The Dice Tower Awards Nominees for 2011 have been released.

The Dice Tower is one of the granddaddies of the board game podcasts. Tom Vasel, Eric Summerer and a revolving cast of contributors do a really good job of exploring the board game hobby with a variety show type of feel. It is funny, informative, poignant, interesting and all around fun. It's a good show, you should check it out.

Over the past few years, the Dice Tower has been attempting to leverage the experience of its various contributors in order to create a set of board gaming awards that relevant to the majority of hobby gamers. Think of it as an American Spiel Des Jahres.

This year's list of award nominees has just been released. After looking over the list, I am sure that at the very least I'd like to try every game that is nominated as every game on the list that I have already tried is really good. Without experience with the others (yet!), I'd say that you owe it to yourself to check out your local game groups and friendly local game stores to see if you can try them out.

Good luck to the nominees and thank you to the Dice Tower crew for creating and going through the work of playing and deciding on awards for these great games. You're helping the board game hobby and we, at the Great Big Table podcast, appreciate.

For those that listen to the show, we'll definitely be discussing games from the list that we have played, like Forbidden Island, Rallyman, Bears!, and Train of Thought in future episodes. At some point, we'll also discuss the impact that awards have on the board game hobby.


***Great Big Table is a late-night conversation between two Midwestern geeks with dreams of world domination through board games. It's not a great plan, but it's our plan and we're sticking to it. Join as we plot to put a meeple in every pot- or at least on every table. We slipped the bonds of our robot masters, so the only opinions represented here are our own. We are however in league with Amazon, so a percentage of every purchase made through our links goes into our onshore accounts (thanks!). You should be proud of yourself for reading all this small print- we are!