text: To be honest I'm still in a bit of shock-- after the votes were posted I was pretty sure I hadn't won. Zamboni Wars and Geomancy both received 8 first-place votes, and Penguin Soccer received 9 (not counting the ballot where it was the only vote), whereas Pylon only received 4 and Subdivision only 3. Just goes to show you how unintuitive this preference voting thing can be, but it also shows how much better it is at expressing the will of the voters than simple plurality voting.
  
  
  Anyway, it's clear to me that this was a very close vote, and all of the top five games had strong support. (In fact, I did a quick pass through a bunch of other ranking algorithms and found several that gave the win to Penguin Soccer or Zamboni Wars.)
  
  
  I don't find the system to be unintuitive.
  
  The condorcet system is based on the idea that the overall winner in any election should be the candidate that would have defeated any other candidate if it were only a one-on-one contest; which I think is a very intuitive concept; if A would beat B in an A vs. B contest, and A would beat C in an A vs. C contest, then A should win in an election of A vs. B vs. C. (The fact that plurality voting doesn't gurantee this is a strong argument against it in any election between more than two choices.)
  
  
  The complication comes, and this vote has some great examples, of what do to when A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A, as happened, when Subdivision beat Zamboni Wars, Zamboni Wars beat Moonshot, and Moonshot beat Subdivision.
  
  
  The base Condorcet method doesn't address how to handle so-called "Condorcet ties", but the Ranked Pairs method, which was used for this vote, breaks the tie by, essentially, ignoring the "weaker" wins; ZW beat MS by 15, and SD beat ZW by 4, while MS beat SD by only 2. (It's explained a bit more wordily for precision's sake, but that's the meat of it.)
  
  
  That said, it was a _very_ close contest, and there's no such thing as a "perfect" voting system; but Condorcet Ranked Pairs is a fair sight better than most, in my opinion.