Best structure for new DB, picking your heads

The people of these forums have been extremely kind and helpful so I'm going to pick your heads again on a new issue.

I'm tracking members, award credits, awards etc for a gaming squad and I'm not happy with my old system that is a mix of a bloated db and excel sheets.
I'm thinking of starting from scratch and want to make things as automated as possible and hope you people can help suggest some ideas to maximize efficiency and streamlining it.

What I want to do for each member is keep a log of awards received, current credits towards all the various awards, show what they are due (preferably filtering already received ones) and a simple way to add in new credits correctly.
One problem is that he awards work differently, one is for time in squad, most others are based on credits and a few uses a total of several different credits. Each award in general also have different grades requiring different amounts of credits to achieve.

I figure one base table with user info (nick, join date, active y/n and id that will pull all the tables together).
I guess I need a look-up table with all the awards, not sure how to set it up with requirements etc though.
One table with the log of awards, who-when-why-what kind of thing
One table for the credits (or maybe one table per award linking to id, that would create a lot of tables, but maybe a better solution?).
Separate table for awarded stuff beside the log? that can be compared to due list?
Table that list the highest awards due by checking credits vs requirements somehow? (maybe the last two is more functions/queries that actually needed tables?)

I guess there's a lot more to consider (maybe automated updating by feeding it excel sheets with credit reports?) and I hope some kind soul can give some advice and pointers and guide me in the right direction (in addition to doing the task at hand I also want to learn and become more apt at building and using Access).

I hope this isn't out of bonds for this forum, and thank you in advance for your help and advice!