251 Participants from 29 Countries submitted 702 entries, including 369 Races, 297 Special Powers and 36 other ideas!

These raw numbers alone illustrate the tremendous response the Small World Design Contest received. From Australia to Austria, China to Chile, Singapore to Switzerland – budding game designers from around the globe proved what a Small World it really is when it comes to creative designs for this game.

It would take us weeks to respond to each entrant individually, so we’d like to publicly acknowledge and thank each of you for putting in the time, creativity and design effort into your entries. Even if you didn’t win (if you did, you’d know by now); were one of the innumerable adepts of the Doppelganger gang (40 and counting!); or forgot to specify how many Race tokens your Race or Special Power should come with; you delighted us in some way. It was fun opening each and every envelope and discovering what you had come up with.

So a BIG THANK YOU from us all at Days of Wonder for participating in the first place!

Even more impressive than the sheer numbers was the high quality of many of the entries. The top entries were so good that we couldn’t settle on which one constituted the best of the best. Instead we are granting not just 1, but 3 Grand Prize trips to Essen and awarding an additional 9 Secondary prizes whose entries will be published along with the Grand Prize winners.

We’re still in the process of finalizing it all in time for Essen (there’s the matter of a few illustrations to create!) so we’re not ready to announce the winning entries yet, but be on the lookout for additional news shortly…

Until then, here are a few more statistics on the contest entries:

• Entries received in the US (124) and Europe (127) were almost equal.
• The Race type with the most duplicate entries was the Doppleganger/Shapeshifter crew with 40 submissions, though Leprechauns and Were-whatever were close too!
• 36 entries were submitted that were neither a Race or Special Power. One of them was so delightful that we decided to find a way to get it in print anyway, and another one so unique, fun and breathtaking in scope that we decided to award it a Special Prize and publish it as a separate expansion in its own right, later in 2010!

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