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I've played Brass: Birmingham (only once) and my feelings are pretty close to Jimmy's. It felt like an expansion of the original game, albeit a fairly extensive one. I also hated the artwork (not that that's relevant to the discussion). But I also understand what David is saying--to a truly skilled Brass veteran, figuring out the ramifications of the new rules would be quite a challenge. I love Brass, but I've never been that good at it, so that's not the sort of thing that would make an impression on me after just one play. I can certainly see where one could say that the need for these new strategies make it a new game.
And that may be the crux of the situation. Some spinoffs may be too close to the original to qualify for the award, while others are sufficiently different to warrant inclusion. But different people will differ on where to draw the line. There may be a few straightforward cases, but most will fall in a gray area.
The way it works right now is if the Geek says a game is an independent one (and their rules for that tend to be very forgiving), a spinoff is eligible for the MCA. Then we, as a group, decide if it deserves to be nominated, and then if it deserves to win an award. We make that decision with our votes. In this case, enough people decided that Brass: Birmingham was an independent game for it to win one of the awards. It's certainly not the only way of doing things, but it seems to have worked over the years (and there have been no shortage of spinoff games to get nominated in the past).
If there is sufficient interest in coming up with another way of doing this in the future, I'd be happy to implement any suggested changes. In point of fact, we do have a way of sorts, since during the initial few days of the process, when I ask for games to be included in the first election, I also ask if anyone has objections to those that have been proposed. I realize that inertia is a big factor here, which is probably why no one thought to object to Brass: Birmingham or Concordia Venus (not to mention Endeavor: Age of Sail or Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra--you see, spinoffs *are* quite common). We probably could vote on games that seemed too close to the original and winnow some of those cases out ahead of time. Or we could just continue to let people make their feelings known on these games by how they vote in the general elections. I'm happy to do what the majority wants, so now is the time to raise discussion points if you'd like to change how things work in future years.
Larry