Simming Prize Archives - Independence Fleet

A purple-tinted space scene featuring a futuristic starbase and a Starfleet-style starship approaching it, with the text "IDFLEET.COM" in the bottom right corner.

Awardapalooza 2025

Posted on February 2, 2026 | by Charles Star | 1 Comment

The 2024 Tournament of Simulations (aka ToS) were finally announced last month, and continuing our long tradition of excellence, IDF took home four more awards! Congratulations to the Captains and crews of the USS Wayfarer, USS Firebird, USS Washington, and USS Sunfire. In fact, the USS Wayfarer was the #2 overall sim for the entire tournament! Well done!

Outstanding Star Trek:

Excellent Star Trek:

Banner image of the USS Firebird, registry NCC-88298, featuring a detailed Starfleet starship flying through space. The ship is shown from above at an angle, with glowing blue and red elements and a sleek, futuristic design.

Banner for the USS Washington NCC-81533-E, featuring a sleek futuristic starship with a glowing deflector dish flying through space with a purple nebula in the background.

In addition to the ToS awards themselves, Ken Gillis and Shran dh’Klar were awarded Ongoing World Community Honor (OWCH) medals for judging at three different Tournaments. We also completely missed that Kevin Riker won an OWCH after last year’s Tournament. Thank you very much to all three of you for your continued selfless service to the community. Without you and others like you, ToS simply wouldn’t be possible.

A gold medal featuring the Ongoing Worlds alien mascot holding a globe, hanging from a green and silver ribbon, representing the Ongoing Worlds Community Honor award.

It turns out that we actually have even more awards to announce from last year as the USS Wayfarer and USS Montana shared the 2025 Q2 Outstanding Post Award from the Khitomer Peace Awards, which are sponsored by the Khitomer Conference. Congratulations to both games!

But wait, there’s more! The Simming League announced just yesterday that the USS Firebird was one of five winners of the most prestigious 2025 Simming Prize! Congratulations and well done to the entire team over there on the Firebird–your excellence and commitment to our craft is apparent to us all! Here is their citation in full:

“With an amazing cast of characters and top-notch host to match, the Firebird has blazed a trail of simming excellence for multiple years in a row, including winning the top overall prize at the most recent Tournament of Simulations, in addition to receiving extensive awards from their home fleet. The players complement each other perfectly, building on their existing culture and lore with new and inventive ideas in seemingly every joint post, which are a joy to read.”

A gold medal featuring a portrait of a man, framed by a laurel wreath, hanging from a blue ribbon with four gold stars—symbolizing excellence and recognition within a creative or roleplaying community.

If I haven’t missed anything else, we’re now fully up-to-date on community awards. But please do, keep the awards coming and make me write more blog posts about them!

We’ve Gone Plaid!

Posted on April 17, 2023 | by Charles Star | 3 Comments

If you visited our website yesterday, you probably noticed that it looked like it was straight out of 2002 (or 2001?). And you would be right! Using records from the Internet Archive, we reconstructed our Angelfire site from the days of yore using the current fleet line up, creating a mash up of then and now. The simming world was quite different back then–and so were our web development capabilities! In case you missed it, we’ve archived the 2023 retro site here.

But why now? Fast forward to April 14-16, 2011–it was exactly 12 years ago that IDF hosted the first modern SciWorld Online Convention, which incidentally was 12 years after the original SciWorld in 1999. In early 2011, the Simming League was largely dead and the community had drifted apart over the previous few years: Clubs rarely interacted with each other anymore. SciWorld 2011 changed all of that by serving as the genesis for a new era of cooperation and celebration. In addition to SciWorld, we also now also have FallFest, Khitomer, and Babel. SciWorld renewed interest in the Tournament of Simulations and the Simming Prize as well.

On a related note, a few of you have pointed out that we missed our typical April Fools’ Day joke this year. While we can’t go back in time to fix that, we hope this blast from our past was still fun nonetheless. Until next year…

Monthly Awards: January 2021

Posted on February 15, 2021 | by Rook Mirtoh | Leave a Comment

I hope your new year is off to a good start! And if it’s not, I trust simming with us here in IDF is giving you a good creative outlet.

If you remember from last month’s announcement, we are now presenting two Best Post awards, one for a single author post and one for a joint author post.

Without further ado, here are your January award winners:

Best Post (Single Author)

Chief Petty Officer Remal Kajun
Counselor
USS Liberty

For “Stumped”

Fine piece of writing here! Quiet and introspective, a solid juxtaposition to the excitement of life aboard a starship.

Best Post (Joint Post)

Capt. Rhenora Kaylen & Crewman Ronson Mitchell & Cmdr. Savar cha’Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Lt. Dean House & Lt. Aurora Vali
CO / Yeoman / XO / ASTO / CC
USS Liberty

For “Survival of the Fittest Pt 3”

Fantastic writing with an interesting setting!

Funniest Post

CPO Sapphire & Lt. Bonnie “Bon-Bon” Durnell
Master at Arms / Computer Systems Specialist
USS Liberty

For “Green With Envy, Red in the Face, Blue All Over”

Lots of good jokes in here, along with a mighty fine piece of role playing.

Genesis

Capt. Rhenora Kaylen & Cmdr. Savar cha’Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen
CO / XO
USS Liberty

For “The Jungle”

Great opening with a cliffhanger of an ending. Well done!

MVP

Cmdr. Savar cha’Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen
Executive Officer
USS Liberty

What an exceptional month of role playing! He not only led the fleet in posting, but also crafted a fabulous idea for the Liberty’s new mission and encouraged some new players as they got their footing.

Most Posts

Cmdr. Savar cha’Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen
Executive Officer
USS Liberty

For writing 30 posts.

Most Improved

Lt. Michael Stonebridge
Chief Intelligence Officer
USS Washington

His posting consistently pulled the crew in and kept the story moving and fresh. He also worked behind the scenes on several collaborations.

Rookie of the Month

Lt. Dean House
Assistant Security/Tactical Officer
USS Liberty

Lt. House jumped into the Liberty’s plot with gusto, with an impressive 12 posts in only two weeks. He also helped organize the Liberty’s discord and became a main character in the current series of posts.

Recruitment

Lt. Cmdr. Emmalyn Marcus
Executive Officer
USS Montana

The XO recruited one new player and continues to give the Montana a good presence elsewhere on the web.

Congratulations to all of our winners! Congratulations is also due to our very own Charles Star and former Director of Art Sadie Stanton as they won the prestigious Simming Prize due to their work producing The Simming Endeavor game show back on 2019. Well done to all!