Origins Award

A House Divided is unquestionably my favorite game about the Slaveholder's Rebellion (better known to many as the American Civil War, and to Reb sympathizers as "The War Between the States," or in sad and extreme cases as "The War of Northern Aggression"). It deals with the entire war, barring minor actions in Texas, with a map whose four corners cover roughly New York, Kansas, Louisiana, and northern Florida. It's also playable in a few hours.

Illuminati is the classic Steve Jackson Games boxed set of conspiracy and high weirdness, inspired by the equally classic Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. The game won the Origins Award when it was first released in 1982, and inspired a trading card version in 1995 called Illuminati: New World Order, which plays similarly. In all honesty, I think no other boardgame has had such an influence in my life as this one –- both in terms of my admiration for its tight yet expressive game mechanics, and also for introducing me to the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and ultimately to the Discordian Society, of which I am a key member (I could tell you why, but then I’d have to scramble your brains with a spoon).

Time travel would seem to be a fairly intractable subject for a game. After all, paradoxes are a major issue, and the sheer variety of potential outcomes are a challenge, at least if you posit that changing the time stream is at all feasible (and if you don't, then time travel is nothing more than historical tourism). That's one reason that Chrononauts is such a clever design; it tackles the problem head-on, producing something quite satisfying (and even instructional for younger players without much knowledge of history) with what is, when you come down to it, a remarkably simple and quite clever system.