The Stack

This year on this blog feels like it’s been mostly delays and excuses. Well, here’s today’s: I’ve been sick, and I didn’t want to judge Comp games while my physical misery had the potential to skew my judgment. That said, it’s Comp season and I am ready to start judging!

I wasn’t sure I’d do this. For the last two years, I’ve been putting the main Comp aside while I look at alternatives like Spring Thing and ParserComp. But I feel like there’s just something more… solid about the Comp itself. It’s an entrenched institution, sponsored by the IFTF, with its own purpose-built infrastructure. Little comps these days tend to run as itch.io jams, which no doubt makes them easier to set up, but makes me acutely aware that they’re dependent on a third-party platform that doesn’t really care about them. The Comp was around before all the popular commercial websites, and will probably be around after most of them are gone.

There are 75 entries this year. If I count correctly, 29 are labeled by their authors as parser games, 42 as choice-based, and four have been placed in the intriguing “other” category. I do not know how many I’ll be posting about here. Definitely not all of them.