This post is from Alex Knight. Alex is the designer of Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War, which received the 2024 incarnation of SDHist’s Summit Award (for games published in 2023). That award recognizes the historical board game each year that most broadened the hobby through ease of teaching and/or play, uniqueness of topic, or novel approach. Here are Alex’s thoughts on the award one year later. (Note: this year’s Summit Award and Bobby Nunes Award will both be announced in person at SDHistCon Summit Friday, and will be announced online shortly after that. Also, the top image is a photo of the Land and Freedom board from Yoni Goldstein, designer of Chicago ’68, and is used by permission.)
What the Summit Award Means to Me
Rejecting fascism has once again become a controversial stance in the United States. On October 9, 2025, academic historians Mark Bray and Yesenia Barragan were forced to leave the country after receiving coordinated death threats because of their research on historical anti-fascist movements. They fled to Spain with their children.
In the 1930s, 2,800 other Americans defied the U.S. government and went to Spain to fight against fascism, joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They were defeated by Franco’s forces, but in the liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany in August 1944, Spanish anarchist exiles were the first Allied troops to enter the capital, driving American tanks painted with the names of Spanish Civil War battles such as Ebro and Brunete.
We are connected to the past whether we like it or not. Better to know our history and have the chance of not repeating it, than to be prodded along in darkness and ignorance.
Given the current climate, the selection of my board game, Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War for last year’s Summit Award is a testament to SDHistcon’s pushing the boundaries of the board game community by spotlighting games that tackle complex social history in inventive ways. Winning the Summit Award is massive validation for me as a designer, but it more so validates the resonance of the game’s story.
In Land and Freedom, players take the roles of competing political ideologies (Anarchist, Communist, and Moderate) having to semi-cooperatively balance their own agendas against the existential need to defeat fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). As a designer, communicating a story like that is the fuel that sustains you from the initial brainstorm through years of testing, failing, and starting over, before reaching the final, fully-realized game. Getting it published and seeing so many people enjoy the game and wrestle with the gut-wrenching dilemma at its heart— — maintaining the most fragile of alliances against an all-threatening evil— — is one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.
I want to honor all those involved in the Summit Award for the important role they are playing in advancing the historical board game hobby/industry towards engagement with meaningful subjects like the struggles for rights and freedom in past winners Votes for Women and Red Flag Over Paris. I also congratulate the Summit Award for highlighting designs with accessible mechanics that non-wargamers can easily approach and thereby engage with the history. Candice Harris on the BoardGameGeek podcast named Land and Freedom her number one game for introducing historical games to non-wargamers, which blew me away and reinforces the SDHistcon mission of bringing new people and new kinds of people to the party.
The reason I began designing board games was to create joyful explorations of radical history. My life has been enriched tremendously through my involvement in social movements like the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, and Occupy Wall Street. Social movements are fueled by community, strategic vision, and fun. Those three traits are also core to the experience of board games, so it seemed a natural fit to bring the history that inspires me into a board game setting.
My game on the Russian Civil War (1918-21), Hammer and Sickle, will be published by GMT. It features another uneasy alliance, between the Anarchists and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, defending the revolutionary gains of the peasants and workers, while the counter-revolutionary White Army relies on terror and the New Nations simply wish to escape the Russian orbit entirely. I’m also working on a design covering the radical anti-slavery movement and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, which contains storytelling elements to represent the unpredictable twists of fate that can befall a small direct action of tremendous consequence. Other designs will follow, all with the aim of ushering struggles for a better world into a setting of contagious play.
Meanwhile, the Summit Award each year will surely remain a bright and positive beacon drawing our attention to only the most groundbreaking and inspirational board game designs. I’m deeply grateful for one of my games to be connected with it.
Alex will be at SDHistCon Summit 2025 this week to show off some of these upcoming games. You can follow him on Bluesky here. See also the 2023 ” There’s a revolution happening in board games” roundtable he coordinated for COI Online.