Gen Con 2026 After Action Report (29 July to 2 August 2026)

Indianapolis welcomes us again

It has taken a little longer to get this report written than I had hoped, but here we are at last. A convention on the scale of Gen Con demands some planning on the part of an attendee. This was the 10th time I made the pilgrimage since we started attending again in 2014, after a lapse of more than three decades, so I have the routine pretty well practiced by now.  After taking last year off from running games, my brother was ready to be back at it this year, so we agreed that we were going to run two sessions of Dragon Rampant and two sessions of Burrows and Badgers, each for six players. All of them were to be titled “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”. We bought our badges (admission to the convention), but were not lucky in the February lottery to distribute the available downtown hotel rooms. We decided that we would stay with my brother in Bloomington and commute in the one hour drive each day.  My wife therefore elected not to attend this year, and we settled down for the next milestone, the publishing of the preliminary events list in early May.  Two weeks later the attendees’ event wish lists are processed.  When the dust settled from that, I had a personal schedule with two games, two seminars, and two dance events in addition to the four games we were running, and we had filled 23 of the 24 seats on offer in our games.

I’m going to digress here with a minor pet peeve. My brother and I have often heard people offer the opinion that Gen Con should arrange more of their favorite game, whatever that might be.  Gen Con organizes the spaces and runs the ticket distribution system to allot players to games, but they do not run any games.  All games are provided by companies who offer games to promote their wares, recruiting  whatever gamemasters may be needed by whatever means are available to them, or they are provided by individual gamemasters, either independent or gathered into gamemaster collectives, who volunteer their time, energy, and personal collections of material to run whatever they feel inspired to share. If someone wants to see more of their favorite game (especially older ones) at Gen Con, the best way to make that happen is to submit an event and run it. One does not need to let their hobby rely on the industry. I will hop off my soap box now… 

Since I needed to haul a fair amount of stuff to do my part in running miniatures games I decided that I would drive this year.  I have been regularly soloing on trips to visit my father, a distance of 560 miles, so I didn’t think that the 620 miles from my house to Gen Con would be that much harder.  I did figure I would need a recovery day after the drive, since my brother’s house is another 50 miles past the Gen Con location.  I set off on the morning of Monday, 27 July, and reached his house after thirteen hours on the road, including the rest breaks.  We used Tuesday to make sure everything was organized, laying out and repacking the troops for the Dragon Rampant game and finalizing and printing all of our handouts.

Three warbands sorted and double-checked

We took a leisurely trip up to Indianapolis on Wednesday after lunch to sample the “Day 0” activities, including sampling the food at the Block Party and attending The Stink, an ice breaker gathering to unofficially kick off the convention. (I do not have the credentials to be a participant in the Trade Day activities on Wednesday for educators and industry people.) While at The Stink we ran into Nelly from the long running vlog Nelly’s Nerdy Adventures and I ended up on the Day 0 report talking about looking forward to running some games. (It’s around 6:00 minutes in…)

Setting up for “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, DR version

We got up to Indy on Thursday morning without any issues, loaded our scenery and miniatures into our collapsible wagon, and hauled them to our assigned tables, with a little side trip out to the Block Party to pick up my morning caffeination from the Helm Coffee tent.  They appeared to be doing a brisk business everytime I stopped by, and I remembered them fondly from previous Gen Cons. We had been assigned to Tables 21/22, Green, Hall C.  As you can see, the Green area was denoted by the table cloth.  We discovered that we were in the last row of tables next to an aisle, with the back entrance to the Exhibit Hall on the other side of the aisle, so we had a lot of people wander by to see what we were up to. 

For our Dragon Rampant version of “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, we placed three warbands on each side of the central pond, with a command hierarchy (from first to third) designated.  The Lady of the Lake, depicted by a Ral Partha Elf Princess (catalog 01-021), would hear the entreaties of the most senior surviving leader on each side, and lob a scimitar, as it were, to whichever one first convinced her that they had what it took to rule the kingdom.  Bonuses to the entreaty roll were available to any side controlling the auxiliary objectives on either side of the table.  We set it up that way hoping that each player would feel that they were contributing to the overall effort.  

Note the table designator signs. A lot of effort goes into organizing for smooth running.

The Centaur general and some of his crew work to seize the Dragon Stones objective.

Eventually senior challenger leader made it to the pond and was granted the sword

For convenience, and not to spend too much time laying out a backstory that was irrelevant to the actual play, we designated the two sides the “incumbents” and the “challengers”.  In the first run, the challengers just barely got the sword, needing the die roll boost from controlling one of the auxiliary objectives, and managed to get it off the table.  

We were pleasantly surprised to find that all six of our pre-registered players showed up, although we had anticipated that anyone willing to sign up for a game at the same time that the exhibit hall was due to open was likely serious about playing. They all seemed to be having a good time, so we were happy to be running the game for them.  They were a mix of grognards and younger people, and we took the opportunity to jest that most of our miniatures were older than the young people.  While some of the miniatures may have been recently production from Ral Partha Legacy or Iron Wind Metals, I don’t think we had anything on the table originally sculpted after 1985. In addition to Ral Partha, our warbands included figures from Heritage, Hinchliffe, Minifigs, and even some early Citadel Dark Ages historicals from about 1980, before the release of the earliest edition of Warhammer.  One passer-by noted that it had been a long time since he’d seen that many “true 25s” in one place.  Our scenery was more recent.  We relied on commercial scenery this year, with mats from Cigar Box Battles and trees and pond from Monster Fight Club, along with a few more vintage pieces, such as some 1980/90s resin buildings from Hovels to form the village, the second auxiliary objective.

From this angle, you can see that we were right up against the Exhibit Hall

In submitting our events, we had allowed ourselves one hour to reset and find a bite of lunch between games.  I packed my lunch, since an hour is scant time to forage at Gen Con.  Our second game on Thursday was the only one that was undersubscribed, with five players signed up for the six seats. However, all five of them showed up, and my brother played the extra position.  Interestingly, for a game involving as many dice as Dragon Rampant, the second game played out as a near duplicate of the first.

Overheard from a passer-by, “Any game with a triceratops is already awesome!”

Once again the challenger leader rides up to the pond to be granted the sword

Once the games were over we packed everything back in the wagon and took it back to the car.  We then had time to spare to visit the Block Party one more time for some food and conversation with random fellow attendees about how their convention was going before we headed over to the stadium for a game we were both going to play.

Sometimes they play a different game here

The whole playing field of Lucas Oil Stadium is made over into more gaming space.  With the extra high ceilings and the industrial air conditioning, the stadium is a pretty nice place to play.  My brother noted that we should consider requesting it (again) next time. 

Kingmaker

We had signed up for what turned out to be a three player game of Kingmaker, in the current Gibson Games edition.  We have played more of this as the earlier first Avalon Hill edition, and I’ve even played the original Ariel edition.  In fact, we played the Avalon Hill edition when my brother visited in May, so that version was relatively fresh in our minds.  It ended up being my turn to be the goat (not the GOAT!); my faction managed to crown Edward of March (Yorkist #2) after Richard (Yorkist #1) died when plague struck York, but I was stomped on by my brother who revealed the office of Chamberlain of the County Palatine of Chester with 200 extra troops in Wales (guess where I was…) before I could escape.  I spent the rest of the game (not too long) trying to build up a faction to re-enter the scuffle, but we noted that the 3rd player could win by summoning parliament and assigning his faction most of the unclaimed offices, so he did.  Really, we had had a long day and had that hour-long drive to get back to our beds, so it was not the winter of our discontent, so to speak. 

We had arranged Friday to be a quiet day, with the expectation that we would get our shopping done and sit in on the Gen Con auction for the miniatures and the collectibles.  I was mildly disappointed in my morning seminar, as it turned out to be focused on getting your “actual play” channel to work, and I was hoping for something more actionable for my next home roleplaying game.  

The Gen Con Exhibit Hall is ridiculously huge

I had prepared for my visit to the exhibit hall by annotating a copy of the map with the booths that I knew that I wanted to see, and I got through most of them on Friday after the seminar.  I had to keep the shopping light as I had everything with me in a book bag (unless I wanted to try out the new bag check vendor implemented last year).  I did stumble into an opportunity when I found that the line was short at Ginny Di’s booth, so I was able to meet her briefly.

I thought she always carried a sword?

After lunch I played a short game of Dragonbane under the auspices of the Free League team (see above regarding sources of games). We accomplished our objective within the two hour window for the game and avoided a dangerous combat.  This was good for the characters, but did mean the GM didn’t have a chance to show off Dragonbane’s combat system, which is pretty good.  I’ve run Dragonbane at home, but hand’t had a chance to sit down and play. 

Auction lightly attended at some point during “miniatures”

After the game I met up with my brother at the auction.  If I had been a colletor of Battle Tech or Ogre miniatures, I would have been in luck, but as I am not I was able to keep myself from buying anything without too much trouble.  I even took a turn through the Consignment Store without finding anything that had to come home with me.  

Downtown Marriott’s Gen Con themed hot dog stand

The auction has space at the downtown Marriott, and I noted that they had put up a Gen Con tehemed hot dog stand this year.  Part of the atmosphere of Gen Con comes from the fact that a lot of the service industry downtown plays along with us.  So, to encourage them to continue to play in the future, I decided to have a hot dog for dinner between the “miniatures” and “collectible” sections of the auction.  Happily for my budget, there was nothing in the collectibles auction that I was deperate to own, so I did not buy anything. My brother had his eye on a rare set of Fineous Fingers miniatures, but eventually decided that getting home safely was more important, so we packed up and drove back. 

On Saturday we were back with our other two games of “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, although this time the contenders were anthropomorphic animals as our rules were Burrows and Badgers, also published by Osprey Games.  As with previous years, we did not think it wise to try a multi-player version of B&B, so we set up three parallel two-player games.  Getting the sword from the pond was just a slight re-theming of the “capture the paychest” scenario we’ve used in previous years.

My board; different Cigar Box Battle mat, but more Monster Fight Club

As usual I got too busy gamemastering to take too many pictures. Most of the complications of B&B are in the warband creation phase, and we bypassed that by handing out pre-generated warbands.  Nevertheless, it takes new players a couple of turns to come up to speed with the rules, so we keep busy. Continuing with the trend noted above, all six pre-registered players showed up for the morning game, including a couple who had played with us in a previous year.

All three boards and six warbands laid out

Let the games begin

We reset the boards, had a bite of lunch (packed again), and then played our afternoon session.  I will admit that we were completely amazed when, for the fourth time, all the players showed up.  Now I know that everyone intends to show up when they buy their tickets, but travel mishaps and illnesses occur, and by Saturday afternoon I would not blame anyone for being too tired to show up.  In fact, that’s one of the reasons why we chose the run the two-player games on Saturday.  We can run with any even number of players, and one of us can substitute in if we should have an odd number.  Our record for the weekend was a first for us: 23 attendees for 23 tickets sold; perfect attendance!

We decided we’d have a decent dinner before heading home but it had started raining, so we found ourselves at the downtown Marriott again; their restaurant is acceptable.  That’s where we were when the tornado warning alarms went off.  Happily for us, that didn’t take long to clear, so we were able to head home after we finished dinner.

I didn’t really take any pictures on Sunday.  I had a seminar on fairy tales, and two sessions of English Country type dancing, all run by the wonderful ladies of The Revel Alliance.  It would have been more fun had my wife been able to make it, but I was still glad to take a little break from the gaming and be active for a while.

Getting home after Gen Con took a while.  I left my brother’s on Monday morning and stopped for the night in the Detroit area to visit my father.  I stayed over an extra day with him and then finally drove the rest of the way home on Wednesday.

It was Friday before I got the car completely unloaded, took a picture of my shopping, and packed away the miniatures I’d taken along. At my age, burning the candle at both ends requires preparation and recovery.

Overall it was a great time, and I am hoping to be able to go next year.  I’ve been thinking about what games it might be fun to run …

Gen Con: The Aftermath

Sunday morning was rainy at Gen Con, but the Block Party was still going, so I could get some coffee. There was some shopping, and some dancing, and I have been on my way home since yesterday morning, with visit with my father to break up the 12 hours of driving. I shall hope to get the proper After Action Report posted by Saturday.

Gen Con Day Three — Played

Both of our Burrows and Badgers games ran yesterday and all of the players looked like they were having a good time. All twelve pre-registered players showed up, giving us a perfect record for the weekend with 23 of 23 showing up to play. It would appear there is a taste for some indie minis games at Gen Con ….

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Gen Con Day Three — Setting Up

We have half an hour to spare in setting up for today’s games. We will be running two six player sessions of Burrows and Badgers today. We ought to try multi-player B&B sometime, but for Gen Con we have opted to stay with 3 one on one set-ups. Past experience leaves us confident that this will work.

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Gen Con Day One — Grognard Time

After running our two games today, we are relaxing by playing the current Gibson edition of the Ariel/Avalon Hill 1970s War of the Roses game Kingmaker.

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Gen Con Begins (officially)

My brother and I arrived at Gen Con yesterday for the unofficial Day Zero kickoff. Today we are starting off with an 0900 official game of Dragon Rampant for six players, and repeating it at 1300. The first game went well, and we hope the second game will go well too. More to follow in the After Action Report.

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Gen Con 2025 After Action Report

PLANNING 

After missing Gen Con last year due to family matters (previously described), my brother, my wife and I were determined to return this year.  As usual, planning needed to start back in January, with the purchase of the entry badges.  Due to some uncertainty in my brother’s schedule we agreed that we would not attempt to run any games this year, although we did note (when the events list was released) that someone else had stepped up to run some Burrows and Badgers in our place.  My brother drew an excellent time slot in the room lottery in February and we were able to get a room at Downtown Marriot, one of the hotels connected to the convention center by a skywalk, with the caveat being that the hotel wanted a Tuesday through Sunday stay to get the convention rate.  

I got most of what I wanted when events tickets went on sale in May, so after that it was just a matter of settling in to wait until it was time to drive to Indianapolis.  Entry badges were sold out this year, so there were a number of disappointed last-minute would-be attendees noted on the Gen Con online discussions.

As usual, Indianapolis rolled out the proverbial red carpet for the convention.

Many of the roads around the convention center were under construction this year, so I was very happy that we were able to park the car in the hotel’s garage on Tuesday and live as pedestrians until Sunday.

We checked into the hotel and found that they were trying to be Gen Con themed.  The lobby staff were wearing fairy wings, and we were issued with a bag of emergency dice along with our room keys.

WEDNESDAY    

Wednesday is “Trade Day” at Gen Con, with the majority of the events being for industry and education folks.  There are usually some free scheduled games going on, although we didn’t sign up for any this year.  My brother had suggested that we bring the materials necessary to play some pick-up Dragon Rampant, so we set up a game on Wednesday morning, having, in accordance with the rules, asked the area manager at the Union Station gaming space for an open table.  

In order to get two Dragon Rampant warbands into a single 4-Liter Really Useful Box, I chose to use my figures based on 60mm by 40mm bases for Dux Bellorum, so I had pseudo-historical Saxons and Britons. My brother was using some sort of chaos orc army, drawn from his large collection of vintage miniatures. (One of the things I like about Dragon Rampant is that it is very flexible about match ups.) As an aside, my stack of RUBs can be seen at one end of the table; I had a 2.5 liter box of gamemaster materials such as dice, measuring tapes, and tokens; a 4-liter box with the two Arthurian warbands; and a 4-liter box with some scenery.  We had agreed that my brother would have the ground cloth, some trees, and some additional scenery. 

Eventually my Britons sent the orcs and trolls and what not back to wherever it was that they came from.

The Gen Con “Block party” opened up on Wednesday afternoon, so we tried Sun King’s Gen Con brew, an apple containing ale called “Core Strategy”.  I’m sorry to say that it was not at all to my taste, so my only other beer this convention was an IPA. 

THURSDAY

I had two scheduled games on Thursday.  The first was the only roleplaying game I had signed up for, a session of Shadowdark.  Shadowdark, designed by Kelsey Dionne and published by The Arcane Library, is currently making a splash in the RPG community.  It’s fast-playing and calls back to the playstyle of the early D&D games.  I’d only played one online one-shot, and wanted to try it in person.  It was a good start to the official convention, and I was glad that I played.

My second Thursday game was a real throwback to earlier times.  I had the good fortune to get a ticket to a session of the TSR Napoleonic naval game Don’t Give Up the Ship (DGUTS), designed by Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax and  Mike Carr, and being run my Mike Carr himself. Mike is a Gen Con legend, having been around since the very first Gen Con in 1968.  I had played DGUTS as part of my high school gaming activities back in the late 1970s, but hadn’t played since.  

I remembered DGUTS as being fairly complicated, but I guess 50 years of gaming experience since then has altered my perceptions, as it was not particularly hard for my to follow today, except that the boarding actions were all adjudicated by Mike, so I didn’t see the underlying mechanics.  Twelve or thirteen players were in the game, and I was interested to note that several of them were both young (under thirty) and veterans of previous years’ play, so interest in older games is not entirely restricted to grognards such as myself.

I was interested to see that the game was to be played with some rather abstact ships.  These plastic vessels may be recognized by some as the playing pieces for the 1962 Milton Bradley board game Broadside.  It didn’t take me long to get past that and become immersed in the game.  As Donald Featherstone once wrote (Solo-Wargaming, 1973, p.90) “…the imagination can paint nearly as well at the brush!”.  Given my usual propensity for choosing the losing side in any scenario, I was surprised to find that we (the British) won the game, taking two French ships as prizes, one of them by me.  As it happened, between the boarding actions and the need to assign crew to sail off the prize, I ended the game only able to man a few guns and barely sail the ship, but a victory is a victory nonetheless.  It was a delight and a privilege to have gamed with Mike Carr.

We had dinner Wednesday night at Loughmiller’s Pub, a block from the convention center.  They were one of the restaurants that switched over to a Gen Con-themed menu (although they just renamed the dishes), a custom which has seemed to be declining in recent years. 

FRIDAY

 

Gen Con is an overwhelming experience.  This year, there were over 25,000 scheduled events.  Nobody is going to be able to see everything, and the best way to avoid FOMO, in my opinion, is to build your schedule beforehand and stick to it.  My two scheduled events on Friday were both dance sessions with my wife.  These (basically) English Country Dance events have been run for almost ten years by a group currently entitled “The Revel Alliance”. Irene and I do ballroom dance at home, and look forward to these events as a pleasant break from our usual dance fare.  (We woud recommend these events to anyone attending Gen Con and looking for something to break up the gaming a bit.)

However, the main thing I scheduled for Friday was the Gen Con auction.  An enormous amount of material changes hands at the Gen Con auction and the related consignment shop each year.  A general schedule is posted just before the convention opens with the time blocks laid out (e.g. “board games”, “RPGs”, “miniatures” etc.), but there is some predictability from one year to the next.  Friday afternoon is for miniatures, and Friday night is the collectables auction, ending with the auction of whatever super-rare items have been consigned that year, things like D&D first printings and the like.  

I had a vintage board wargame agenda this year, and I was pleased to be able to pick up a copy of Avalon Hill’s Machiavelli and Wooden Ships and Iron Men as well as a copy of the Battleline edition of Trireme. I didn’t buy anything personally during the miniatures sessions, but my brother bought me a box of nearly a hundred Ral Partha 25mm Renaissance figures for less than $50, so I have a future project whose parameters remain in flux.  The collectable session went quite late.  I was a little startled to see a copy of the 2014 40th anniversary reprint of original Dungeons & Dragons go for $2000, while a reasonable looking copy of a 4th printing original with all the supplements including Chainmail and Swords and Spells went for a mere $1000. There’s no accounting for collectors…

I’ll add here, a little out of order, that I also came home with a set of the recently reproduced Partha Paints, two years’ worth of The Courier magazine (covering the Franco-Prussian War and French and Indian War theme years, from the consignment shop), and GMT Games Britain Stands Alone (The Battle of Britain and Operation Sealion) and the original Source of the Nile (both from Games Plus, the last vintage game shop doing business in the Gen Con Exhibition Hall). I spent most of the ‘90s painting with Partha Paints, and I thought it might be fun to revisit my roots and do a little retro painting. (More about that in a later post, I hope…)

SATURDAY

I had, oddly enough for Gen Con, a second historical miniatures game to start off on Saturday morning.  I was signed up for a session of “The Lonely Outpost” run by GM Patrick Connaughton and using 25mm 19th century British and Afghans and the Fistful of Lead Bigger Battles rules by Wiley Games. 

I chose to play Afghans, so our goal was to drive off the British, who had taken refuge in an abandoned fort.  We played this on a 5x6 table, probably with about 200 figures all told.  I’ve got Fistful of Lead on my list of rules to try at home now. (In fact, I’ve got a French and Indian War game scheduled for this coming Monday…)

As with the DGUTS game, I was pleased to see some younger people among the players.

I had Saturday afternoon earmarked for the Exhibition Hall, according to my pre-con notes.  At the risk of being a grumpy old man, I had a hard time with the noise and the crowds in the Exhibition Hall this year, so I cut my stay short, and collected up my wife for a nice quiet early dinner at Harry and Izzy’s.  I apologize to all the exhibitors who might have been able to sell me something under other circumstances.

On Saturday night I ventured into the main gaming hall for a session of the new (3rd) edition of the classic 1970s War of the Roses board wargame Kingmaker.  As you can see, the players for this one were definitely fellow grognards.  In the new edition, there are rules for declaring a winner short of having the last royal heir standing, and using them allowed us to play to a conclusion in three hours.  To my surprise, I came out on top in the prestige ratings (and thus won).  

SUNDAY

We packed up the car, checked out of the room, and did a little more shopping on Sunday (results shown above).  After that, we finished up the convention with two more sessions of dancing with the Revel Alliance team, and then drove on to Michigan to visit with my father for a few days before finally getting back home.

CONCLUSION  

I was glad that we were able to go this year, and having a downtown connected hotel makes a big difference in the quality of one’s convention experience, especially for a more, uh, veteran gamer such as myself.  I didn’t do enough actually walking in preparation this year, something that I’ll have to address before the next time we go.  Gen Con may have sold out, but the cap of about 75,000 people they have placed on the event is still a pretty massive crowd in the space that’s available.  As I noted above, the Exhibition Hall was almost too much for me this year.  

Everyone’s Gen Con is different, as they pick from the vast menu of possibilities.  This year, I had a very retro experience, with my vintage game shopping, my historical miniatures games, and the Kingmaker game.   

For anyone considering going, I’d still recommend it.  It’s an experience like no other in this hobby.  It does repay some careful planning, so don’t wait until the last minute, lest you find that it has already sold out. 

Gen Con 2023 After Action Report

 My wife and I did all the necessary Gen Con planning (badges, hotel reservations, flight arrangements, and event sign-ups) at the appropirate intermediate milestones this year, so we were able to pack up calmly on Monday, July 31st, to be ready to head to the airport on Tuesday morning, 1 August 2023.  Since we were flying, I had to keep the miniatures down to what I could easily carry on.

My brother and I were signed up to run three sessions of Burrows & Badgers, so I didn’t need more than two dozen miniatures and a single 3x3 foot terrain set-up. That all went into two Really Useful Boxes, a 9-liter and a 4-liter, which I banded together with a transverse strap and a “Strap-a-handle”. This configuration fits in the overhead compartment without difficulty. We had an uneventful flight, and checked into our hotel with enough time to spare to meet my brother for dinner.  Since only a few of the con-goers are arriving on Tuesday, we figured that we could have anything that we liked, and ended up at The Social Cantina, not far from the convention center.  It’s new since last year, and I wonder how the rest of their weekend went. 

We enjoy being at Gen Con on Wednesday for the unofficial Day 0. This year my younger son, William, made it in on Wednesday morning, so we started the day with a brunch at the Cafe Patachou, anticipating that Wednesday was probably the last day where we could find seats at that hour. After that, we headed off to our first ticketed event.  It has been our custom for the past several trips to sign up for some board game, usually something still in pre-production.  This year we tried Eureka Science Academy, a card game themed around recruiting historical scientists and developing and defending scientific theories.  It has some potential, and I enjoyed the idea of trying to defend the phlogiston theory, so I will keep an eye out for the final version. We finished the day with a visit to the Block Party.  While we were able to get the special Gen Con pizza from the folks at Hot Box Pizza, the line to try the Sun King special Gen Con beer was longer than I could stand in.  One of William’s grad school gaming friends attending this year arrived while we were eating.  We left them to explore the convention on their own, as my brother and I needed a good night’s sleep before our early start on Thursday.

As noted above, we were running three sessions of Burrows & Badgers, for six players each.  The first of these was scheduled for Thursday at 0900.  This year our games were out in Lucas Oil Stadium.  As can be seen from the shot below of our setting up, there was still extra space on Thursday morning.  We have

not GMed out there previously, and we have agreed that it’s not a bad place to run games.  (For the historical miniatures gamer, I might note here that we were setting up just beyond a large group of tables where an event organizing group called Able Company was running a large Flames of War event.) With the dome ceiling, sound does not bounce around as badly as it does in the event halls, so my voice was not as damaged as it has been some years.  With a game at 0900, we know that we are not trying to get into

the Exhibition Hall for the 1000 opening, and all of the players have presumably made that decision as well.  We were pleased to find that all six of our preregistered players showed up.  The session went well, and we had an hour to reset things for the afternoon session. In between, I ran down to the Exhibition Hall to get a copy of Free League’s Dragonbane, an English translation of the latest edition of the earliest roleplaying game in Swedish, Drakkar och Demoner, itself originally derived from Chaosium’s Basic Role-playing and Magic World as presented in Worlds of Wonder in 1982.  The crowd was very heavy, and that was as much as I could do in the limited time available.  Like the morning session, the 

afternoon session was also full, with all six players appearing.  Another fun set of games was played.  We set these events up, by the way, as three parallel one-on-one tables, all playing the same scenario, “Seize the paychest”, though on different terrain and with different war bands.  We do this so that we are flexible.  If an even number of players shows up, we pair them off and both of us advise and adjudicate.  If we have an odd number, one of us can jump in and play, so we are ready for anything from just one up to the six players planned.  My wife found us just as we were finishing and packing things up, so we headed back to the hotel.  We met up with our favorite dance instructors, Whitney and Reesa from The Revel Alliance.  We had some supper with them, and then I headed off to my evening game, a Pendragon (6th edition) adventure that William was also playing.  We managed to save some part of England from being ravaged by a dragon by putting it to sleep with a well-fed magical panther, so I guess we’ll call that a success.

On Friday morning, I met by brother for breakfast at the Lincoln Square Pancake House.  It is far enough from the Convention Center that it wasn’t too crowded.  After breakfast we took a quick look at the Auction’s consignment shop.  This year, it seemed to be mostly recent Euro-style board games, so the only thing I came away with was a copy of a vintage GDW Series 120 game, 1940, which turned out later to be short the rules.  (I expect I can find them online somewhere, but haven’t had time to search yet.). Then it was time for my main foray into the Exhibition Hall.  As with Thursday, it was quite crowded and two hours was as much as I could stand.  I ended up with some pins, some Games and Gears paintbrushes, some Dryad Tea, some Campaign Coins to use as fate tokens in Burrows & Badgers, a few little games from Indie Press Revolution, and a few more coins from the Shire Post Mint. 

Friday afternoon was scheduled for dancing.  Irene and I were signed up for four sessions of dance run by the Revel Alliance.  We have been doing their events since they started in 2017, and they are always fun.

After four hours of dance, I was a bit worn, and didn’t make it to the fantasy miniatures game I had scheduled. (My apologies to the event organizer … )

My brother and I ran our third Burrows & Badgers session on Saturday morning.  We had five of the six

registered players, so we were 17 for 18 for the weekend.  I believe this was our best show-up rate ever for Gen Con.  After that game I had no choice but to carry my miniatures boxes to my next events, the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff live podcast, and another dance session.  At that point things caught up with me, and I carried my boxes back to the hotel room, stretched out on the couch, and fell asleep.  I woke up just in time to make it to the pre-scheduled family dinner.  Our previous customary location for Gen Con family dinners had closed during the pandemic years, so we made reservations after the event sign up weekend for the Weber Grill, conveniently across the street from our hotel. We try to schedule one dinner, usually Friday or Saturday depending on how the gaming schedules work out, to allow us to catch up on what everyone has been doing for the con.  After dinner, William and I took a walk to the other end of the convention world, the JW Marriott, to see how the open gaming looked this year. One ballroom is

dedicated to open gaming, and it takes a wide-angle lens to capture it.  I was too tired to actually play anything, but there was a wide variety of board games as well as a few pick-up roleplaying games on offer.  Perhaps next year I will actually schedule some time to try this out.

By Sunday morning, I was dragging a bit, but I still managed to get up before my alarm went off so that I could go play my final scheduled game.  My son William has been playing a great deal of Crusader Kings 3, from Paradox, and decided that he was interested in playing Kingmaker.  I had played quite a bit of Kingmaker, in the original British edition and the Avalon Hill version, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, so it wasn’t hard to convince me to join as well.  The only issue was that signing up for an 0800 Sunday game made sense back in May, but was a little daunting in August on the fifth day of the convention. We both made it, though, and it was a good game, pleasantly more dynamic than I remembered it being. 

There is a new edition about to be released, and I have a copy on order.  In the meantime, we can play the Avalon Hill version. There was time for one more dance session after that, and a final quick peek (with no purchases) at the Exhibition Hall.  We all had lunch together after that, and then headed to the airport, where the traditional departure game tables were set up:

The official Gen Con press release says that over 70,000 unique individuals attended, a new record.  The crowds in the high traffic areas bear this out, and they sold out their limit of 4-Day and Saturday passes.

So that was Gen Con; this was my tenth consecutive year including the two virtual pandemic years.  With the crowds and the general uptick in Covid, I was not surprised to hear quite a few con crud/Covid 

stories.  I’ve had some serious con crud this week, but have tested negative for Covid. Next year I may need to reconsider my masking decision and mask more consistently.  But who knows what the viral environment will look like by then … 

I’ll throw in one random background fun shot.  Among the other Gen Con traditions, a large balloon sculpture is built, starting on Wednesday.  This year the balloon sculpting team built a life-sized model of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module, which was amazing.

Hope to see you in Indianapolis next year!