(Photo by Anita Jankovic on Unsplash)
Hello and welcome one and all to the 2026 Milk Awards: Known far and wide like the rising tide, here to there like the county fair, from your basement to your game store, you’ve heard it all before. You know it, you love it: The Milk Awards! It is our favorite time of year where I determine the best RPGs of last year1 using a tried and true scientific process called “I think about it using my brain.” Without further ado, let’s get to our winners.
2026 Milk Award Winners
Cream of the Crop: Hollows by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor
Easiest to Recommend: Big Dog, Big Volcano by Kurt Refling and Kathleen Hartin
Most Unexpected: Green Oaks by Roberto de Luca
Best Adventure Module: Blood Cotillion by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies
Secret Sunday Sampler’s Pick of the Year: Hollows by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor
Why should I listen to you?
Honestly you don’t have any real reason to. I suspect that for most people who see this the reaction will be “neat” if a game they like is on the list, or “dumb” otherwise. But I played a lot of different games this year and really enjoyed a majority of them. I am putting together this list for those who may not have the time to play every game I recommend, so you can at least make sure to hit the highlights. I just want to make the most of your available playtime!
The rest of this post will be me waxing short about each winner and a few honorable mentions in each category. At the end I will drop in a list of all the games I played this year. It is probably worth it to scroll through that list and see if our general preferences align before taking my word for anything.2
Cream of the Crop (Best game)
Hollows by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor
This has to be my desert island game. The boss fights are the main event and they are so damn clever with the circular map that follows the boss, not the players. The abilities are simple but stack together with your party members so cleanly that teamwork becomes explosive. We live or die by the blade of friendship.
Boss fights are the easiest way to pitch Hollows, but what they don’t tell you upfront is that RRD somehow packed this game full of catharsis and reasons to call your therapist. The two things I remember most vividly from Hollows are playing a hyper prideful evangelist whilst grappling with my own personal religious experiences, and playing a character that uses any pronouns. While I could technically do the latter in any game, Hollows feels particularly cathartic because despite all the horrible-ass-shit things going on in the world they built, no one gave me guff for switching between he/him and she/her. Can you imagine a world like that?
I would play this game without the boss fights. Well done to Grant Howitt, Chris Taylor, and everyone on the team for Hollows over at Rowan, Rook, and Decard.
Honorable mentions3
Draw Steel was a close second. I have been following Matt Colville and MCDM for basically my whole roleplaying career, so it would be easy to say this is just a nostalgia/parasocial pick, but damn if they didn’t get so much right. I recently returned to a more traditional tactical rpg and often find myself wishing I had the tools Draw Steel provides. MCDM had a specific vision in mind and masterfully executed on it.
Perils & Princesses is a mix of simple, but clever design, and a near perfect aesthetic for me. Gift dice and heart dice feel like such obvious design decisions in hindsight, a sign of particularly well thought through mechanics. I love the retelling of fairy tales, especially with the bent toward the heroism of our princesses. I came to this game expecting to find a great game for my kids and came away with a great game for me.
Easiest to Recommend
Big Dog, Big Volcano – Kurt Refling and Kathleen Hartin
Big Dog, Big Volcano is $2 on itch and it could be the key to the best three hours of next weekend. There is no prep necessary, the game hinges entirely on prompts, and the central mechanic is straightforward. I would feel comfortable with running this for anyone whether they are RPG acquainted or not. To the veteran roleplaying head this has space for open story play, and to the totally new recruit this reads as a straightforward loop: Roll a die -> read a question -> answer the question. It’s beautiful.
Honorable mentions
Into the Odd from Chris McDowall and Johan Nohr is a game I think everyone should own a copy of. It reads as a case study on how to make the largest game possible with the fewest number of words. Into the Odd is the gold standard for precision and efficiency. The game itself was a major player in how I frame my entire understanding of the OSR. You have no abilities to save you, nothing but a few pieces of garbage and perhaps a single Arcanum in your inventory. You will survive by your wits alone.
Fomoria from Tania Herrero and Johan Nohr absolutely smashes the epic horror vibe. I think anyone familiar with trad or osr gameplay will get the Mork Borg based system very quickly, and with the powerful art and layout, one flip through the book is going to hook anyone in.4 Unfortunately, it isn’t out in full yet. I suspect that once it is available in print I will be sending physical copies to anyone who is even partially RPG-curious.
Most Unexpected
Green Oaks by Roberto de Luca
I never ever ever would have chosen this game to play on my own, so thank you to the GM that brought it into my life.5 I still can’t quite remember the rules to the game, but I do remember laughing so hard I cried as my geriatric whaler PC fought through crystal caverns filled with soda pop before watching their new ladyfriend get murdered by an undercover FBI agent as part of a cover up for spiking the retirement home Sunday dinners with LSD. There is no part of Green Oaks that I understand and I love it.
Best Adventure6
Blood Cotillion by Jim Rossignol and Marsh Davies
RPG fact: All players want to go to a fancy party. So why not make the party the whole adventure? My players loved this module because they got to sneak and flirt and cut their way through a beautiful ball filled with the worse people you can imagine, and I loved this module because I got to be the worse people you can imagine. Being a rich asshole who later gets put in his place is one of my favorite NPC archtypes, and it is just rife with them.
The adventure is also just presented so well. The pdf is thick with possible content, more than you could possibly get to in a single evening, but all the important encounters are on a cheat sheet for the GM and all the important NPCs are on a cheat sheet for the players. Rossingnol and Davies did all the prep work for me, all I had to do was read. It was fabulous.
Honorable mentions
Both Fabula Ultima and Draw Steel have these fantastic quickstart adventures where you can theoretically pick them up and play without any prep time and without any of the players including the gm having read or played an RPG before. They walk you through the rules as you play, with rules and character abilities getting unlocked in each new scene like a video game tutorial. They must be difficult to write, but it makes them so easy to suggest for new roleplaying groups despite both games being relatively complex.
Yochai Gal’s Positronic Library for Electric Bastionland is one of my favorite one-page dungeons because it is clear the game is not in combat. Gal gives you several somewhat absurd rooms with fun toys for the players to mess with including a cactus that is always on fire and a miniature black hole that will always kill you if you get too close. Maybe more than any OSR system, this adventure helped me to really feel the importance in providing scenarios not story. The adventure isn’t filled with combats or specific shaped keyholes, it just gives the players problems and lets them be creative. I love it.
Secret Sunday Sampler’s Pick of the Year
Hollows by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor
This award is chosen by vote from my players in our weekend one-shot group: The Secret Sunday Sampler. They have good taste! In a very, very close second and third place were Mythic Bastionland and Delta Green respectively.
Appendix and Acknowledgments
I played 38 total campaigns and oneshots this last year, using 33 unique systems. For a slight majority of those games, I acted as the GM. If it helps you understand my game preferences, I far prefer being a GM over a player, which I think makes it extra impressive that Hollows won me over even as a player.
I want to point out that all of these games were at least interesting enough to get me to take the time to run them, which comes with some level of endorsement all on its own. I wish I had the time to fully explore more of them, but alas, time marches ever forward and designers are putting out new incredible games much faster than I can play them.
Looking forward to the rest of 2026, I expect I will have fewer total games played, but I am hoping to up the number of campaigns played, even if they are short. Thank you to all the amazing players and GMs who have allowed me to enjoy all of this gaming. I’m excited to keep it up for years to come.
-Birdmilk
Game summary statistics
| Stat name | Stat value |
|---|---|
| Total number of distinct games | 38 |
| Number of one shots | 34 |
| Number of campaigns | 4 |
| Number of unique games | 33 |
| Games as a GM | 20 |
| Games as a player | 16 |
| GMless games | 2 |
All games played
| Game played | Game type | Game role |
|---|---|---|
| Pathfinder 2e | Campaign | GM |
| Wanderhome | Oneshot | Player |
| Outgunned | Oneshot | GM |
| Orbital Blues | Oneshot | GM |
| Fabula Ultima | Oneshot | GM |
| Fabula Ultima | Oneshot | GM |
| Slugblaster | Oneshot | Player |
| Teeth | Oneshot | GM |
| Hollows | Oneshot | Player |
| Pico | Oneshot | Player |
| Delta Green | Oneshot | GM |
| Salvage Union | Oneshot | GM |
| In the Night | Oneshot | GM |
| Blightfall | Oneshot | Player |
| Blightfall | Oneshot | GM |
| Blightfall | Campaign | Player |
| Eat the Reich | Oneshot | Player |
| Mausritter | Oneshot | GM |
| Troika | Oneshot | GM |
| Into the Odd | Oneshot | GM |
| Sleepaway | Oneshot | GMless |
| Into the Lair | Oneshot | Player |
| Electric Bastionland | Oneshot | GM |
| Perils and Princesses | Oneshot | Player |
| Draw Steel | Oneshot | GM |
| Kingdoms | Oneshot | GM |
| Trophy Dark | Oneshot | Player |
| Delta Green | Campaign | GM |
| Green Oaks | Oneshot | Player |
| Prince of Hounds | Oneshot | GM |
| Royal Blood | Oneshot | Player |
| Punk is Dead | Oneshot | Player |
| Starfinder 2e | Campaign | GM |
| Spire | Oneshot | GM |
| Wolves upon the Coast | Oneshot | Player |
| Big Dog, Big Volcano | Oneshot | GMless |
| Fomoria | Oneshot | Player |
| Hollows | Oneshot | Player |
- This is not the the best published in 2025, just the best of the games I personally played in 2025. ↩︎
- For instance, you’ll notices there is not a single Powered by the Apocalypse game. I will play those eventually, but lately my focus has been elsewhere. If you only ever play PbtA, then our tastes may be incompatible. ↩︎
- I think in a just world, Blightfall would be on this list. It is easily one of my favorite games I played in 2025, including multiple one shots as a player and a GM, as well as a full campaign. It is a start to finish banger for me. You always begin with collaborative world creation, the gameplay loops are simple and tight, and the character abilities are straightforward and evocative. But it isn’t publicly available as of publishing and the designer is real life friend which makes things complicated for an awards post. ↩︎
- This is true for Mythic Bastionland as well. ↩︎
- I feel like you get tagged in these a lot Gemelli ↩︎
- I excluded Impossible Landscapes from the running. It did not feel fair to include a full length campaign against all the one shot adventures I ran. ↩︎
Birdmilk's RPG Cafe 
Leave a comment