The Dice Tower, episode 179.

The Dice Tower Awards, Best Games of 2009.

Welcome to the Dice Tower, a podcast about board games and card games, but especially the people who play them.

This is a special episode in which we present the winners of the Dice Tower Gaming Awards.

Join the Dice Tower regulars, as well as some special guests, as we celebrate the best games from 2009.

I'm Eric Summerer, and here's your host, performing a musical medley based on the rulebooks of the game of the year nominees.

It's Tom Vassal.

Well, even though I laid the singing at our church, I really am thinking that singing here

would bring back some maybe memories, Captain Kirk or, you know.

He's a rocket man.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure we want to go there.

But we do have some exciting things to talk about, folks. I'm Tom Vassel. And I'm Eric Summerer. Now, on our show, we talk about board games all the time, and we started a few years ago, the Dice Tower Gaming Awards. We invited other podcasters and prominent bloggers and people who play a lot of games.

And we wanted to go through and simply pick the most fun games of each year.

We have lots of categories that we're going to be giving out awards during the course of the show,

including Best Reprint, Best Production, Best Party Game, Best New Designer, Best Expansion for an Existing Game, Best Artwork, Best production, best party game, best new designer, best expansion for an existing game, best artwork, best war game, best small publisher, the most innovative game, best family game and our big award for game of the year.

Lots of exciting games to talk about coming up.

Now, you might want to wonder how we pick these games, and the process is pretty simple.

We wait till each year is well over so that we can play games because a lot of games that are produced each year come out near the end of the year.

There's a big fair in Germany called Essen, and many of the games come out then, which is in late October.

So we want to have a chance to play all these games. So in spring of the following year,

which would be spring 2010 this year, we get together, we nominate different games, we vote

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