votes don’t matter.
The last thing that make the results somewhat unpredictable are the event cards, which are not particularly balanced against each other. The event cards include one which swaps your company with that of another player, which provides an interesting strategy and a serious reversal of fortune. Although it plays in about half an hour, there are some good decisions to be made here.

Recommendation
Award Show is a fun and fast filler where strategy can help but won’t guarantee you the win. If you don’t mind chaos in your games, then you will probably get a kick out of this one. If you hate imperfect information games or games where a single card can upset your carefully laid plans, then you should probably pass on this one. I’ve played it about 30 times all told and I still enjoy it.

Thread: Re: Quick Comments

anglotiger — 2007-01-22T19:30:18+00:00

My friends and I actually quite enjoyed the game, in contrast with the low ranking here (perhaps people were expecting far too much from a 30 minute filler game). But like you, we hit the issue - although only on one round of the six - where we had a tie.

Finding nothing in the rules to cover the situation, and no errata here when I checked the next day, I went to the manufacturer's website. Again there was nothing. So I clicked on the provided link to contact the company, only to have my e-mail come back to me with a "fatal error" within minutes (receipt refused). So good luck actually finding out the intent of the designer on this one.

Our solution on the night was that you had to have an outright winner or else no-one got a thing, but with hindsight that wouldn't work too well if you had lots of ties. In your situation, that would result in a 0-0 draw. OK in soccer, but not very satisfying even there, let alone here. So I think the better solution is that winning players split the spoils evenly, with any leftovers being discarded.

Thread: Perfect Filler

sdonohue — 2005-09-04T20:07:17+00:00

We'd just played two rounds of Heroscape but with only a half hour before one player had to go, we didn't like our chances of finishing a third. I broke out Award Show. I'd done some playtesting on the game and had played a few hands with the designers at Origins, so I was pretty sure we could finish it.

The game was pretty cutthroat from the get go. Joe picked up on a strategy I hadn't really thought of before, playing the "What did I vote for" card to figure out what the other players were doing with their votes early in each round where he had it. With only 3 players, there were a couple of rounds where we didn't reach 8 votes until we had revealed all 6 company cards. Even so, the game was finished in about half an hour from the time we broke the cellophane to the time we put it back in the box.

Everyone had a good time with the game and Mike was already thinking about new ways to play for the next time.

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Wren — 2005-08-24T12:33:53+00:00

This doesn't seem like a game that would take THAT long to play... (Display at Twilight Creations booth, GenCon 2005.)

Thread: Quick Comments

Risha Moonshadow — 2005-08-15T20:20:52+00:00

Every round we played, we seemed to tie and there are absolutely no rules for dealing with ties. It's ironic that the theme of this game is awards for game design, because this one isn't getting any!

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Wren — 2005-07-11T17:00:30+00:00

Back of the game box.

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Wren — 2005-07-11T17:00:30+00:00

Company Identification Cards.

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Wren — 2005-07-11T17:00:29+00:00

There are two of each of these Event Cards in the deck. They can be played to interrupt votes.

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Wren — 2005-07-11T17:00:29+00:00

Vote cards.

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Wren — 2005-07-11T17:00:29+00:00

Company Award category cards showing different winners for each of the six categories.

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Shawn_Solo — 2005-06-12T11:52:04+00:00