As usual with this sort of competitions it was really hard to select the winner. Every submitted game had a thing or two that caught my eye and made it a worthy submission. Every submitted game had something special about it, be it a fun gameplay, aesthetic graphic design, or an overall polished feel to it. But it the end, there can be only one. Without further ado, the winners, runner-ups and third places of Gynvael's Winter GameDev Challenge:

Best Game Award

1. Dungemoji by Vassildador - award of 150 USD (or equivalent)

2. Against the Endless Enemy by drekmonger - award of 100 USD (or equivalent)

3 (ex aequo). Battle Chess by Mart - award of 50 USD (or equivalent)

3 (ex aequo). Taktyka by Cody Ebberson - award of 50 USD (or equivalent)

Community Choice Award*

1. Battle of the Dawn by Fanna - award of 100 USD (or equivalent)

2. You Shall Not Pass by Marcin Lasota (Codeboy) - award of 50 USD (or equivalent)

2. X-PL: 1830/31 by Arkadiusz Cholewa, Maciej Szymański - award of 50 USD (or equivalent)

3. Dungemoji by Vassildador - award of 25 USD (or equivalent)

* For reasons purely of my fault I didn't collect voting data from the exact deadline. In the end the I decided that the best solution in this case is to do a max(place) from available data, which in this case were YouTube analytics for the deadline (which I think is shifted a few hours due to timezones) and YouTube voting data from after a few hours from the deadline. Apologies for the mixup (though in the end it's probably beneficial for the authors).

Final note

I would like to thank once again all participants for their submissions and congratulate all the winners (I will contact you about rewards shortly).

If you're wondering how I selected the winners in the main category, I looked at the art style (is it well designed? elegant? aesthetic?), gameplay (is it fun? polished? non-trivial? can you win/loose? how closely does it fit a "turn-based tactical game" description?), sound & music (though most games didn't have any) and additional features which made the game interesting, unique or just plain cool.

Overall the level of submitted games was quite amazing and I had a lot of fun testing them. I'm really looking forward to Gynvael's Summer GameDev Challenge 2018 :)