The Dice Tower announced the list of nominees for their Dice Tower Awards: ostensibly the best games from 2015 in a variety of categories, including Best Game Components, Best Expansion, Best Two-Player Game, Most Innovative Game, and many others. They'll announce the winners during the Dice Tower Convention in July. 

You can see the list of nominees here. 

The nominees have come with a small bit of controversy, with some people claiming that it's a "populist award," and expressing disappointment that "the voting body isn't doing more to shine a light on games that the public might not already know about."

Well I (Firestone) was a member of that voting body, and as to the charge of it being a populist vote, all I can say is: yep. 

You see, there were openings for practically every game out there, as long as it fit the category. But even if I did play some awesome, innovative game that I think everyone should know about, my nomination is just a drop in the bucket compared to all of the people who played the also-innovative T.I.M.E. Stories, for example. 

When you ask a bunch of bloggers to vote on games, you're going to get a list of games that a lot of people have played, because bloggers play a lot of new and popular games. 

So you can complain about the lack of smaller and lesser-known games. (Though there is a Small Publisher category...) And you can complain that it's mostly already popular games. But if you want to look back in a couple of years and see what games were popular in 2015, and what was new and exciting, The Dice Tower Awards are going to be a pretty darn good gauge. 

Thanks for reading! What are your thoughts on the Awards? Are they necessary, since they tell us much of what we already know? Let us know in the comments!