Origins Awards' 2026 TTRPG Finalists

The Origins Awards, which is an award program which covers all manner of tabletop gaming, from board games, to war games, through to tabletop roleplaying games, is run by the Game Manufacturer's Association and presented at the annual Origins Game Fair--which this year runs from June 17-21.

Amongst the various categories, there are two for tabletop RPGs: Roleplaying Game of the Year and Roleplaying Supplement of the Year. The shortlist includes Daggerheart, Cosmere, Starfinder, and Warhammer, amongst others. These are the nominees in each of the roleplaying categories:

Roleplaying Game of the Year

• Age of Vikings (Chaosium
• CHEW: The Roleplaying Game (Imagining Games)
• Coriolis: The Great Dark (Free League)
• Cthulhu Bay (MS Edizioni and Ares Games)
• Daggerheart Core Set (Darrington Press)
• Land of Eem Deluxe Box Set (Exalted Funeral)
• Cosmere RPG Stormlight Starter Set (Brotherwise Games)
• Starfinder Second Edition (Paizo Publishing)
• The Bonsai Diary (Gene Koo)
• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Player’s Guide (Cubicle 7)

Roleplaying Supplement of the Year

• Advent-ure Calendar 19: Kitty Clacks Christmas (Black Oak Workshop
• ALIEN RPG: Rapture Protocol (Free League)
• Call of Cthulhu: The Sutra of Pale Leaves – Twin Suns Rising (Chaosium)
• Cthulhu by Gaslight: Keeper’s Guide – (Chaosium)
• Full Art Dice Set: Porcelain (Q Workshop)
• Green Oaks (MS Edizioni and Ares Games)
• Pendragon: Gamemaster’s Handbook (Chaosium)
• The Field Guide to Floral Dragons: Explorer’s Box Set (Hit Point Press)
• The Vault of Mini Things (Tinkerhouse Games)
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: High Elf Player’s Guide (Cubicle 7)

The winners will be announced at Origins Game Fair in June.

 

[Zander]

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The Origins Awards, which is an award program which covers all manner of tabletop gaming, from board games, to war games, through to tabletop roleplaying games, is run by the Game Manufacturer's Association and presented at the annual Origins Game Fair--which this year runs from June 17-21.

Amongst the various categories, there are two for tabletop RPGs: Roleplaying Game of the Year and Roleplaying Supplement of the Year. The shortlist includes Daggerheart, Cosmere, Starfinder, and Warhammer, amongst others. These are the nominees in each of the roleplaying categories:

Roleplaying Game of the Year

• Age of Vikings (Chaosium
• CHEW: The Roleplaying Game (Imagining Games)
• Coriolis: The Great Dark (Free League)
• Cthulhu Bay (MS Edizioni and Ares Games)
• Daggerheart Core Set (Darrington Press)
• Land of Eem Deluxe Box Set (Exalted Funeral)
• Cosmere RPG Stormlight Starter Set (Brotherwise Games)
• Starfinder Second Edition (Paizo Publishing)
• The Bonsai Diary (Gene Koo)
• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Player’s Guide (Cubicle 7)

Roleplaying Supplement of the Year

• Advent-ure Calendar 19: Kitty Clacks Christmas (Black Oak Workshop
• ALIEN RPG: Rapture Protocol (Free League)
• Call of Cthulhu: The Sutra of Pale Leaves – Twin Suns Rising (Chaosium)
• Cthulhu by Gaslight: Keeper’s Guide – (Chaosium)
• Full Art Dice Set: Porcelain (Q Workshop)
• Green Oaks (MS Edizioni and Ares Games)
• Pendragon: Gamemaster’s Handbook (Chaosium)
• The Field Guide to Floral Dragons: Explorer’s Box Set (Hit Point Press)
• The Vault of Mini Things (Tinkerhouse Games)
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: High Elf Player’s Guide (Cubicle 7)

The winners will be announced at Origins Game Fair in June.

From a former Origins Award winner, let me wish all the current contestants the best of luck!

 

[Zaruthustran]

Lots of great stuff! Very happy to see Vault of Mini Things there. It deserves more attention.

Thanks, Mike. It's been a labor of love for sure and I'm proud of the outcome. No joke, the project started when my players went in an unexpected direction and I had to find my Sahuagin minis. I looked through my big Costco-sized bin of hundrers of prepainted plastic minis--which I'd even helpfully grouped in sandwich baggies--and just couldn't find them. After 15 minutes of rooting around I sighed and just put some d6s on the table. If I own a thing, but can't quickly access and use the thing when I need it, then what's the point of owning the thing? And devoting such a huge amount of space to storing it?

Thus: the Vault of Mini Things. Flat-pack standees with gorgeous front-and-back art hand-drawn by Marshall Short (of Printable Heroes fame). Over 800 of them, in all of D&D's wide varieties of diverse heroes and monsters and NPCs (and props and animals and familiars and persistent spells), sleeved and organized with color-coded divider tabs and alphanumeric codes on the bottom of each mini so you can quickly find (and put away) whatever it is you need. Large and Huge things, too: All colors of chromatic Dragons. Every type of giant. All the elementals. Golems. Even a purple worm. It's in the Vault.

Plus starter terrain for town, wilderness, and dungeon.

We made it for new players looking for a "one and done" tabletop solution, but really I think the person who'd appreciate it the most is the lifelong dungeon master. The person with a mishmash collection of prepainted plastics alongside hand-painted minis stretching from old Ral Partha and Grenadiers they slopped Testers paint onto when they were 10 years old to modern high-def models they expertly painted by airbrush and fine-point brush as an adult. All of that stuff is precious, but it takes up a ton of room and it's a pain in the ass to find and quickly deploy whatever it is you need at the moment. For such a gamer, the Vault presents a clean and consistent tabletop experience where everything fits in one board-game-sized box.

Still use hand-painted or Heroforged minis for your PCs, of course. It makes sense; player characters have more depth after all.

Anyway: glad to see folks are liking the Vault. Everyone at Tinkerhouse is grateful for the nomination and kind words, and looking forward to Origins.