Contests and Accolades

Design Competitions, Designer Accolades, public designer profiles, and a big polish pass

This is a big one. The Den now runs design competitions, awards Designer Accolades, opens designer profiles to everyone, and gives most of the site a cleaner, wider, more consistent look.

Design Competitions

Enter your game, play everyone else's, and get it in front of judges. Find competitions under Community → Competitions.

Entering

• Enter with one of your saved table setups. The competition keeps its own copy, so you can keep working on your game without changing your entry.
• Until entries close you can update your entry from your setup. After that, the version you entered is the one that gets played and judged.
• Every entry is a real DDD table that anyone can open and play right from the competition page.
• Choose whether publishers may contact you about your game. You can change this at any time.
• After results are published, you get written feedback from the judges, with judge names kept private.

Community playtesting

• During the playtesting phase, members play the entries and leave a rating with written feedback.
• Feedback from people who actually joined a table of the entry is marked.
• Feedback can be reported, and the organizer reviews reports.
• Community ratings are feedback for designers. Judges can read them, but they are never added to the judges' scores.

Judging

• Judges score every entry against a published rubric, and can save drafts before submitting.
• The scores suggest a shortlist and final placements. The chair judge can swap entries with a written reason that every judge and the organizer can see.
• The chair breaks any ties.
• Judging moves on only when the judges are done, never just because a date passed. If a round runs overdue, the organizer can close it once every entry has at least one evaluation.

Hosting

• Members on a paid plan can host a competition. Publishers can host as their publisher profile.
• You can host a small jam or a full season. Organizers set:
  • the schedule;
  • the number of finalists and awarded places;
  • prizes;
  • whether judges' scores are shown with the results.
• Descriptions, rules and submission requirements support Markdown, and Insert template buttons give you a ready-made starting point.
• Add judges by searching as you type, or add yourself.
• Phases move on automatically at the times you set.
• The organizer's control room covers:
  • a publish checklist;
  • judge progress;
  • disqualifications;
  • reported feedback;
  • an activity log of every change.
• If a designer edits their game after entries close, the change is recorded with a timestamp and flagged for the organizer and judges to review.

Results and discovery

• Finalists and final results are published by the organizer exactly as the judges decided, with medals for the winners.
• Competitions carry DDD Official and DDD Verified badges when the DDD team runs or checks them.
• Browse current and past competitions, filter by phase, and search by name.
• Publishers can browse every entry and message designers who said they welcome it.
• Email notifications keep judges, entrants and publishers up to date.
• Full guides for entering, playtesting, hosting, judging and publishers are in Help → Design Competitions.

Designer Accolades

Your profile now shows Accolades: badges earned from what you actually do on the Den. Once you've earned one, it's yours.

Contests: Contest Champion, Podium Finish, Placed, Finalist, Community Favorite, Contest Judge and Contest Host. You earn one per competition, and your profile shows how many, with links.

Playtesting: Playtest Host, Crowd Puller, Regular and Busy Month. These count qualifying playtests: sessions of your game where you were at the table and at least one other signed-in member played with you for 15 minutes or more. Guests are always welcome but don't count, and neither do your own second accounts.

Supporter: Den Patron, for staying on a paid Pro plan month after month. It starts hidden, so it only shows if you choose to show it.

Building: Component Builder, Rulebook Author and Published Prototype.

Community: Critic, Resource Contributor, Idea Implemented and Veteran.

Special: Founding Member and Staff Pick, awarded by the DDD team.

• Many accolades have tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond.
• Community Favorite goes to the highest community rating when playtesting closes. Bigger competitions need more ratings to win it, from 3 up to 10.
• Your best three accolades appear right under your name.
• Hide any accolade you'd rather not show.
• "Show the ones to earn" lists what's left and how close you are. Only you can see it.
• Open your own profile and anything you've just earned is awarded on the spot, marked New.
• The full list, with every badge and exactly how to earn it, is in Help → Community → Designer Accolades.

Designer profiles, now open to everyone

Share your profile link and anyone can open it, no account needed.

• A new full-width design with your banner colors, a big avatar, your tagline and your top accolades.
• Your games, each with its art, genre, player count and play time. Every public setup has a Play button that opens a ready table in the browser.
• Your competition record: entries, finalist spots and placements.
• A Share profile button that copies your link. Shared links show a proper preview card.
• Public profiles can now appear in search engines.
• Member names across the site now link to their designer profile, in a new tab, when that profile is public.

Your profile is still private until you tick Make my profile public in your profile settings. You'll need a Profile URL first, and the page now tells you if one is missing instead of quietly saving your profile as private.

A new Community menu

The top menu now has a Community section: Other Designers' Games, Community Resources, Suggestion Board, Publishers and Competitions. Tools keeps the tools: Calculators, SVG Cutout, Print & Play Maker and Mask Editor.