Voting is open on the first round of the XYZZY Awards. You can go here to login, then here to vote.

First-round voting will be open for the remainder of April, closing one minute past midnight on May 1 (US-Pacific time).

This year we’re adding an experiment to the first round: instead one nomination each category, you can now make two. You don’t have to nominate two games, but you can’t vote for the same game twice. The hope here is that this will lead to somewhat more balanced categories; the vote can be so spread out in the first round that there have often been many-way ties, leading to a second round where there are either way too many nominees, or way too few.

A polite reminder if your game is nominated: you’re not allowed to vote for your own game, and canvassing for votes – which for purposes here I’m going to define as ‘any action which results in a large number of people showing up specifically to vote for a particular game or slate of games’ – is strongly discouraged, and may result in votes being discarded.