This weekend is Independence Day, which used to be the weekend I’d spend in Columbus, Ohio, at the Origins Game Fair. But this year, it was last weekend, if that makes anything clearer.

There are two big stories out of Origins this year: First, my game Trail of Cthulhu was beaten for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game by Luke Crane’s Mouse Guard RPG. Second, so was Dungeons & Dragons 4e. Now, I play 4e (when my DM can manage to schedule a game for a quorum of us) and enjoy it very much, and I absolutely believe observers like Joseph “Goodman Games” Goodman who say that 4e is showing strength not only in the mass market (its new corebooks reliably make, for instance, the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists) but in the hobby channel. But for it to lose Best RPG to a (brilliant, beautiful) game about talking mice is not business as usual.

Possible explanations include, in no particular order: 1) Since every attendee at Origins could vote for any award, the card-floppers and lead-pushers and chit-flippers voted against D&D for the same reason that I (had I not lost my ballot between bars) would probably have voted against Magic: Version Whatever for Best CCG: sheer cussedness. That said, Magic won for Best CCG this year, so obviously that explanation only goes so far. 2) Same set-up as #1, but the voters were seduced by a beautiful cover full of cute li’l mice. Seems shallow, although there are (Origins-Award-winning) publishers who claim to believe it. Of their own products, even. 3) My columns are amazingly powerful, and my love for Mouse Guard (strategically unveiled right before Origins) hoist me (and 4e) with my own petard. Let’s just say that the science on this question is not settled. 4) Mouse Guard had huge buzz, because it’s an awesome game with a better network of mavens and connectors in today’s wired con-attendee community. Possible, but — beating D&D? Really? 5) It was just the best game up for the award, so of course it won. This has the advantage of being true, but not of explaining very many other Origins Awards.

Really, the best possible news out of this contretemps is that there were three nominees (two were withdrawn after the nomination process as ineligible) that all could be said to deserve the Origins Award that year, and that I and Wizards of the Coast just got caught in a perfect storm of design excellence.

Don’t worry about me too much, though: I did win an Origins Award, for Best Non-Fiction Product, for Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales. Other, non Hite-related results can be seen here: Wizards wound up winning three all around, and my minis friends were generally pretty stoked about the quality of those awards, too. The “deck building as game” card game Dominion won the Spiel des Jahres and the Origins Award, so that’s hard to argue; Pandemic was an SdJ nominee, and won for Best Boardgame. In short, a really good run for the Origins Awards.

Not such a great run for the Origins convention: it was smaller and bereft of some major players in the dealer’s hall: Wizards, White Wolf, Paizo, Games Workshop, AEG, Green Ronin, and Fantasy Flight all skipped the show (though Wizards and, I believe, Paizo, ran some events), which can’t be where the organizers wanted to be even in these times of global economic brouhaha. It’s still considerably bigger than a regional con, and the game rooms were still pretty full, so there’s a foundation to build on — but there’s some load-bearing beams that could use a look-see first, methinks. That said, the new GAMA Executive Director has run a juvenile detention system and a Gulf War POW camp, which is pretty much the minimum requirement for running a game convention as I understand it.

So what was at the show that was any good? The games, of course. For my money, the single best new game at the show was Darren Watts and Jason Walters’ Lucha Libre Hero, which is even better than it sounds. Other standouts were Mike Fiegel and Jerry Grayson’s Hellas (literally a “space Odyssey”), Z-Man’s remake of Eric Goldberg’s “choose your own adventure boardgame” Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Gareth Hanrahan’s Hammer’s Slammers mod for Traveller. So there was good games to be bought, and even more good gaming to be had, at Origins on Not Independence Day.

Just stay away from the mice.