Radio Hour: The Clicky-Clacky Candy Metric, feat. Clayton Notestine

Episode 40 of the Rascal Radio Hour sees designer and blogger Clayton Notestine join Chase to discuss the 2026 ENNIE awards (of which he is a nominee) and past awards (for which he was a judge, once). The ENNIEs purport to celebrate "excellence in tabletop roleplaying gaming", but the reality — especially in the eyes and minds of players — is much more complicated. Awards don't matter beyond what we invest in them, and can be, at their best, a collective victory lap for the industry. But an ENNIEs nomination can also propel the career of a small designer or team, and it doesn't arrive without consequences.

The duo then cover the creeping infestation of generative AI into tabletop design via Adobe software, as Chaosium discovered earlier this month. If the corporations pushing this corrosive technology can't convince us to adopt, they'll shove it through every crack in the foundation. Later, Clayton explains his unique metric for grading board games and waxes lovingly about simply reading Stonetop. And Chase still hasn't faced consequences for his quadruple-dealings in Diplomacy.

Finally, the pair wade into The Question Dungeon's muck in search of pesky reader-submitted questions. They postulate on a counter version of the ENNIEs and dare tabletop designers to play their genres straight — no Cthulhus or vampires allowed!

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Here's an excerpt:

Clayton: Like a lot of people, I was frustrated with the ENNIEs. And now I'm more indifferent to it. My assumption was always they're not doing things the way I would do them, and I think they are designed incorrectly. And the conclusion of my articles, my series, was actually the ENNIEs just straight up aren't for me, and they are not designed. They are this iterative thing that just sort of emerged organically. A lot of what my articles ended up being about was that anything you dislike about the ENNIEs is a result, a consequence, of the way it is built. And the way it is built is not malicious. It just sort of happened by a happenstance.

That can have some critiques. I would critique that pretty harshly: why not put your fingers in that pie and change things around a bit? Have a heavier hand on the scales. But obviously then I got nominated, so my opinion's completely changed. I actually think the ENNIEs are perfect, and there's nothing wrong with them.

Chase: And please vote for me.

Clayton: And please vote for me. As I said on Blue Sky, "On second thought, no notes." After a thirty-minute read in my blog, never mind. I was wrong.

Chase: My Criticism of the ENNIEs, a Rejoinder: Never mind, vote for me.

Clayton: I mean, it makes sense because the ENNIEs have a material impact whether you like them or not, and I think that is why people care. It's why, even though I don't think the ENNIEs are for me, I want something else out of an award show. I'm still gonna ask you to vote for me because, if I win, maybe I get a few more subscribers. Which means I get to keep the lights on, and it's all it's all good and gravy.

Chase: Awards don't matter, except when they do, and they matter to everyone at some point because, like you said, the material reality of getting nominated or winning the award. I have to imagine that being a judge and having this many awards and these many nominees is an arduous process. And then to have any sort of rubric for picking what is the — big air quotes here for the listeners — "best" and "second best." That's a big job.

Clayton: Yeah, it's a huge job. I've got a thousand things I would like to say about this, so I have to pick and choose. The ENNIES was the first like big award show that really stuck in people's minds. And it's just been operating on inertia ever since then. It's positioned itself as awarding excellence in gaming, but that's not how it's perceived in a lot of spaces. When I go on Discord or I see some comments on Threads or Bluesky, I think people are noticing that the ENNIEs are an incredible vehicle for getting eyes on things that otherwise wouldn't get eyes. They see it as almost a discovery platform. But that is literally not what it's positioned as in its own marketing copy. Does it operate as an organization that wants to give you the best of the best? I don't know. I don't think so.

The judges go in maybe thinking that a little bit, but they are also thinking, well surely we should show a wide swath, we should show a diversity of candidates. All these things that are maybe not necessarily lashed to this idea of excellence.

Chase: I have this critique of many parts of the tabletop industry, which is that if it isn't rigidly designed, it will become a vehicle for discovery and advertising because this hobby is just so otherwise starved for advertising. They will turn it all into an a vehicle for getting eyes on a product. Everybody needs it. There's just not enough of it out there. So, it makes sense that the ENNIEs would then become something like that.

How do you think that happens? Is that because of the judges? Is that because it is a fan-forward award show such that perception alters it so heavily? Or is the organization that runs not being realistic about where it sits within the public perception?

Clayton: I wanted to find a root cause, and my theory, my thesis, is that most of all this is can be saddled in the design, the systems, of the ENNIEs themselves. The reason why we have all these perceptions around the ENNIEs is because of the way it's made, how it's built.