WINNERS OF THE 2024
DIANA JONES EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM

The Diana Jones Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s Emerging Designer Program Winners: Quinn Brander, Taylor Navarro, Clarence Simpson, and Basil Wright. As our Emerging Designers, they’ll each receive a fabulous prize package worth over $6500:

The committee would like to congratulate our excellent winners:

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.

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.

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!

EMERGING DESIGNER PROGRAM FINALISTS

The committee would also like to congratulate our excellent finalists:

• Armanda
• Otto Garay
• Laurie O’Connel
• Navaar Selk-Jackson

For more information about our finalists, see the 2024 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 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.