Welcome to 2025! It is time for another round of awards to be handed out to all the games that jockeyed to sit atop the pile of Board Game Rankings. As before, I will be considering two publishing years of games but all of the rankings that determine the winners happened in 2024. Let’s refresh ourselves on the categories and sub categories.

Hotness Awards - games published in 2024 and ranked in 2024 are considered for this award. Knowing the games people are really excited about is also deserving of an award. These games will have a chance to win the Game of the Year the following year.
Game of the Year Awards - games published in 2023 and ranked in 2024 are considered for this award. This is mainly to allow all games in a given publishing year to have the same amount of time to be ranked but it also has the side effect of allowing the hotness bump to shrink a bit.

Each of these categories will have up to 3 recipients:

Most Popular - games from a given publishing year that were ranked the most times.
New Edition - games from a given publishing year where most of the work was in developing an existing game into a new edition (tinkering with rules, presentation, etc.). This award may or may not be awarded depending on if there are stand outs in a year or not.
New Game - games that were both mechanically designed and developed from the ground up or from a basic framework.

Are we clear? I’ll just assume we are and move on to the awards