TGC Vehicle design contest submissions

Vehicle Types

They got 28 submissions over at TheGameCrafter.com for their vehicle design contest.  I looked through all of them quickly just to see where I stood.  The most common vehicles used are cars, making up nearly half.  The most common game themes involve racing (not unlikely, given the many cars-based games), trading, and war, with some simulations built in.  It was somewhat difficult to distinguish some of these categories for some games.

Game Types

Most interesting for me was that of the space games, which were 1/4 of the total, most were space trading games of one sort or another, where you are visiting places and gathering goods.  That makes my submission, Warped, seem not nearly so unique, and may make that whole genre tiresome to the judges as they wade through many sets of similar rules.

By my (admittedly idiosyncratic) standards, I'd say roughly half of the entries I categorized as flawed in some significant way and not a threat to win.  This was not usually based on looking at the rules, although I did read through some of them.  The problems included very crude art, very crude or simplistic design, poorly-written or incomplete descriptions, or other reasons.

My easy dismissal of these might be wrong - there could be a gem of gameplay in there, hidden behind bad art, in the same way that visually beautiful games can often suck in terms of gameplay.  About 1/4 of the games had good to great art.  My art isn't the greatest, but it's OK, and the game behind it is fun.  I'm not certain the rules will make it clear how fun it is, and there are some complexities that I'm not sure I got across.  The fact that I'm competing with six other space-trading games is troubling, too.

Well, we'll see how it goes.  As usual, I'm sure I'm over-thinking this.