My reviews are a little delayed this year (thanks, government shutdown for turning October and November into scheduling train wrecks) and I didn’t get to take every submission on a test drive, but the silver lining is that I can just fire off my comments without worrying about influencing anyone else’s reviews. My comments will be short, as I just jotted a few notes about each work, and now a few weeks after playing them, I tend to only remember the points that really struck me. I didn’t use my scoring rubric from previous years, but I had the same criteria in mind. I would usually rate games according to five categories on a first pass and then adjust the scores before voting based on gestalt after playing all of them. This year, I went with my initial gut rating and used the overall history of IF Comp as a baseline.
These reviews are in the random order of play, up to the point that I hit the November 15th voting deadline. Here’s the pseudo-obligatory line break for propriety and etiquette: