To celebrate 10 years of Boardgames Australia, the committee is looking to recognise outstanding and ongoing achievement in Australian board gaming by creating the Lifetime Achievement award.
The first Lifetime Achievement award goes to Phil Walker-Harding for his consistently outstanding board game designs.
Phil started by self-publishing under his Adventureland imprint, and has gone on to have his designs published by some of the biggest publishers in the world such as Z-MAN, KOSMOS, CMON and Lookout Games.
Phil’s designs generally hit the sweet spot of combining great fun with accessibility so that people can easily pick up and play the game. He often achieves this by a refined focus on a single core mechanism or concept. By distilling his games in this way, he provides fun for the whole family while still retaining surprising depth and replayability.
Boardgames Australia has recognised Phil’s designs multiple times. Archaeology: The Card Game was the first game to win Boardgames Australia’s Best Australian Game award in 2008. Zev from Z-Man game was at the award presentation, and subsequently picked up and republished the game.
Phil is the only designer to win Boardgames Australia’s awards multiple times, having won the award 4 times in 9 years with Dungeon Raiders (2013), Sushi Go (2015) and Imhotep (2017).
His designs have also been nominated many times with Cannonball Colony (2009), Pirates of the Spanish Main: Shuffling the Deck (2014), Pack of Heroes (2015), and Cacao (2016).
Phil has also been recognised further afield,with nominations for the Spiel de Jahres for Imhotep and Recommendation for Cacao, the UKGE Awards Best General Card Game Award for Sushi Go!
In giving this award, Boardgames Australia is recommending any game with that bears the name Phil Walker-Harding as a gateway to fun for Australian families.