WINNERS OF THE 2025
DIANA JONES EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM

The Diana Jones Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s Emerging Designer Program Winners: Ashraf Braden, Elliot Davis, Lyla McBeath Fujiwara, and Marceline Leiman! As our Emerging Designers, they’ll each receive a fabulous prize package worth over $6550:

The committee would like to congratulate our excellent winners:

Ashraf Braden

Games: rpggeek.com/rpgdesigner/150719/ashraf-braden

Ashraf Braden is an African RPG designer living in Uganda’s Kampala District. He is best known for Legends of Uganda, a zine dedicated to bringing Ugandan myths and urban legends to the gaming table.

Between warehouse shifts, Ashraf is working on a potential sourcebook for Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, based on his work with Legends of Uganda. This work, drawing upon the history of the Bugandan kingdom, details the clans of Buganda and delves into new, playable classes based upon local folklore.

Ashraf has loved finding a wider audience for his writing and marvels at the reach his work has in today’s global society. Receiving support from all corners of the globe has been an eye-opening experience for a burgeoning developer from rural Uganda, and he continues to strive to bring his readers ever greater thrills.

Between working 12–14 hours a day and designing games, Ashraf has time for little else, but he hopes that he will one day be able to dedicate himself fully to his writing. What spare time he can carve out is spent aiding his family in their endeavors.

Elliot Davis

Social: bsky.app/profile/moreblueberries.bsky.social
Website: www.moreblueberries.com

Elliot Davis, a.k.a. “moreblueberries,” is a Brooklyn-based game designer, publisher, podcaster, and artist who loves all things weird and wonderful about the TTRPG industry. He is known for such self-published releases as Project ECCO, Rom Com Drama Bomb, and the upcoming The Time We Have. 

Elliot has made a name for himself as a designer of solo supplements for existing TTRPGs, with the creation of The Wanderer for Orbital Blues, ACCEPT(deny) for HUNT(er/ed), and the upcoming Mourning After for Paint the Town Red. 

When he’s not losing sleep over a new game idea, you can hear him play, GM, produce, and host on the podcasts My First Dungeon and Talk of the Table, which he produces as a co-founder of Many Sided Media.

Lyla McBeath Fujiwara

Social: bsky.app/profile/lyla.bsky.social
Website: www.jarofeyes.com

Lyla McBeath Fujiwara is the project lead for the Cosmere RPG, which in 2024 became the highest-funded tabletop Kickstarter ever. She coordinates a team of 20 diverse creatives working on 14 game products. She is also the book lead for the RPG’s hardcover campaign-length adventures, Stonewalkers and Mistborn Legacy. As the book lead, she facilitates and directs the overall creative vision and execution of the adventures.

Lyla has freelanced for Hit Point Press and Evil Hat Productions. In 2024, her Broadway musical-inspired game, Jukebox: The Karaoke Musical TTRPG, successfully raised over $16,000 on Kickstarter and was profiled by both Dicebreaker and Polygon. Lyla hired and led a diverse team for Jukebox, including 12 designers ranging from veteran writers to newcomers. She is the author of Project Management for TTRPGs, a Substack tutorial series about project leadership for newcomers in the TTRPG space.

As the Big Bad Con crowdfunding co-lead in 2024, she helped raise $80,710 which enabled 124 scholarship applicants from minority backgrounds to attend the convention. She also helped organize the convention’s PoC Meet and Greet, a networking event for PoC TTRPG professionals. Finally, she co-organized Gamehole Con’s inaugural PoC Industry Dinner.

Marceline Leiman

Social: bsky.app/profile/marcelineleiman.bsky.social
Games: marcelineleiman.itch.io

Marceline Leiman is a graduate of and instructor at the prestigious NYU Gamecenter. She has designed in the board game and RPG space, and has worked with design/development teams at North Star Games (Oceans solo mode) Underdog Games (Trekking the World second edition) and Clarkson Potter (title unannounced). 

Her handcrafted wood-and-fabric game, High Tide, was selected to be featured at the inaugural Indie Games Night Market, and has since been signed to Underdog Games for mass production. Her bluffing microgame Phantasmic was recently signed to Button Shy Games.

EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM FINALISTS

The committee would also like to congratulate our excellent finalists:

• Rook Feld
• Kodi Gonzaga
• Ashwin Kamath
• Tejas Oza

For more information about our finalists, see the 2025 Emerging Designer Program Finalists page.

SPONSORS

We’d like to thank the program’s key sponsors for this year, Gen Con LLC and Bundle of Holding.

Our other sponsors & volunteers for the Emerging Designer Program include:

This year’s prize sponsors are:

ABOUT THE EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM

This program of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming amplifies the voices of up-and-coming hobby game designers, with a focus on creators from marginalized communities, by featuring them during an expenses-paid trip to Gen Con. Its inaugural year was 2021, when Jeeyon Shim was our first Diana Jones Emerging Designer.

For more information about our previous winners and finalists, see our past-year Emerging Designer pages: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

CONTACTS

Questions? Please reach out to the program’s coordinators at edp@dianajonesaward.org. To contact the Diana Jones Award committee, email committee@dianajonesaward.org.