Bonus Episode: Ennies Exploration 2026

Hello, systemic shoppers! This is (hopefully) part one of a 2-part bonus about the nominations for the 2026 Ennies: the annual public-vote awards for TTRPGs.

We realised that the games tended to fall into either “I own and have played this” or “I haven’t even heard of this”. 

Now, we’re not going to talk at length about impressions of games we haven’t played, because judging a book by its cover is only appropriate for the games nominated for Best Cover Art.

But we are going to each pick one game, give it a spin in the near future, then reconvene with part 2 to talk about our experiences.

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Voting will have closed by the time this episode goes up (it’s only open for like a week!) but the list of categories and nominees is on their website:

https://ennie-awards.com/2026-nominees/

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The Girl Frame review Freya references is by Caelyn Ellis of Rascal News: https://www.rascal.news/girl-frame-confidently-stomps-its-way-into-a-niche-mecha-genre/ 

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We also had a discussion about Deadline: A Clockwork Press that was definitely comedy gold, but (ironically enough) didn't make the cut because we’d decided to end the recording immediately before it. Whoops!