The winners of the Diana Jones Award 2025 have been announced. This sought-after award is given to four emerging designers in the tabletop industry, amplifying the voices of rising talents from marginalized communities. Part of their prize includes a trip to this year’s GenCon.
The Diana Jones Award 2025 Emerging Designer Winners
In an official blog post, the Diana Jones committee has named their four Diana Jones Award 2025 emerging designer winners. Those four winners are Ashraf Braden, Elliot Davis, Lyla McBeath Fujiwara, and Marceline Leiman. This is the fifth year the committee has given out this award.
Ashraf Braden is an African RPG designer living in Uganda. His most notable work includes working on a sourcebook for Dungeon Crawl Classics and his zine, Legends of Uganda. As the name implies, this zine is dedicated to adapting Ugandan myths and legends to gaming tables.
The second winner, Elliot Davis, is based in Brooklyn. Davis’ work credits are a mix of board game design, podcasting, and self-publishing his work, like Rom Com Drama Bomb and The Time We Have. He has also worked on solo mode supplements for other indie TTRPGs. These include The Wanderer for Orbital Blues and Accept(Deny) for Hunt(er/ed)
Winner number three, Kyla McBeath Fujiwara, has an impressive body of work. In addition to freelancing for Hitpoint Press and Evil Hat Productions, Fujiwara helped fundraise scholarships at Big Bad Con and helped organize networking events for POC designers at the event.
But Fujiwara’s biggest accomplishment to date is being the project lead for the Cosmere RPG, the ambitious tabletop adaptation of Brandon Sanderson’s best-selling fantasy book series. She is also the book lead on the game’s prewritten adventures, Stonewalkers and Mistborn Legacy.
Last but not least, the Diana Jones Award 2025 committee recognizes Marceline Leiman. Leiman is a board game instructor at NYU and has worked alongside design teams at North Star Games and Underdog Games. In addition, she has produced two board games of her own: the wood-and-fabric game High Tide and the bluffing microgame Phantasmic.
All four winners will receive a one-year voting membership with GAMA, a $6,500 prize package, an all expenses paid trip to GenCon, and a game demo spot on GenCon TV.