Gen Con 2
August 6, 2025 | ≈ 8401 words | gencon
Thoughts on Gen Con 2
I did Gen Con again. 3 years ago I had a great time playing games and hanging out in Indianapolis, Indiana. But I came away not ever wanting to go again. But here we are, with 38 more games to mention and 6 days of gaming and walking to talk about.
This is going to be a chronological account of the board games I experienced swapping between reviews and experiences and the people I met as I remember them. I don’t remember that much because of lack of sleep. This is dedicated to the 1.5 people who are going to read this. And the first board game we’re starting with is:
Applejack? Yessir I started my vacation Wednesday morning at the airport with a game on Board Game Arena with Peter, my friend from Saugus board game night of 4 years. We played in the 45 minutes before boarding while sipping coffee at 7AM.
In Applejack you spend money to make money. There’s 3ish income rounds and try to make the most money buy chaining apples. It’s like in real life where increasing the size of your market stall makes people notice your larger market stall more so you make more money because of marketing or branding. In this game, the theme is you place adjacent apples for honey. Idk board games man.
Would I Buy: No.
After landing in Indianapolis and checking into the very convenient Omni hotel one block away from the actual convention center, we head over to Good Games Indianapolis to meet up with Big Mike, another Saugus gamer. He was with Issac and Megan, two friends (married together, information that Jenn needs) he met from volunteering for various board game companies at conventions. Big Mike et all was playing something Peter and I didn’t care about, so we took a look at the small game library in the store. There was a chance the store would be “home base” for the convention, and the quality and quantity of the demo shelf would determine that. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much we cared about, but we got to do a little bit of warmup for the con by doing what we were about to do for 4 days. A marathon of picking up a new game, reading rulebooks, teaching them, and playing them back to back to back. And Peter was the best learning partner I could ask for.
The first game I picked off the demo shelf had Game of the Con energy. GOTC if you will. Curious about the cover, I picked QUIN off the shelf and was surprised to see a spin on Stratego, a chess-y game where you don’t know what the opponents pieces are and you slowly deduce them by how they move and with the highly memorable bomb piece that instantly kills the opponents piece when attacked, a surprise since defending pieces normally do not attack back.
We played 2 games back to back and Peter was not as enthused as I was. I could have spent the next couple hours playing, but Peter didn’t care for it. Not a bad game he said, but no desire to play again.
Would I Buy: Yes.
Next on the docket was CULTivate, an aggressively mediocre game of playing cards that tell you to get a certain color person to place in your scoring grid, and playing other cards to prevent people from placing the right color people in the right spots in their grid to keep them from scoring. Played with Peter, Big Mike, and Angela, the last of the Saugus game group that came to Gen Con. Glad we played, because I know not to buy it now.
Would I Buy: No.
After CULTivate, we played Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, a Trio/Nana style push your luck game that punishes you for busting. Your singular goal is to flip a card that doesn’t tick the timer to twelve, but every card adds time. A 5 adds 5 time, a 4 adds 4, and a 0, well. Zero. Everyone orders their cards lowest to highest, left to right, so everyone starts knowing their left-most card is lowish. The game without table talk plays like a random game, flipping and busting and frustrating. The game with table talk is funny and boisterous, with equal amounts of generous hints and terrible bluffs. Why help anyone else? Because every time someone flips, the money gained from the supply is doubled. So the fifth person to succeed is getting infinitely more money than the second and third. Pushing your luck has its benefits.
Would I Buy: This was my game I brought. But I buy again yes.
Peter decided to help Angela back to her hotel since she had a bone bruise in her knee right before this week. I decided to stay to play games because that’s what I do. Big Mike’s party joined and after introductions Issac said he wanted to play a game on his shelf of shame and pulled out one of my perennial favorites: No Thanks. I asked if they knew the rules and they said they read the rules before they came, which is admirable. I wonder if that makes me ill-mannered as a person who made the conscious decision to only read right before deciding to play the game and making everyone wait for me to learn the game.
So we start into the game and the classic game of No Thanks plays out. With first time players “prudently” grabbing money saving cards while the “experienced” (me) greedily letting the card spin around the players for the small amount of push your luck the game offers. The game ends with the “prudent” players winning, as they should. Great game.
Would I Buy: fuck yeah.
It turned out that Issac was working on a new game and was showing it to publishers in the hopes of getting it printed. It was poker mixed with yahtzee, sculpting your hand to try to make all 8 different poker hands. The concept was great, but the play is lackluster. I am fucking awful at giving feedback for games. I’m too invested in playing the game for what it is because I like really digging into the weird rules and strange play that comes from an unpolished design. It teaches a lot about how to approach a game, just as an editor for creative writing wouldn’t make the final changes of a book, a playtester isn’t equipped with the context and backstory of the game to make the final changes for a game. At least that’s how I feel personally, and I may be wrong. So I just said “yeah I wanna play it more, I don’t really know”.
Would I Buy: No.
Sorry Issac.
The last game I played with this group included the inclusion of Danny, the friend of Issac’s brother. Big Mike wanted to play Camel Up, the 2014 Spiel des Jahres winner. I quite enjoyed the horse betting game this time around, with the race tense and the money tight, everyone made the “obvious” bets with the underdog pulling out in the end. A literal photo finish because of the players. Good play.
Would I Buy: No.
Peter returns sans Angela. Peter and I decided to meet back with our last hotel-mate and other gaming friends to help carry in the luggage. We got to the hotel and confirmed Tim and Mark’s safe voyage while not thinking too deeply about the horrors of the 10 hour drive they experienced. That kind of experience could cause one to never want to go to Gen Con again.
We left Tim, the driver, who went to get dinner. He is the reason I was in this state in the first place. Tim won a raffle for the Gen Con exclusive V.I.G. club and amongst many other benefits, allows members first dibs at the Gen Con hotel blocks. Hotel blocks that vaporize within the first minute once publicly available. With over 70,000 total attendees over the weekend, hospitality within walking distance is a privilege.
We gained Mark, our third and final hotel-mate.
I like Mark.
After getting situated, we walked Mark to where we had gotten our Gen Con badges not 3 hours ago. It didn’t even get a sentence in my chronological account of events because it was so trivial, but at 6pm, the line to pick up badges was so long that it snaked through the convention center. But it couldn’t take that long to pick up a badge, could it? A long wait for a badge is an experience that could cause one to never want to go to Gen Con again.
Sans Mark, we moseyed back to Good Games Indy and sat down to meet Ryan and his network. Ryan knows Peter through the Sunday Prudential Center Slight Social and Silly games meetup. I have also met Ryan at this meetup. Cool guy. His friend Steve, could not ask for a better gamer at the table. Quick to laugh and quicker on the turns, he kept it light and fun with any game he played. Though he keeps all his shrink on the boxes after cutting it cleanly around the opening which is weird. Really weird. First game we sat to play was Festival of a Thousand Cats. I’m glad I decided not to veto it, because it was a great game to start off with this group.
In Festival of a Thousand Cats, everyone has a hand of cards in 4 suits with numbers that range from 1-13. Each round 2 cards are put up for offer and simultaneously all players play a card. The higher card on offer goes to the highest card played and goes to their scoring pile, and the other goes to the lowest played card. The highest and lowest card of that trick are the next card’s offer. All other cards played are returned and scored by the player that played them. Those two sentences are hard to read and I’m not fixing it. The round ends when one player scores 3 cards that have the sake icon. For some reason, Peter fucking loved this game. It was his Game of the Con. I think every game with a simultaneous reveal is great, so I thought it was great. The 1 and 13 are auto win cards since there’s only one of each and they’re the lowest and highest cards respectively, but any player that played a card with a bird icon does a switcharoo with the 1 or 13 played, adding a risk to anyone who wishes to play them without consideration. There were great plays made and the banter with Steve absolutely sold the game. Great little game and feather light.
Would I Buy: No, but I’ll play any time.
With this group we ended with a game of Ali Baba, and I’m pretty sure we had fun but I genuinely have no recollection of the game. After the game we collected our bearings and head over to the Hampton Inn Express where Angela was staying over by the Lucas Oil Stadium, a structure I never entered. In the quiet lobby of the hotel we played Fire in the Hole, a raucous game where you throw felt balls into a ship-grid and try to land 4 adjacent balls in the grid. Incredible.
Would I Buy: Yes. You throw balls into a pirate ship. Come on man.
Wait I feel like I forgot something. Like the fact that Mark waited in line for his Gen Con badge for 4 fucking hours. Holy shit. It’s an experience like that which would make you never want to come to Gen Con again.
Back at the Omni, our home for the week, we decided that I would sleep on the floor. It wasn’t a big deal.
Day 1 of 6 over.
Day 2 started with how most days would start, a coffee and B.E.C. from the hotel cafe downstairs. It’s fucking expensive, but I’m paying for convenience here. I stash the bacon egg and cheese for lunch and inhale the coffee and make the decision to do what I wanted to the entire time last time I came, go to the BGG Hot Games Room and play all day. We did not play all day, but we did find out that we could play board games without having to wait 2 hours in a line to get into a convention center. Peter, Paul, and Mark all head into the room and sit down to learn the first game on Paul’s list of games to try at Gen Con, Kinfire Council, a game that is Lords of Waterdeep++.
In Kinfire Council, you play as a posse of heroes taking up space in a spot to collect resources to spend for victory points. Only your hexagon hero can vanquish threat cards by spending resources, while your disc members have to stay inside the safe walls doing various regular worker placement things. Most of the game was spent parsing all 25 worker placement spots all game and searching for places that gave the right shapes to get the most points. I thought the game was ok++. There’s an AI opponent that tries to win, and if no one beats the AI then everyone loses. It’s the only part of the game I really cared about, but I will try to play this game 2 times, and both times neither group will want to finish the game. Bullshit. The game was not interesting or fun enough for anyone to finish, but the only part of the game is at the end. Fury is not enough to describe how I felt. It’s injustice. Injustice! But it’s just ok++.
Would I Buy: No.
After about 2 hours and 30 minutes of reading, learning, teaching, and playing Kinfire Council, Peter taught a game that he was reading while I was reading called Graft. He picked solely based on the size of the box. He did not know that Graft was on Paul’s list of games to try at Gen Con. Paul was excited.
Graft is a push your luck drafting game. Drafting in the truest sense of the word. Drafting the way Richard Garfield intended. Drafting with signalling and disruption and bombs and duds. And push your luck. Pick one pass until the deck runs out, and the deck only runs out when people play their ship card to signify they want to start another scoring row. Why start another row? Well most cards in the game have a symbol that says “NO MORE OF THIS SPECIFIC COLOR ANYMORE IN THIS ROW”, which means after you play that card, if you get passed a pack that only has that card, you bust. You blow up. You blow up so hard that some people are gonna bend your cards because they feel terrible about busting. How do you keep yourself from busting? On any pick, you can pick your ship card to finalize your row. You play the card with the anti-color requirement at the end of that row like a capstone, and next turn you can start a new row. But you must play a card with that ship card. No passing. So you played that card that says no more blue cards, and I pass you 4 blue cards. You’re gonna look at me and go, “you sick fucking freak”. Then we both laugh. Then I’m gonna tell you to stop bending my fucking cards. Great game.
Would I Buy: Absolutely.
After Graft, Peter looked like he didn’t want to pay more money to stay in the Hot Games Room, which I realized was him saying he did not want to come back to that room because he didn’t want to spend more money on something he already spent money for. Fair enough. We trekked over to the Expo hall to search for the games we were tasked to buy for other who couldn’t afford the $1,000 cost to attend the convention. We beelined for just the games we wanted to buy like men going into a Target getting exactly what they need, precisely picking games that we’d be able to fit into 1 carry-on bag. The foolish purchase I made was Moon Bunny which we demoed at the Hot Banana booth. Peter didn’t want to play because he didn’t like Hot Banana’s other game Steam Up. I wanted to because I like bunny.
The person teaching was terse and blunt which was nice. I lost the 6 turn demo because Peter scored a tile which is too valuable in a shorter game, though he based his opinion on that short game. The same as Kinfire Council. For whatever reason, I was feeling magnanimous for the mediocre games I was playing. Maybe because of the hype and environment. Maybe the lack of sleep. Whatever it was, I bought Moon Bunny so I could play with Jenn, and later with Dale at Pax Unplugged.
Would I Buy: Yes. For Dale.
We continued our searches for games. Peter buying Wriggle Roulette and Kronologic: Cuzco 1450 and me picking up High Tide, touch It, and my kickstarter copy of Regicide Legacy. While walking around I saw a booth demoing A Fistful of Penguins, a pub game classic. Roll dice, and reroll and reroll and reroll for the best possible outcome. One of the best chuck dicers in the business. But man did Peter and Mark deflate the game. Dry calculation, no tension, silent rerolls with no cheers or jeers, get me out of that fucking game man. The quietest game of Pengies I ever played. Sorry for even mentioning it lol.
Would I Buy: Nah. I have Moonrollers and Emerald Skulls already.
With our bags full, we headed back to the hotel lobby as if it were our homebase and looked out our haul. Peter broke out my Game of the Con: Wriggle Roulette and proceeded to teach one of the best push your luck games I’ve played. 17 red snakes and 51 black eels in a bag, you can’t feel the difference between them. You pull 0-4 tokens out of the bag. If you pull 0, you score all the eels you pulled. If you pull any red snakes, they all go to the middle like a ticking timer for the round. When 7 snakes total are out of the bag, the bomb blows, and whoever has the most tokens in their hand (remember 0-4) loses everything they pulled that round. Everyone else, and anyone else who pulled 0 earlier in the round, score all their eels. Sorry, you were too greedy. With these rules, you create a game where when 6 red snakes are pulled, you play a game of chicken where any snake blows up the table. Fucking amazing.
Would I Buy: I bought 2 copies. GOTC.
After that we played Touch It, a silly game where you try to feel the outline of a shape on the back of a card and guess what shape it is. Peter fucking smoked us. Great game. Buy/10.
Would I Buy Yes Ok I already buy yes.
After Touch It, I told the gang I had to meet Jason, the chosen one from the last Gen Con blog. We were meeting at the Hot Games Room, so I convinced them to come one more time there to play some new games much to their exasperation. There we learned a new Reiner Knizia game, EGO, a very strange combination of resource collection and management, auction, and push your luck. I read, learned, and taught in about 30 minutes, and took an hour to play. Peter learned a small game Ratzia in that time.
In EGO, everyone takes actions together and take turns collecting and choosing various resources to spend later on for points. Imagine a mario party track and everyone does each space. There are 5 auctions along this track that take place where you spend a card of a required suit to increase your bid by 1 or pass because you don’t want to or cannot bid because you do not have that suit. The entire game is centered around getting cards to prepare for these auctions. One such thing to prepare is a space that lets you push your luck for more cards and showing how many cards you must flip should you choose to risk it. That space shows 2 suits, so if you flip any cards that match, you put them in your hand. However, if any don’t match, you get negative points because you made the aliens angry. Idk. But however however, if none of the cards you flip match, you do nothing. No angry aliens, no cards, as if you chose not to take the action. Weird. But you got no cards right? Right. During each of the bidding spots, same deal. Mind blown. Before you play a card, you can flip 2 and if any match, they get added to your power. Sick. If any don’t match, you get angry alien. Not sick. If neither match, you fucking lose the auction as if you chose to get last place and will probably get negative points. Damn. Well at least it was fun flipping, right? Right.
Would I Buy: Yes yes yes.
After playing that ryan knizia game, we played another ryan knizia game (peter mixes up reiner and ryan) Ratzia, a remake of Ra: The Card Game. It’s just Ra, with cards instead of blocks and a board. Good game.
Would I Buy: Nah, I already own Ra.
Peter and Mark leaves Paul to play other games since they don’t want to pay $4 dollars to stay, and Paul sets up Kinfire Council, ambitious to finish the game with Jason that took 2.5 hours in less than 2 before the hall closed.
Jason arrives, raises his hand and says “Hi”. I wave and say hi back but he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the table with his group with Adam, Jordan, Tom, and Alexis. Immediate embarrassment. I don’t really fit in that group so I didn’t bother approaching and saying hi to those guys. After about 5 minutes of me quietly saying Hey Jason over and over again, Jason looks over at me and I wave and he’s like “oh wow you’re here too I didn’t see you at all!” My life is a sitcom.
Soon with sister Katie, 3 players start the light worker placement game knowing they would not finish in time. Eternal life, endless torture.
Plans are made with the Jason gang to play at noon, so at least that was something to look forward to tomorrow.
Day 2, done.
Except I get a message from a new number asking if I had an extra Gen Con badge. And the number is talking about Dan Kim, my actual brother. And this person is saying my brother, Dan Kim, my actual brother, is at Gen Con. Well I guess I’ll be seeing him later this weekend.
What a tweest!
Another morning, another coffee and B.E.C. Mark and I decided to hit up the Gen Con Auction + Consignment room in the morning while Peter slept in. We wait in our first line of Gen Con. Well, my first line. Mark had waited 4 hours for his badge at Will Call if you remember. This flea market style thing would be cool if I had space and wanted to spend money, but I didn’t really want to. There were significant discounts but I just didn’t have the energy to buy and figure out logistics. I was in a sorry state at 10AM with half a cup of coffee in my hand. The only games I were interested in were The Networks and Ka-Boom. Mark and I left with no change in weight.
Peter woke up at 11APM so we decided to meet him in the Expo Hall. Mark and I walked over to a vacant table next to an Ark Nova demo table to chat and play a little game of High Tide. My interest in board games started with Push Fight, and my love of 2-player combinatorial strategy games has continued since.
High Tide is a chess-y strategy game where you try to have all your pieces cover your opponents while forcing them to cover their own. As Peter eloquently puts it: “In this 2 player game, players must move pieces (theirs and neutral) onto another adjacent higher piece. Game ends once a player can not move a piece. Player with the most pieces showing wins.” I like the way Peter writes.
Would I Buy: Yes.
Once Peter shows up, we split so I can meet Jason in the Hot Games Room. There I show up and I can clearly smell that Jason had a beer before I showed up. I’m not mad, just jealous he didn’t invite me for that beer. We played Zenith before we have to leave to meet Katie, Joey, and Jeffery Steiner. As Peter states: “A 2 player card game where players are taking turns playing a card, in either advancing tech (one of the 3 symbols on all cards), one of the standard actions based on the symbol, or play it by paying for it (minus discount based on the number of cards of that color) and execute any action on the card. Players win any of the 3 conditions occur, 3 of the same color pieces, 4 different colors pieces, or any 5 pieces.” Jason and I rarely play 2 player games anymore because it bring out his competitiveness in a bad way. Not that I care, but he’s very self-conscious of it. And I bring it up all the time. He’s not a sore loser, he just hates losing. I barely remember the game but Jason says he loves the 2v2 team game.
Would I Buy: No.
Right after Zenith we played Kronologic: Cuzco 1450 which is a logical deduction game like Clue. You get information about the thing, then make deductions, then try to guess the thing. At some point Jason fucked up a deduction because of an assumption so we called the game. Another asterisk in the books. I normally like playing with Jason, so unhinged Indiana Jason is a fun change.
Would I Buy: No.
We leave the room of infinite gaming to grab grub and game in the Expo Hall. I forget what the plan was, but they were killing time until Jason had to demo his prototype game at 7PM. We searched and found a vacant table to play an assortment of games I had to play for five people since no one else seemed to have anything. Idk, I felt like with this group I was kinda a 5th wheel even though I was obviously invited and we were obviously having a good time. 5 is just a high inertia amount of people. Alone they are nimble, but together it’s like moving an attention deficit mountain.
I brought out Wriggle Roulette first. Gotta hit’em with the best. After I explained the shared-group-busting, Jason was sold. I showed him Refuge last year and it has the same thing. He ended up finding Refuge at Gen Con and bought it at some point during the con. Great game with a mandatory showdown for a tiebreaker because of sibling rivalry.
Then we played Corgi Pileup, which I knew was a bad game but I wanted to give it a shot. Play cards shedding the right cards up until the last card which score you points. When someone(s) goes over 15 points, the highest core among those not over 15 win. Weird game, but I like weird games. Joey and Jeffery Steiner kept complaining and asking why we were playing a game where nothing matters. Banter made the game obviously.
Would I Buy: No. But I bought a copy for a friend.
Lastly I got to play Ali Baba with this group. The table talk was good, Jason lied to me and I’ll never forgive him because he is a Christian man. I don’t think Jeffery Steiner told the truth a single time. I barely remember this game but it was probably fun. We wrapped up and then after getting up and walking 15 minutes into the sea of people in the expo hall, I split to find my actual brother, Dan Kim. He was sitting right behind where we were playing games but it took me 15 minutes of doing something I didn’t want to do to decide that I wanted to break.
So I moseyed back to where we were sitting to find my actual brother, Dan Kim. I took many pictures. We are brothers. We played Sagrada. It’s not my favorite but I didn’t care, I played with my brother. I love my brother, he is cool. MY BROTHAAA
Dan’s group broke to play Feed The Kraken, an Among Us game that I didn’t care for. I bowed out and told them if they wanted to get dinner together to let me know, and that we should hang out at some point this weekend again. I never saw my brother again.
At 6PM, I head over to the J.W. Marriot where Peter made his home base for the weekend. If anyone wanted to meet up to play, this is where we would go. Peter, Steve, Ryan, and Roderick were all playing Hooky. Roderick is Ryan’s other childhood friend along with Steve. Roderick is the nicest smiliest friendliest dude. Together at this table were the chillest board game dudes I could have asked for. I spectated their game of Hooky for about an hour while I walked up and down the tables hoping a friendly non-desperate group would ask me to join. There were a couple games I could have sat and taught a game to, but they were all at 2 players and looked like they were couples. After the gang finished Hooky, Roderick and I went to pick up food for the group while they played Waddle, a newish game.
We chatted and talked board games. Roderick runs a tri-weekly meetup at his apartment and seems like a good host. He’s a friendly dude, so I can only imagine that everyone who attends wants to play with him. Roderick’s favorite game seems to be Nucleum. Nice.
After we got back and a couple of beers, it was time to play some games. I taught Corgi Pileup to the group, much to Ryan’s excitement. He fucking loves corgis. Then we played a Gen Con exclusive release that Steve bought: Soda Jerk, a wacky mario party minigame-ish game where you stack secret points for yourself and negative points for everyone else, but everyone else is doing the same. You can flip someone else’s card to find out what they did, but that means you’re not playing a card. When someone runs out of cards, all the secret cards are flipped to find out what’s scoring positive and what’s scoring negative. Neato.
Would I Buy: No. But it’s cool that Steve got his copy signed by the designer and the artist.
Then while the group played something else, Steve and I read, learned, taught, and played Tag Team, a two player I know you know that I know fighting game. Each round you add a card to counter the opponents cards, and there’s something so juicy about getting the exact card to counter the opponent’s cards. We played twice back to back. Right up my alley, except I have no one to play with (besides maybe Jason but we’ll see).
Would I Buy: Yes.
Last game of the night was Ruins, a ladder-climbing game where you can modify a card to make sets. So if you wanted to play a 3 of a kind, you can play two 5s and add a 3 and a 2 into a 5. Such a weird game. It’s a plodding, thunking, clunker of a shedding game. If you’ve played 200-300 hands of a game as fast and smooth as Big 2, Ruins feels like Big 2 with a tire boot stopping everyone every turn. Neat idea, garbage feel.
I taught the game wrong and I changed the rule so that you only upgrade cards after you play them, so that they only impact the next round. Much better feeling game, but much more random.
Would I Buy: No. But I would play with my house rule.
And so ends Friday. I ended the day with a quick meetup with the hotel gang playing a game of Spyrium in the middle of a sea of vacant tables by Tournament HQ in the Expo hall. We say our good nights and walk back in the balmy night. Couldn’t have picked a nicer week to be walking outside.
Day 3 done.
I woke up at 9:45AM with a message asking if I was gonna meet Jason and Katie at the Hot Games Room. Teeth showered games brushed body out the door and running to the Hot Games room which was about 2 minutes away sprinting. ETA 10:02AM.
I get to their table and Katie mentions my resting bitch face and asks if I’m ok. I say “Yes I am very excited to play games with you this morning.” in the same way a robot would read off the weather for today. I ask if it would be better if I smiled when I was happy and both Jason and Katie in unison say “Yes”. So I smiled like that fucking dog with that stupid fucking smile. It didn’t help.
I sit for about 25 minutes while Katie and Jason finished Ace of Spades and the rest of Jason’s gang shows up. We play a game of Rhymes with Duck which was wacky and fun. Nobody matched with me even though everyone knew what I was gonna write. You wanna match with people. You wanna match with Chuck.
Would I Buy: Yes.
After that silly party game, we split to play 2v2 Zenith with Jason and Tom, Jason’s friend with me and Katie. My initial impressions matched my secondary impressions. The game is ok, but it’s not the best game I played at the con. Not by a long shot. But Jason loved it, best game ever he said. Most fun at the con he said. He loves team games he said.
The joining group left as soon as they came to go to a scheduled event with them constantly asking where Jason’s other friend was. I don’t normally care that people don’t give a shit about me, but it makes it easy to know that these aren’t my people. Fuck’em.
With Jason, Katie, and I, we break out Graft.
And it was as total flop. Everyone drafted friendly, no hate-drafting, so no risk of busting. Both Jason and Katie stated: “I’m really disappointed about the amount of push your luck in this game. There’s really no tension.” So I just took the greediest cards and made the longest line of cards possible to score the most amount of points. Game ended with two deflated players and one player who doubled their scores. ¯\(ツ)/¯.
After the two games, we met up with Joey and Jeffery Steiner, the man who the other group was asking for. To be fair, he is a funny fun guy. Affable man. Handsome. Beard. Extremely married. We decide it’s time for food, and we head to Steak and Shake, probably the best place we could have picked for food. Less than a 10 minute wait, my classic burger and fries came out and it was less than 15 dollars for the meal. Sublime. After fooding, we head to the expo hall in the search of a vacant table to play more games.
We bust out A Message for the Stars, a game that Katie bought for Jason. Joey immediately feels the stress and frustration of having the team on his back, Katie gets bored of having to wait to give clues, and Jeffery Steiner starts strong but gets dejected because halfway through the game I ask him to hold on a second while Jason is explaining something and he gets upset that I ask him to stop because there’s too much crosstalk while Jason finishes talking. He leaves the table go do more fun things. Lame. On the bright side at the end Joey gets into the deduction and becomes less frustrated and does kinda care, which is a win in my book.
Would I Buy: No. It used to be a yes, but after that play, I just don’t care for it.
We play a quick game of Wriggle Roulette and then head kill time in the expo hall before their next scheduled event. Their next event is in the dedicated IV Studio room, which is a company dedicated to making the most beautiful games. Their marketing is great, and I only like a couple of their games. Moonrollers is a perfect accompaniment to Can’t Stop, and Brink is a resource gathering trading game that intrigues me. The event the Jason gang was waiting for was TEND, a big box Stardew Valley inspired board game with a great theme and production. I played a couple times before but I didn’t care for playing at Gen Con, but after realizing that 70 people were gonna play at the same time, I was suddenly much more interested. Somehow, the gang each bought an extra ticket so I jumped into their table to play a 3 hour game of Tend.
While I was in there I bought a copy of Brink to play later, and it was the only game I bought at the con that I never got to play since I gave it to Jason to mule back to Massachusetts. As of the time of writing (Wednesday after the end of the con) I have not played my copy. We sat down at a table to play a game that everyone will enjoy besides me.
Tend is a roll and write where you take actions based on cards flipped from an ever improving deck. Your actions increase based on upgrades you take, and if you have met certain requirements you take even more things. You spend things for points or upgrades. That’s the game. The game is fun for what it is, I just don’t care about getting points in this kind of game. I never once shipped to get points, and just upgraded everything I wanted. I don’t give a fuck, I just wanna do shit.
Would I Buy: I kickstarted it to give it as a gift to Jason, but I wouldn’t buy it for myself.
After listen to Grant Lyons and the IV Studio team for 3 hours, I split with Jason to meet up at home base in the J.W. Marriot. Btw, the reason we met there was because it had 2 floors of open gaming in the ballrooms. Huge space, not packed, tables are spaced nicely. In our Massachusetts gen con organizing Discord, Sara mentioned she wanted to play an 18xx called 18RoyalGorge. I commited to joining her and also playing the game.
We never end up playing this game.
I join the Peter, Tim, and Sara table. Sara is the host of the Amesbury meetup and a very nice person. She was the one who bought 18RoyalGorge but had not finished preparing to play. I sat at the table and told her I was willing to read the rules and teach the game if she was up for it, and if she had any other players willing to play that’s fine. The other two at the table were playing First Class, and then had planned to play Salton Sea. The Ryan, Steve, Mark table had started a game of Lightning Train, which would run about 4 hours long until 11pm. It’s a 90 minute game, but they fucked up some rules. After I finish reading the rules to 18RoyalGorge, I tell Sara that it’s probably best if we wait until tomorrow to play, so that we don’t kill the rest of the day while other people wanted to play games with them.
So Sara brings out Tricky Kids, a trick taking game where you get to write your own numbers on the cards when you get your hand but the numbers must sum up to 21. So there’ll be a lot of 0s after you’re done. Too thinky for me, paralyzing amounts of things to think about, so I’ll leave it to the trick-taking enthusiasts to let me know if it’s good.
Would I Buy: No.
The last game of the night was with the Lightning Train group after their 4 hour endeavor. Mark calls it after to go to bed, so I start a game of Merchants of Andromeda with Ryan, Steve, and Roderick, the new homies. Of course, I had to read, learn, teach beforehand to play the game. The game is a very simple game of choosing what track to go up and what majority minigames to place on each turn, but everyone’s turn includes a dutch auction that let’s someone else take a full turn. So two people take a full turn each turn, which could be yourself! Wow! But money is points. Wow! What a conundrum. We played for about 2 hours, much much longer than I thought it would be, but I guess this was a longer game than I expected.
Would I Buy: Yes. This is my exact current wheelhouse.
Day 4 complete.
Last day of the con. Time to play games.
The last day was split between playing with the new friends and playing with the old friends. We start by meeting with Big Mike a final time to hang out and pick up some last minute things from the expo hall. I buy EGO and say good bye to Issac, Megan, and Danny. We head over to J.W. Marriot to play the games we bought over the weekend. I sit down with Mark, Ryan, and Steve to play Moon Bunny, and Peter sits out because he still thinks it’s mediocre. We play the quick game and it solidifies that it is an ok game. I like moving things like a rook. Idk, I like grid-based movement.
After, we play a 4 player game of Graft, and that solidifies that I love pushing your luck in Graft, and being good at drafting makes you good at pushing your luck.
The last game I play with these guys is EGO, which convinces Steve to immediately buy the game. He was on the fence but the play and the group and the game and the art all convinced him that he loved the game. And to be fair, it’s a fucking fun game.
Would I play with this group again: YES.
That reminds me, what happened to playing 18RoyalGorge. Well it turns out that spending the day playing a long hard train game might not be the best way to spend the last day of the con, so Sara decided to push it and make a game time decision at 5. I decided and told the other players we’re bailing. Come on just be reasonable, you wanna have fun, not play a long hard train game and kill the rest of the day at a con. You’re not me.
So Sara and Tim arrive to the J.W. Marriot. I get a message from Jason saying I’m invited to join them at their airbnb. I decide to play one last game with the Amesbury group before I head over. We play a game Sara bought called Kabuki Tricks. I read, learn, and teach the game in about 25 minutes and we start to play. It’s a follow, tiered-trump with a bidding card that lets you change trump and what’s high. It was an ok game, and I ran away with the game by playing as aggressively as possible while others tried to shoot the moon.
Would I Buy: No.
And so I said farewell to those folks and ubered over to Jason’s gang.
In the Uber ride over, I was driven by a recent college grad who was having trouble finding a job and wanting to finally leave Indiana but didn’t know how to break from the resources his parents provided. I said nothing of import and arrived at the house midway through a game of Coconuts, one of the greatest games of all time.
They finished Coconuts and jumped into a similarly amazing game Pengoloo which is a shell game of 16 penguin shells with 6 colored balls and dice that tell you which balls to find. Incredible.
Would I Buy: Yes, but I have no idea who’ll want to play 20 times for an hour like I would.
After Pengoloo, we ate dinner. Well they ate dinner without me and I had to wait an hour for my food that wouldn’t arrive because of grubhub issues. Really dumb issues. An hour later I ate 2 pounds of fried chicken, Jason broke out Veiled Fate, another IV Studio social deduction game.
The game is about getting incremental points by moving your pawn to the right place at the right time, but your pawn is secret. There’s 8 total colored pawns in the game, and you have the ability to give pawns negative points as you see fit. So a lot of vocal lying and vocal bluffing. My method of lying in these kinds of games is to move the same piece over and over again to signal that it is my piece, obviously saying out loud that I care about it because that non-trivially affects those who do not know about these tricks.
We play a farce of a game where all players pretend to care about another pawn with one player feeling hopeless and that trying to win is pointless and at the end of the game it’s revealed that the pawn I chose to move the entire game and pretend was mine was Jason’s pawn the whole time. I was doing so well as Jason’s pawn in fact that other players dunked on that pawn and made it lose points. What a magical moment that will never happen again. And remember, Jason hates losing.
Would I Buy: No. Hell No.
After that exhausting game, we all play Pengoloo which energizes the group again, and I decide to leave at the appropriate time of 11PM. Nothing cool happens in the uber back. I return to the hotel and the hotel gang goes to bed at the appropriate time of 1AM to get ready for the 6AM flight.
Yep. Monday 6AM flight back to Boston. And what’s planned after the flight? Games. Games from 1PM to whenever I get tired back at Saugus with the Saugus crew.
While going through TSA, my copy of Regicide Legacy got stopped because “dense plastic”. When we were both looking at the entire contents of the game on the x-ray, it became apparent that it was a stack of poker chips. Neat way to get spoiled on a legacy game.
On the flight back I sat next to a very stinky person. But it was a 2 hour flight so I didn’t die. Peter and I go to Starbucks to get coffee after the flight and play High Tide. We go to get pho for lunch to hang out and discuss the con. We eat and go to start our game day at 1PM at Saugus.
Peter decides to crack open his new copy of Loot of Lima while I open Regicide Legacy to play solo while I wait. The first game of the Regicide Legacy campaign is strictly just normal Regicide so it gets the same rating as I would give Regicide.
Would I Buy: Yes.
After my solo game, Peter teaches Loot of Lima, and it is the fucking crunchiest, toughest, thinkiest deduction game I’ve played. It’s so tough picking the best action, and making good deductions is crucial to squeezing out the win. We play two games back to back, with both of us loosing the first game, and me picking up the win after 60 minutes of excruciating concentration. Tremendous game. 10/10. Probably my favorite deduction game as long as I’m playing with other non-emotional robots.
Would I Buy: Yes.
The rest of the game night is just playing the games I got. I had a rough game of Graft because one player got really heated and bent my cards after they busted which is too bad. They were just really frustrated there was literally nothing they could do, and hate playing games where you lose everything for busting and they simply quit. Awesome. Love it. Gamers. I left at 9PM so that I could say good night and go see Jenn because I missed her. I still haven’t told her everything I did during Gen Con because I’ve been falling asleep and resting, but I will tonight (Wednesday) since tonight is date night.
In total I played 66 games (including demos) in 6 days, and 38 of them were unique compared to the 25 games total I played in 2022 where 20 of them were unique. I had a fucking amazing time, and I spent it doing exactly what I wanted to do, hanging out with cool people and playing games. Thanks for reading this Ryan. And maybe Jenn.