FINALISTS FOR THE 2024
DIANA JONES EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM

The Diana Jones Award Committee is pleased to announce our 2022 Emerging Designer Program finalists. Congratulations to everyone! Our winners will be announced on Friday, May 17.

Armanda

Twitter: @Armandah17

Armanda is a queer Argentinian TTRPG designer who focuses on solo gaming. They are also a sommelier and a published poet. They have designed games such as Teenage Angst, Paranoid Android, Once and Again, and The Ferryman. In the industry, they have designed projects such as the solo scenario for Skyrealms (by IKO), a playset for Jukebox (by Lyla Fujiwara), and the solo rules for Banda’s Grove (by Pandion Games). They have also received one of Evil Hat’s Omen Project Awards for an Apocalypse Keys pitch for The Vastness, a solo gaming experience they’re currently designing, inspired by Patagonian mythology and urban legends.  

Quinn Brander

Twitter: @QuinnBrander
Games: boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/148266/quinn-brander

Quinn Brander is a Cree designer of board games and videogames, hailing from Vancouver, Canada. He designed the 2023 sleeper hit Rebuilding Seattle, an economic city-building game with a notably simple ruleset that was awarded the Dice Tower’s Seal of Excellence. In videogames, he was the lead designer of Phobies, an indie turn-based mobile game, and he currently works on Marvel’s Contest of Champions,  a popular mobile fighting game.

These days, in his spare time, he’s hard at work on two new board games: Rebuilding Chicago (a standalone sequel set for a 2025 release by Wizkids) and an ambitious cooperative roguelite campaign game. The roguelite is a co-design with Isaac Vega and is on track for a 2025 crowdfunding campaign, and will be published by Rose Gauntlet Entertainment. It’s slated to be announced at Gencon 2024. Hope to see you there!

Quinn loves crafting puzzles with multiple solutions and offering experiences that give players real agency and a sense that they accomplished something epic. When he’s not playing or designing games, he can often be seen practicing the Bach cello suites on his front porch.

Otto Garay

Games: ottotg.itch.io

Otto is a non-binary and queer Mexican TTRPG designer. They love understanding and experimenting with TTRPGs. They are interested in seeing what roleplaying games can do as a storytelling medium and have written over 10 zines and 5 games.

Taylor Navarro

Twitter: @TaylorAnnNx
Website: taylornavarrottrpgs.carrd.co

Taylor Navarro is a Puerto Rican-British TTRPG designer, project manager, editor, and mother of two living in the southeast of England. Most notably, Taylor is a Storytelling Collective Creative Laureate (2024), a Big Bad Con POC Scholar (2022 & 2023), and currently works as the producer for Tales from Sina Una. She began designing for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition in 2021, publishing Lonely Locations and other short supplements of encounters and magic items. Since then, Taylor has written for several companies, including for Ghostfire Gaming’s The Seeker’s Guide to Enchanting Emporiums and Evil Hat Productions’ Deathmatch Island: New Horizons. She is also the creative lead/lead designer for self-published projects such as Chefs de Partie and Not Yet: A Romantic Duet TTRPG.

Taylor is loved in the UK tabletop scene for her selfless and enthusiastic commitment to raising up fellow creators, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. She co-organised the Dragonmeet 2023 POC Lounge and Networking Mixer and is a regular contributor to the UK Tabletop Industry Network. The quality of her designs is informed not just by her own imagination and skill, but her efforts to collaborate with other designers, a testament to the very best of British indie creators.

Laurie O’Connel

Website: twelvepinspress.com/collections/games-by-laurie
Games: laurieoconnel.itch.io

Laurie O’Connel is a British RPG designer. Their first game, Lichcraft, was crowdfunded in February 2021 and has become a key point of reference in the British TTRPG scene. It’s a political satire in which the characters play necromancers trying to get to the end of a waitlist for trans healthcare. Another design, Hieronymus — which explores the paintings of the medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch — gained critical acclaim and contributed to a developing trend of art-based RPGS. Their module Stolen Crown has been described by reviewers as “the definitive LANCER module” and is a mainstay in that play community. Finally, they also worked on Uncaged Goddesses, which won an ENNIE and recently reached Mithril on DMsGuild.

Navaar Seik-Jackson

Website: navaar.carrd.co

Navaar Seik-Jackson is a designer of narrative TTRPGs, a podcaster, game master and actual play performer. Their love for writing and creating led them to the world of TTRPG design. Navaar designs narrative games that strive to elicit dramatic roleplay, and dynamic and quick combat that leaves the players feeling powerful. Primary among those games is The Corrupted, which is an apocalypse game heavily inspired by The Last of Us. For it, they created a system (called The Protagonist System), that helps the players feel empowered while also having mechanics that cause real tension and fear.

Clarence Simpson

Twitter: @StoicHamster
Games: gdofnc.herokuapp.com/users/clarence-simpson

Clarence Simpson is a half-Filipino board game designer and advocate for diversity and representation in tabletop games. He spent most of his professional career as a software engineer in video games, but he’s always had a soft spot for tabletop games. In early 2019, after spending over a decade exploring modern hobby board games as a player, he discovered his local tabletop design group, the Game Designers of North Carolina, and dove deep into designing board games. In 2023, he was named one of the Top 10 Up and Coming Designers by The Dice Tower.

He is a co-designer of The Wolves, which topped the BGG Hotness chart upon release. It’s since been localized into 15 languages and sold around the world. It also won the Dutch Game of the Year award.
Other published games he designed include A Message from the Stars, Chomp, and Merchants of Magick. His unpublished design Shaking the Tree won the 2019 HABA USA Design Contest and was a runner-up for the 2020 Cardboard Edison Award. He also has 5 more unannounced designs signed with publishers that should release within the next year or two.

Basil Wright

Twitter: @kobanya_kana
Bluesky: @kobanya.bsky.social
Website: towerofbasil.wordpress.com/portfolio
Linktree: linktr.ee/kobanyakana

Basil Wright is a Black and Seminole Florida native whose works focus on drawing the magical from the mundane. They enjoy creating weird games for equally weirder people. Their works include Pelogos, Mouseia, You’re Naked, Run!, and You Can (Not) Pet the Cat. They were a POC Scholar for Big Bad Con 2023 and have been a panelist for UX In Layout Design for Big Bad Con 2023 and Big Bad Online 2024. Their game design philosophy is to create games that promote community and have the lowest barrier of entry, so that everyone can enjoy playing games together!

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:

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 the see the 2021 Emerging Designer page, 2022 Emerging Designer page, and 2023 Emerging Designer page.

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.