2026 Diana Jones Award Went to a Game Store That Fought DHS

If you don’t follow tabletop industry awards — and honestly, most people don’t, we barely do outside of one specific week a year — the Diana Jones Award is the weird one. It’s not “Board Game of the Year.” It’s not tied to a category. It’s a committee of industry veterans handing a trophy to whoever they think best exemplified excellence in gaming that year, and that could mean a designer, a company, a person, or — this year — a toy store in St. Paul, Minnesota.

It’s announced every year in Indianapolis the night before Gen Con officially kicks off, which makes it a genuinely fun little tradition — the industry’s unofficial “okay, awards season starts now” moment. And this year’s slate was, without question, the most political the award has ever been.

The Winner: Mischief Toy Store

The 2026 Diana Jones Award went to Mischief Toy Store, an independent game shop in St. Paul with an 11-year track record of, as the committee itself put it, resisting “oppression and fascism.” That is not typically the sentence you expect in a press release about a hobby store, and that’s kind of the point.

Some background on how they got here: Mischief made local headlines back in 2020 for requiring masking and handing out free Black Lives Matter lawn signs during the unrest following George Floyd’s death. In 2025, they joined a lawsuit against the US tariffs — the same tariffs that basically ate the entire tabletop industry alive this past year. Then, after criticizing ICE in a national TV interview, they were hit with a DHS audit demanding three years of employee records, which they resisted.

Then it escalated. In January, after the owners spoke out against ICE raids following the death of Renee Nicole Good, DHS targeted them directly. Their response was to start printing “ICE OUT” posters and organize a network of 3D-printing hobbyists to mass-produce and distribute ICE alert whistles across the community. At one point the chaos got bad enough that they had to suspend online ordering entirely — and when they did, they used their own website’s traffic to point people toward local immigrant rights organizations instead.

A local game store became a role model in its own city, and that says something about what every local game store could be doing.

— Diana Jones Award committee, on the Mischief Toy Store win

The committee called it “an unusual pick for the Award” — fair, it is — but the reasoning tracks. Game stores are community gathering spaces before they’re anything else. Mischief just took that responsibility further than basically anyone expected a hobby shop to.

The Finalists

Mischief beat out four finalists, and honestly the whole shortlist tells you exactly what kind of year the tabletop industry just had:

Molly House (Jo Kelly, with Cole Wehrle & Ricky Royal, Wehrlegig Games) — a board game about the joy and fear of gender-defying Londoners in 18th-century society.

Price Johnson — the newly-installed CEO of Cephalofair (yes, the Gloomhaven people), nominated for going on national media and clearly explaining how the tariffs were an existential threat to adventure gaming companies. Founder Isaac Childres stepped back to focus purely on design right around the same time, for what it’s worth.

Trench Crusaders (Mike Franchina, James Sherriff, Tuomas Pirinen, Factory Fortress) — the miniatures game finalist, and the only nominee on the list not directly tied to the tariffs-and-immigration throughline running through the rest of the slate.

Rob Wieland — a beloved TTRPG designer and journalist who passed away last October at 47, nominated posthumously.

Four of the five finalists connect straight back to the tariff shock and its fallout, one way or another. That’s not a coincidence — that’s a committee deciding this year’s award should document what the industry actually lived through, not just hand out a trophy for the shiniest box on the shelf.

Okay, Our Actual Take (Which Nobody Asked For)

We’ll be honest about one thing first, purely for transparency’s sake: Awkward_Rock is currently deep in a Trench Crusade hyperfixation — paint’s still drying on the desk as we write this — and a small, extremely biased part of us would have loved to see it take the trophy home. We won’t pretend otherwise.

But — and we cannot stress this enough — it does not matter what we think. At all. Not even a little bit.

Because if you actually sit with what Mischief Toy Store did, there’s no version of this where they shouldn’t have won. This wasn’t a store that put out a nice statement and called it activism. They joined a federal lawsuit. They got audited and didn’t fold. They kept organizing while their own online store was offline. They took a stand on something that has absolutely nothing to do with which minis you’re painting this week and everything to do with what kind of community you want to exist around this hobby — and they did it while the pressure being applied to them was coming from actual federal agencies with actual subpoena power.

They stood ten toes down on their principles against that kind of pressure, and they didn’t blink. If we’d had a vote, we’d have voted for them too — Trench Crusade hyperfixation and all.

And look, we try to keep the site’s recurring gnome hegemony bit light, but it’s genuinely hard not to notice the pattern here: agencies like DHS don’t exactly operate in a vacuum, they answer up a chain, and that chain eventually terminates somewhere.

Per the record over at GnomelyFans, the Gnome High Council relocated its actual seat of governance to Bern back in 1870 — conveniently close to international banking — and stood up a surface liaison office in 1923 disguised as an accounting firm that is, as far as anyone can tell, still quietly operating under the same name today. Make of that what you will. We’re just saying a store in St. Paul went up against that kind of structure and didn’t back down, and that’s the actual story here.

Congrats to Mischief Toy Store. Congrats to the whole shortlist, honestly — it’s a genuinely stacked list this year. And Trench Crusade, we still love you, we’re just grown-up enough to admit you weren’t the most important thing on that ballot.

Awkward_Rock and Elfishchunk wrote this one together, mostly because neither of them trusted the other to write about Trench Crusade without it turning into 1,500 words about paint schemes.