Gaming Like It’s 1930: Game Jam Winners Announced!

A card game adapting a beloved 1930 novel, a digital challenge to abstract art snobbery, and an interactive fiction piece exploring Weimar Germany are among the winners of this year’s “Gaming Like It’s 1930” game jam, organizers announced Friday.

The annual event, now in its eighth year, challenges game developers to create works inspired by or based on creative works entering the public domain on January 1st, 2026 – in this case, those from 1930. The jam, hosted on itch.io, saw submissions across both digital and analog formats.

Diary of a Provincial Lady by donnabooby took the top prize in the analog category. The game reimagines E.M. Delafield’s 1930 comedic novel, which follows the life of an upper-middle-class Englishwoman in a Devon village, as a card game. According to the jam’s organizers, the game blends the mechanics of games like Apples to Apples with the artistic technique of blackout poetry, tasking players with modifying diary entries to match prompts and collecting cards featuring illustrations from the original book.

“It’s simple, fun, funny, and a fitting winner of this year’s Best Analog Game,” the organizers stated.

In the digital realm, Geouug’s I Could Do That! earned the “Best Digital Game” award. The game responds to the frequent dismissal of abstract art with a challenge: players are shown Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow for a brief period and then tasked with recreating it. The game then provides a detailed, pixel-by-pixel comparison of the player’s attempt against the original, assigning a numerical score.

Marshview Games’ I am Sam Spade was recognized as “Best Adaptation.” The game is a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon. Organizers noted the game uniquely draws inspiration from Raymond Chandler’s later detective stories, particularly his exploration of character’s inner lives, to enrich Hammett’s comparatively stoic portrayal of Sam Spade. The game utilizes mechanics from the minimalist TTRPG Everyone is John, with players taking turns embodying different facets of Spade’s personality.

Autumn Chen’s interactive fiction game, Lilac Song, received the “Best Remix” award. Set in the final years of the Weimar Republic, the game explores themes of gender, democracy, socialism, and the rise of Nazism. It incorporates paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as early 20th-century musical compositions, to enhance the game’s narrative.

The “Best Deep Cut” award went to CARAMENTRAN by RedSPINE and poymakes, a haunting video game inspired by the Carnivals of Southern France tradition of parading and burning an effigy representing the “King of Carnival” to scapegoat the past year’s misfortunes. The game presents the player as the effigy, attempting to extinguish the flames while facing accusations from townspeople. Organizers highlighted the game’s use of collage graphics created from obscure 1930s archival images.

Geouug secured a second win with As I Lay Flying, earning the “Best Visuals” award. Based on William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, the game transforms the story into a slapstick physics-based challenge while retaining the novel’s emotional core. The game features original character portraits, parallax backgrounds, and thematically appropriate interface elements.

Organizers also highlighted several honorable mentions, including The Agatha Effect by A.M.Homunculus and Matteo Ignesti, a narrative game involving a seance with Agatha Christie; Early Sunday Morning by Nora Katz, a location-based scavenger hunt; The House Hunter Mystery by Gwen C. Katz, a Nancy Drew-inspired object-finding game; and Poetry Appreciator 2K26 by ZapJackson, a comedic exploration of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday.

Winners will be contacted through itch.io to arrange prize distribution. Organizers announced plans for a series of spotlight posts detailing each winning entry and an upcoming discussion on the Techdirt Podcast.