Wrapping up the last of our 2013 year-end coverage, we have the results of our annual Readers’ Choice Awards voting.

Our Readers’ Choice Awards are a pretty simple concept – it’s all up to you!  We take nominations all year long in our forum threads, and any game that’s nominated that was released within that calendar year gets included.  Our editorial team helps group some of the categories together, but if you nominated it, it’s here somewhere.

We divide our categories into tabletop and digital games, with miniatures normally included with the tabletop games.  This year, however, we had no nominations for any miniatures games or products.  Within each of the digital / tabletop branches, we break out some separate categories, but we always include an “overall” category for each, pitting every nomination against each other.

Without further ado, here are your winners of the GrogHeads 2013 Readers Choice Awards:

Our winners in each category are awarded the GrogHeads Readers’ Choice Award Gold Medal

The tabletop world saw nominations into several categories, include Wargames, Strategy Games, Magazine games and scenarios, Expansions, Reprints, and the ever-coveted Overall category.

Consim Press’ The Hunters hammered the competition for the Tabletop Wargame of the Year, with only A Distant Plain, even garnering double digits as A Distant Second.  The Ogre Designer Edition brought up the third place tail.

Competition in the Tabletop Strategy Game of the Year was a little more heated, with the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game narrowly edging out the much-anticipated Firefly Board Game to take the title.  Eldritch Horror nailed down third place.

With only 3 nominees in the Magazine category, we were only awarding a Gold for the top finish, and Against The Odds Magazine’s game Guns of the Askari clearly earned the title with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Another fantasy franchise took home the prize in the Tabletop Expansion of the Year, with the Lords of Waterdeep: Scoundrels of Skullport claiming the prize over expansions for Zombicide and Spartacus.

The Tabletop Re-issue / Re-release of the Year, was not without some controversy.  We did not include the Designer Edition of Ogre in this category, as we felt is was enough of a new game to warrant inclusion elsewhere; some of our readers disagreed.  As it was, the Wings of War WWI re-issue beat out Merchant of Venus and Battlelore (2d Ed) for the category.

Our overall Tabletop Game of the Year was The Hunters.  A Distant Plain was second again, showing a strong grognard bias in the overall game category.  The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game finished 3d, with a narrow margin over Wings of War WWI.

Second place finishers pick up a Silver Medal.

Our Digital categories were certainly more varied, but the strongest showings here at GrogHeads were the games you’d expect: the wargames.

Our Digital Wargame of the Year was certainly a worthy title holder, as Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations pulled in first place over several other acclaimed titles.  Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm came second past the post, and Wargame: AirLand Battle ensured that all three titlists had colons in their names.

Our Digital RTS of the Year was a big win for Europa Universalis IV, but the competition for second and third was tight, and won by Company of Heroes 2, and Graviteam Tactics Operation Star, respectively.

The first person shooter category included some games that were best categorized as “action” games as well, and ARMA III came out on top as our Digital Action / FPS Game of the Year.  Again, the competition for the follow-up spots was also tight, with Bioshock Infinite edging into second ahead of Battlefield 4.

We reviewed Card Hunter earlier in the year, and found it to be a fantastic little game.  The readers agreed with us as nearly half of the voters picked it as the Digital RPG of the Year.  Path of Exile and Sword of the Stars: The Pit rounded out top three.

Expansions and mods are always an interesting category, as some official expansions are competing side-by-side with third-party mods, and many different genres are thrown into the same pot.  This year, Combat Mission: Market Garden landed the title for top expansion, in a category that saw XCOM Enemy Within finish second and Civilization 5’s Brave New World expansion round out the podium.

A Bronze Medal might not sound like much, but third place in some pretty competitive categories is nothing to sniff at!

Controversy reared its head again as some readers thought Total War Rome II should have been in the RTS category instead of the Digital Turn-Based Strategy category, which it ultimately won.  Strategic Command: Assault on Democracy and Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol finished with the silver and bronze.

Drive on Moscow rolled through the competition like a panzer column and claimed over half the votes as the iOS/Android/Mobile Game of the Year.  Panzer Campaigns – Bulge ’44 finished second, ahead of Elder Sign: Omens.  We’re hoping this category is going to grow in future years.

Finally, we had a handful of games that, quite frankly, we weren’t sure how to group.  But true to our principles, if it was nominated, we included it somewhere.  The Euro Truck Simulator 2 cleaned up in this category, busting past Spelunky and Pinball FX2 to win the “Arcade” category, knowing full well that some of the games in the category weren’t true arcade gamed.

Finally, our overall Digital Game of the Year was won by Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, with Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm again coming in second, and Europa Universalis IV edging out Card Hunter for third.

Congrats to all of our winners, and a hearty and grogfelt “thank you” to all of our readers who participated in both the nomination process and the voting.

As a reminder, our nomination threads for tabletop and digital games open all year round, and anyone can drop whatever games they choose on us.  We promise that if you nominate it, we’ll put it out there for votes at the end of the year.

Discuss the winners in our forums >>