The 8 Games I Played at Gen Con

I was having a conversation at 16-Bit, a barcade in Indianapolis that attracts many Gen Con attendees. Gen Con is the board game convention I went to last week. It was night time and I was speaking with a few other designers on the patio over drinks. The topic was the experience of playing games as a designer, as opposed to a fan. I compared it to watching a magic act as a magician. For an audience member, they are entertained by the tricks and the spectacle of the presentation. For a fellow magician, they’re entertained trying to figure out how the trick works. The mechanics of the act. My argument was that both ways of viewing the magic show are fun, but fundamentally different.

I went to Gen Con to play as many games as I could in four days. Not just to play games, but to learn from them. To be inspired by them. One of the classic tips you hear as a young writer is the importance of reading. The more you read, the more literary tools you have at your disposal. As a game designer, it’s pretty much the same thing. We benefit greatly from experiencing game mechanics, ideally with a critical lens, to inspire our own systems. So, with that in mind, I want to talk about some of the games I played at Gen Con this year and break down what I learned from them.

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is a tabletop RPG in the emerging sub-genre of capsule games. Capsule games are TTRPGs that are less open world than Dungeons & Dragons. It’s like being an actor in a Christopher Guest movie, where you’re given a character, and the outline of a scene, and you improvise within the outline. In Yazeba’s, which takes place in a cottage run by a witch and has strong Steven Universe vibes, we got to choose from premade characters. The game master read an introductory text aloud to me and five other players to set the scene. The “chapter” we played had unique mechanics meant to steer the conversation in a philosophical direction, fitting for a scene about catching fireflies on a beautiful night. And therein lied the challenge. Yazeba’s is very well-written and conceived, but its capsule nature made it less flexible. There were a lot of awkward pauses at the table, as players tried to figure out what their pre-designed characters would say. There’s a mechanic that encourages players to use a set of character-specific conversation prompts, but they were a little vague. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s hard to “Say it again with gusto!” when you don’t know what to say in the first place. I think the process of character creation in an RPG gives the player a feeling of ownership. They know what their character would do, because the character came from them. When a player is being asked to embody someone else, they need a clear path into that character’s head.

Parsely was my favorite game of the show. It’s the closest thing I’ve played to a tabletop RPG party game. In Parsely, the game master takes on the role of a computer running a 1980s parser-based text adventure game, and the players are all controlling the same player character, giving directions to the computer one turn at a time. Think Zork meets Twitch Plays Pokemon, only in real life. I do not like parser games. They make me feel hopelessly stupid! I struggle to figure out what parser game designers are asking of me and get stuck. Their inability to parse natural language is also frustrating. (“I don’t know what STAB THE GOBLIN I GUESS?? means.”) But when a parser game is played by a group of 10 people who are experiencing the same frustration all together, with a grinning GM – J Duncan, a member of Phoenix Fire LARP, who played the role of parser with self-conscious sarcasm – it changed everything. The game led to group problem solving, bonding, and shared laughter at the absurdity of the rules. The same mechanics that frustrated me, re-contextualized, enchanted me. We won the game together by curing a werewolf, killing a vampire, and delivering a package to a ghost. Afterwards, a fellow player said I was key to our victory. Maybe I’m better at parsers than I give myself credit for. (Just kidding, I totally suck at them!)

We Can Be Heroes is a superhero tabletop RPG with art by Max Bare, a cartoonist who’s absolutely terrific at drawing dudes with beards. The two hour game of We Can Be Heroes we played was almost entirely a combat encounter in a warehouse. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel the same amount of joy and fun from the combat as I do from Max Bare’s artwork. It’s not an issue with We Can Be Heroes specifically. There are tweaks I’d make to the system, but ultimately, it played like most TTRPGs with turn based combat where you roll a die and add a modifier to resolve an action. The session got me thinking about how combat encounters in TTRPGs can be improved. The classic complaint is math, but this one wasn’t too bad. After a few turns, I can figure out what dice to roll and which stat numbers to add.

For me, the problem was the waiting. In We Can Be Heroes, I was a superhero on a team of six attempting to disable a drone. My roles were all middling. Not high enough to damage the drone, and not low enough to get an entertainingly bad result either. The drone slipped away, turn after turn. Then I had to wait an interminably long time for a bunch of strangers and a gaggle of villainous NPCs controlled by the GM took their turns before I could attack again. I could see other players checking their phones and looking bored during the long wait, too. The GM did a good job telling the story! My issue is that games are about player agency. The more you sit around not being able to act, the worse the experience feels. It’s why players complain about long cutscenes, and rightfully so. After the game, I thought a lot about my beloved X-Men: The Animated Series, and how action took place simultaneously in the foreground and background. I would love for these games to implement simultaneous combat, where we discuss as a group what actions we want to take, then roll simultaneously, and watch the results play out. If you know a TTRPG with combat like that, please light up the Bat Signal and let me know. I’d like to play it!

Void 1680 AM is a solo TTRPG where the player is the host of a radio show, where they actually record themselves, play songs from a crafted playlist, and take calls from listeners as determined by dice rolls. Technically, I haven’t played Void yet. I read the manual in the Solo RPG Library, an event where a packed room of solo roleplaying enthusiasts (neeeeeeeerds!) like myself got to check out a collection of acclaimed solo games. At the end of the short manual, I was floored by the final section, which reads that the game has a YouTube “radio station” where players can submit recordings of themselves playing the game to the designer for actual broadcast. The game received a lot of acclaim and I can see why. Here’s a great example of a designer going above and beyond to give their players a memorable experience. This is at the top of my solo RPG queue.

FlipToons is a strategic deckbuilder game where players assemble a cast of cartoon characters for their studio. You recruit toons with higher star power ratings to your studio each turn by engaging with the talent marketplace, all while considering how your toons’ special abilities will play off each other. The goal of FlipToons is to have the studio with the biggest star power in Hollywood. Like We Can Be Heroes, the game’s genre, art and overall theming drew me in. I liked how quickly I understood the game, and the demo game was fun! I picked it up to play with Amanda on our lunch breaks. (Happy Birthday, Amanda! 🥳) However, the game might’ve been too simple for my designer brain. I found myself wanting to add complexity. For example, a trading round where players could swap toons with each other, or the ability to guarantee certain toons would be in my hand at great expense to my ability to get new toons on the marketplace. The game plays great as-is, so I’m not sure my additions would make the game better or just more complex. And that’s what playtesting is for!

Lorcana vs. UniVersus: One of the great things about Gen Con is the sheer number of games being played at the show. It was easy for me to get demos of two TCGs (trading card games) that have been on my radar for a while, but hadn’t gotten the chance to try until this past weekend. UniVersus is a character-vs-character battle game where you build a deck around one character and their various ability cards. The game features a variety of cartoon and anime IP, which is why I have a set of Mega Man UniVersus cards on my game shelf that I had no idea how to play. I suspect the design is inspired by the complexity of arcade fighting games, because there are lots of mechanics that try to emulate hand-to-hand combat, such as whether your attack was low, medium, or high, and the amount of force behind an attack. I could feel myself learning the rules, understanding them, then leaving my head immediately. As someone who’s used to the Attack number versus Defense number dynamic in TCGs, all these other factors to consider felt like a lot.

I had a much easier time learning Lorcana, the Disney themed battler which plays like Magic the Gathering, only simpler. (Akin to what Magic was like when I was in middle school.) The players are in a race to put points on the proverbial board. The first player to achieve “20 Lore” wins. Your characters can quest to earn lore, or they can be used to banish your opposing player’s cards, an easy to understand dynamic of offensive vs. defensive play. Lorcana and UniVersus have a lot in common, actually, like the crossover IP theming and the ability to use any card to generate energy for moves, as opposed to the need to draw specific land cards to generate mana in Magic. However, I’m much more likely to play Lorcana than UniVersus in the future. The more complexity in the system, the greater the risk of alienating potential players.

Super Boss Monster: In the Hot Board Game Room (🔥), I was able to pick out and play newly released games. I chose Super Boss Monster, partly because I enjoyed the original Boss Monster so much and partly because ads for the game were everywhere. It was a surreal experiecnce being surrounded by ads for a board game as though it was a soda or a presidential candidate!

When I opened the box and started refreshing myself on the rules, I was dumbstruck at how little I remembered about the specifics of Boss Monster when I played it a few years ago. I remembered the feeling of having a good time, but almost nothing about how to play. It took an hour of reading, re-reading, watching a YouTube video, and re-reading again before the game loop clicked more me, and technically my first solo game after I figured it all out was played incorrectly, I discovered to my horror.

Super Boss Monster is kind of like the board game equivalent of Lucy at the conveyor belt, stuffing chocolates down her shirt. Heroes appear in town, and if you don’t entice them into your killer dungeon fast enough, they pile up in the local tavern and it’s game over. The rate at which the heroes pile up in solo mode strikes me as unfairly fast. I think they want players to lose a lot, because that’s a good motivator to try again. If a solo mode is too easy, and the player wins every time, there’s no tension to hook the player. But I found the speed of the “conveyor belt” way too fast at the jump. If I pick this game up, I’m going to homebrew a variable difficulty mechanic. There are days when I want to keep my shirt chocolate free.

🎲 Your Turn: If you’re a creator, have you learned any lessons from your recently digested media? What do you think of the adage about experiencing the type of media you’re trying to produce? Any board game recommendations? (I love card games, strategy games, deckbuilders, solo TTRPGs, and weird stuff.) I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below to leave a comment.