by Beth Heile

Instead of the usual lineup of game announcements and post-convention hauls, I wanted to write and photograph about the random tidbits that caught my attention at this year’s Gen Con, including a wonderful interview with Felicia Day (see below).

Full up before we even begin
Hot Weather, Hot Games

Let’s start with the main reason I was present at Gen Con – to help run the Hot Games Room. The BGG team arrived on Tuesday and all day Wednesday was spent collecting games for the Hot Game Room, our event space at the Hyatt Regency which allows attendees to try as many of the newly released games as they please. Typically this prep day is dominated by long hours, lots of heavy lifting, very hot temperatures, and dodging huge piles of carpet and boxes in the chaos of the exhibit hall before it opens. In the calm before the storm, we caught this fun photo over breakfast:

Some of the BGG Gen Con Crew
Once collected, we now had a pile of hundreds of new games that needed to be punched, prepped, and cataloged in our library system. Our Wednesday night is a multi-hour pizza punch party when we eat, chat, and punch out hundreds of games.

LEFT: Games before getting punched. RIGHT: HGR library ready to go, over 800 boxes catalogued in our library system
Over 43 ticketed sessions, we saw over 2,500 attendees check out over 3,300 games! Our top check outs were:

– Hell of a Deal

– Entropy

– Hanami

– Fliptoons: Season 2

– Night at the Zoo

A panorama image of the Hot Games Room on Friday evening
Goodbye Balloons, Hello Statues

A personal highlight for me is seeing the annual balloon sculpture in the main hallway of the convention hall. After two serious latex allergy incidents last year, Gen Con decided to discontinue the balloon sculptures for safety. So I will share this picture of my favorite display from 2023 in remembrance of the hard work and amazing skills of those artists:

2023’s balloon sculpture: a moon lander complete with space backdrop, lunar surface, and astronaut.
Instead I noticed an increase in large statues within the exhibit hall. Gen Con is known for its cosplay events, and I found these stationary versions to be an interesting counterpoint.

LEFT: No shade to Martin Freeman, but this is my favorite Bilbo. CENTER: Dungeon Crawler Carl was everywhere and this statue was impressively huge, RIGHT: Leonardo was life-sized and ready for battle
As always, Cardhalla is a glorious, chaotic whirlwind of construction, and this year did not disappoint. I took a photo of my favorite shape this year, a large shark (whale?) that eventually grew spikes from other builders as the days progressed:

LEFT: An overhead shot of Cardhalla in its final hours on Saturday. RIGHT: The shark / whale in early stages.
And to finish up this roundup of creative endeavors, I am more fascinated with the table setup for the miniature painting than the miniatures themselves.

I forgot to count exactly, but this table seated at least 20 painters
From Tokyo to Philadelphia to Indianapolis

For the first time, Gen Con featured Game Market Indianapolis, a showcase of designers demoing and selling their new, self-made creations on the spot. This event was modeled after the success of the Indie Games Night Market at PAXU, which in turn was modeled after Tokyo Game Market. Held in one of the hallway lobbies at the JW Marriott, this market featured 20ish different designers demoing about 24 new games. I’m partial to trick-tricking games and picked up two titles: Short Stacked and Laundry Day. Unlike the exhibit hall, there are no flashy banners or elaborate displays – just the designers with a table, a single display copy of their game, and a stack of copies for sale. Attendees could wander freely between tables, listening in to demos in progress, or asking the designer to start the explanation. I would estimate about 100 people were there at the start, although we left after 30 minutes or so.

I hope that small sales events like this continue to pick up speed in the US as it was fun to see designers at the beginning of the publishing journey. While many of the games used clipart and homemade cards, a good design will transcend the limits of its components. Hopefully some established publishers found a hidden gem and this event will be the launchpad for some first-time designers.

Two demo tables at the Game Market Indianapolis. For the racing game on the left, the metal cars were included with your purchase
A Few Game Announcements

While taking a water break on Wednesday, one of the reps from Restoration Games was setting up the display cabinet in the main convention hallway, and I was lucky to snap a picture when the cabinet door was open. Inside was the layout for the newly announced King’s Gambit, a reworking of the Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit from 2000 but rethemed to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This display took two shelves in the display cabinet but is designed to stretch in one continuous line on a table – a photo I was unable to capture unfortunately.

Rob Daviau was one of the lead designers of Queen’s Gambit and returns again as one of the lead designers of King’s. Like the original, players will be juggling multiple battlefields at once, with players choosing to allocate their limited stock of cards and resources across those different locations. Unlike the original though, this Middle Earth version will support more than two players. A demo copy was available in the Restoration Games booth, with a projected retail date sometime in 2027.

LEFT: One end of the playing field featuring (presumably) Mt. Doom and Barad-dûr. RIGHT: Minas Tirith with a baby Citadel at the very top.

I haven’t done interviews for BGG since COVID, so it was fun to put those skills to the test again with a sit down with designer Sam Bailey and Kuba Polkowski from Chaosium. Sam is the designer of Forbidden Stars, a reimplementation of Starcraft: the Board Game. Like Queen’s Gambit, both Starcraft and Forbidden Stars will likely be out of print forever due to copyright and licensing issues. Fans of Forbidden Stars have been asking for a new version regularly (you can follow that conversation on this massive 79-page thread) and Sam was excited to give a reboot a try. He created a new implementation with a different publisher and that deal fell through from IP issues. He signed a deal with a second, different publisher…and it fell through a second time. Each time he put in significant time and effort to rework Forbidden Stars into something that was both familiar and yet new, only for that work to languish unused.

Finally, it seems there is success with Chaosium and Forbidden Stars is now reborn as Old Ones Origins, with the setting and theme moved from space-facing sci-fi to a battle of eldritch gods. Unlike many Cthuhlu-flavored games that use a 1920s setting, Old Ones is a battle of ancient powers vying for control at the dawn of time – humans are not part of this picture! Game length can be dialed from two hours to all day, depending on the selected factions and choosing the short game vs. the epic game. I was demoed some of the game play and its evolution from Forbidden Stars, and it was clear that Sam put in massive amounts of work to translate this version’s mechanics into something that clearly supports its new theme.

A Kickstarter campaign for Old Ones will begin in September 2026 with estimated delivery in Q4 2027 / Q1 2028.

Closeup of prototype minis and game board
Speaking of Reboots….

This Gen Con was dominated by events supporting three large fandoms: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Critical Role, and The Guild. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, The Guild is currently being rebooted into a movie after a successful run as an online video series from 2007-2013. Thanks to a BGG volunteer in Felicia Day’s Twitch chat (thanks Walt!), Felicia was put in contact with me and stopped by the Hot Games Room for a tour and an interview.

Aside from funding the movie, Felicia is also launching a TTRPG and a card game: Swords & Sweethearts. This card game is based on the combination of the music video “Do You Want To Date My Avatar?” combined with Felicia’s love of dating sim video games. Players collect items to increase their stats and then try to take a prospective match on a successful date. However, the suitor, location, and actions of the other players can all affect the outcome of your date, so romance is not guaranteed. Many celebrities have donated their likeness for cards in the game, so you could take Misha Collins, Alan Tudyk, Dungeon Crawler Carl, “Weird Al” Yankovic, or a sheep from Catan on a date.

Felicia announced that she and Wil Wheaton are launching a new board game show called Conludo. I also interviewed Wil Wheaton at Gen Con over ten years ago, when his Tabletop YouTube show was at its peak. In that conversation, we discussed that many gamers credit that show as their introduction into modem strategy board games, and I hope the same will be true for Conludo as well.

We also discussed The Guild’s TTPRG, written by castmates Vince Caso and Sandeep Parikh. Just as with Sword & Sweethearts, Felicia noted that humor was a critical piece of the RPG as well. That humor extends to an extensive line of merch, including a medieval popcorn bucket dubbed the “Poopcorn Bucket”.

The Guild’s Kickstarter runs through Aug 21, and you can view the entire interview (slightly edited) below:

Youtube Video