The Cardboard Edison Award, which crowns the best unpublished board game of the year, has revealed its 20 finalists for 2026. Winners are due to be announced later this month, and the shortlist is the usual mix of clever, weird and surprisingly playable design experiments that may end up on shop shelves.
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Start organising for freeThe Cardboard Edison Award has been running since 2016 and has a track record of spotting unpublished designs that go on to do well. Past winners include 2017's Castell, picked up by Renegade, and 2018's Animal Kingdoms, which Steven Aramini took to a successful Kickstarter and shop release. Last year's winner, Sammy Salkind's app-driven dot-com bubble strategy game Dot Com, beat a record 348 entries for the crown.
The 2026 list is varied. Yasaman Farazan's Astrolabe leans on Persian folklore and a secret rotating astrolabe to drive its strategy. Pawel Owsianka's Moonforge is about extracting resources from asteroids. Cameron Fleming's Limelight is a Broadway production deck-builder structured into three acts. Nelson de Castro's StrongHolds uses actual magnets to build castles with vertical mechanics. There is even a co-operative trick-taker about magical food called The Leftovers from Larry Ted McBride. Each finalist gets detailed feedback from the panel of 80-plus judges, made up of designers, publishers, reviewers and streamers.
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Find events near youPlenty of these prototypes will end up demoed at conventions and game design meetups over the next year, and a few will hit shops. If your group enjoys getting hands on with games no one has played yet, find a local gaming community running playtest nights and you may spot one of these on a table before they have a publisher logo on the box.
Sources: Cardboard Edison Award | Cardboard Edison 2026 Submissions | BoardGameWire on 2025 winner
