Earlier this month, I went to my second Gen Con. It’s the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America and it feels pretty big! Not quite as big as San Diego Comic-Con, which I went to the week prior. I had a fit of madness and thought I could do both. It turns out I’m not 28 anymore and this was a bad idea.
Despite feeling pretty damn tired, I had a great time at Gen Con! I signed copies of ALL-CARDS at the IPR booth, snuck into the D&D immersive carnival experience, playtested an unreleased TTRPG during a tornado, ate the infamous horseradish shrimp cocktail at Harry & Izzy’s, and hung out with very good friends, including Paul, who I met at Comic-Con about 20 years ago, and Caity, who I met at Mr. Malkiewicz’s ballroom dance class over 30 years ago.
The main reason I go to Gen Con is to play a lot of tabletop games! (A) They’re fun! And also (B) A good way to grow as a game designer is by playing a lot of games and thinking critically about them. So, like last year, here are my thoughts on every game I played at Gen Con 2026.
Thursday
My Murder Mystery – I’m a lifelong fan of Clue. The board game, the VCR board game, the movie (RIP Tim Curry), and the kid lit whodunnits from the 80s. I had the SNES game growing up and I still have the poster that came with it! My Murder Mystery is a series of card-based deduction games, but it didn’t inspire Clue-level devotion from me. In the game, every player is a suspect in a whodunnit. You have to prevent other players from guessing you were the murderer, figure out who the real murderer is, and throw players off about other sordid events. (ex. “Who was doing it in the villa’s upstairs bathroom?”) This game would be more ideal for a quiet house with friends, as opposed to a giant, noisy convention hall with strangers, but even under ideal circumstances this wouldn’t be a favorite. Unlike Clue, My Murder Mystery requires a lot of reading. You absorb several large cards worth of details at the table and listen to lengthy monologues from the host. When I’m reading a murder mystery novel, I have the luxury of no one actively accusing me of murder as I read a chapter. Two thirds of the way through the game, when all the players finally absorbed our individual information dumps and we were able to grill one another, the game got fun. But the lead time to fun felt very long. The mystery itself was a well-constructed and memorable tale of murder in the world of haute cuisine, but I’d argue the game isn’t well balanced. Some players have less obvious evidence against them than others and will have to defend themselves harder. I think this would play better as a LARP with required pre-prep, rather than a pick-up-and-play board game.
One-Hit Heroes – This is a game designed for an alternate universe version of me. In this alternate universe, I’m a dad and I want to introduce my kid to strategic deck building card games. My hope is that they’ll live out my lost dream of becoming a professional Magic the Gathering player. One-Hit Heroes is a super simple take on games like Marvel Champions. You pick a hero deck with unique abilities and cooperate with other players to fight a series of bad guys with increasing power levels. The conceit is that if you get hit once, you’re dead. Except that’s not true at all. You have two pieces of armor you can sacrifice when taking damage, so it’s really three hit heroes, y’all. When you beat a villain, you get to add upgraded weapons to your deck. A full game consists of three villains. My group managed to beat the whole game on our first try with no deaths. The strategy of each hero deck is pretty obvious and not very customizable. I bet it’d be more challenging for kids just starting to play this type of game who aren’t familiar with well-worn strategies (tank, assist, etc.). My biggest complaint is actually the box. One-Hit Heroes is a card game at its core, but it comes in an enormous box! From what I saw, the box is mostly full of card divider plastic. I’m guessing they can charge more if the box looks big. What the game lacks in combat strategy, it makes up for in pricing strategy?
Catalyst Arcade – Just when I thought I was out on CCGs, this incredible new game pulled me back into the pack game. I backed the Kickstarter months ago, because I really liked the 80s VHS movie inspired setting, the comic book art, and the premise that you can play a full game with just two packs. I was hardly alone. The game made over $2 million on Kickstarter! I had the opportunity to play the demo at both Comic-Con and Gen Con. They gave free packs to everyone who tried it out, which was very generous. The basic premise of Catalyst Arcade is that you’re trying to kill all the bosses in a post-apocalyptic sewer world while protecting your own boss. The game gets so much right. Magic’s mana system is pretty clunky. A third of your deck is made up of land cards, which you need to place to tap enough mana to play cards. When you don’t draw enough mana, a frequent problem, you are screwed. Catalyst Arcade has a much smoother level system. When every player has made all the moves they can or want to make, the game goes up a level. To place a new fighter card, you just have to be at a high enough level. (If your game is on level 3, you can place a level 3 fighter.) No mana required. Every time you level up, you get more tokens. The tokens let you fight, use special abilities, and play new cards. I had a blast both times I played. Looking forward to constructing my own deck and hitting the sewers with friends! Assuming I can convince any friends to play this with me!
Friday
It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show – A game where you simulate a cheesy, low budget B-Movie, like something Elvira or Svenghoulie would’ve hosted? Sign me up! And I did sign up! I played this vintage TTRPG from 1989 with an experienced GM who had run the game many times. The GM was confident and seasoned, putting a lot of care into the details of each setting, particularly the tropical island we found ourselves on for a Lovecraft-inspired adventure. Lovecraft is not my thing, but the game didn’t take the mythos seriously. My only challenge with the setting was that the players were each randomly assigned to rival groups meant to kill each other, so I couldn’t relax and enjoy roleplaying a story. I had to be on my guard over who in our party might kill me. (I didn’t figure it out and I totally died, lol.) But my biggest critique is with the system itself. It’s very barebones. You have an endless array of attributes to assign points into, but only a small handful of attributes turned out to be useful, so I wasted a lot of points in character creation. There are no mechanisms for manipulating dice rolls or any kind of special abilities really, so if you roll poorly, you’re just stuck. Also, there was barely any mechanical acknowledgment that we are supposed to be actors in a movie. There’s no way to yell “cut,” or storm off to your trailer, or change something in the edit. I vastly prefer Straight to VHS, which we used for Worst Movies Ever Played. It incorporates a lot of interesting movie mechanics and gives the player greater agency. By comparison, It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show feels like a B-System.
Saturday
Helluva Town – I can now say that I’ve played on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts. No, I didn’t play football. Never football! Not even Magic, which is at least competitive. I played a cooperative TTRPG set in the world of 1930s cartoons on the field of Lucas Oil Stadium! Helluva Town is a fun new game where you play a wacky toon who is indebted to the Ducko crime family, so you need to do missions for them to pay off your debts. The game encourages toon logic. At one point in our adventure, I suggested we pull a giant heavy laser cannon out of a lake (long story) by having all seven of us escaped convicts (longer story) grab a fishing line and pull it out together. With a bit of luck from a pack of custom cards, we successfully launched the laser out of the sky and onto the ground, fully operational. Our pre-gen characters had plenty of unique abilities. I played a Marvin the Martian type with a shrink ray that was crucial to our success as a party. We had a great DM who managed to command the table, even in an extremely noisy stadium. Her on-the-spot reactions to our ability checks were wonderful. When we failed to open a padlock with a chainsaw, she had the padlock give us a raspberry. More raspberrying in TTRPGs, please!
Compile – At Gen Con, I seek out games I don’t already own. In the case of Compile, I finally got to try a game that was already on my shelf, but I had no idea how to play. I read about Compile on Skeleton Code Machine, an awesome newsletter about tabletop game design, and got it because the I really liked one specific mechanic the newsletter described. Admittedly, it’s a bit complicated for a card game. There are lots of phases and mechanics to keep track of. After playing the game, I still feel like I only understand 85% of how it works. But man, there are a lot of cool design ideas in there. You play as a hacker (I assume, from the art and aesthetic) putting cards into lanes. The object is to clear all three of your lanes before the rival player can. So what is that specific mechanic I really liked? You stack cards on top of each other, like in solitaire, and stacking changes the abilities of the cards when some text is shown and other text gets covered up. Rad! Compile has a lot of complex and interesting strategic possibilities. Once I fully get it, I have a feeling I’m going to love it.
Dragon Strike – I’m crowning Dragon Strike my favorite game of Gen Con 2026. I wrote a bit about it last week. Dragon Strike was an attempt by TSR (the company that made Dungeons & Dragons before it was bought by Wizards of the Coast) to make a beginner board game version of D&D to compete with the more popular Hero Quest. The reason I know it at all is because I’m obsessed with VCR board games, which Dragon Strike is not. It’s a game that came packaged with a VHS tape that introduces the world and game concepts, but the tape isn’t a component of the game. The Dragon Strike tape, presented in AdventureVision™ and hyperReality™, has all the cheesiness I demand from a VCR game. The board game features cards with live action photos of the actors from the video tape on them! Swoon! So I came for the lols, but I stayed because the game is actually mechanically brilliant. Dragon Strike distills D&D campaigns into short, clever adventures where players can battle death knights, converse with bridge trolls, utilize their spell cards, and uncover rare items on the game board. Paul and I found ourselves surrounded by monsters, including a brutal giant, but we managed to uncover a crystal orb (ooooorb!) and run away just before a dragon showed up to burn us into adventurer ashes. We were legitimately enthralled. Paul pointed out how much fun it would be to home-brew campaigns. While the game doesn’t have a system to level characters up, it wouldn’t be difficult to add one. But even as is, we agreed that we would’ve immediately gone into another game after the one we played. I bought myself a copy for my birthday!
Sunday
Ghostbusters RPG – This was my most anticipated game for Gen Con. The Ghostbusters RPG came out in 1986 and has a hilarious manual written from the perspective of the Ghostbusters themselves, an idea I gleefully stole paid homage to when designing the Wet Hot American Summer roleplaying game. I was a Ghostbusters kid growing up, and despite the franchise’s inconsistency in theaters and the bizarre “controversy” over Ghostbusters sometimes being women, I maintain a place in my heart for Egon and the gang. I wanted to play the Ghostbusters RPG last year, but couldn’t get into any sessions. I’ve wanted to play the Ghostbusters RPG for years, in general, but copies go for over $100 on eBay. This game does not disappoint! I had a delightful time playing a Balki/Latka inspired Ghostbuster named Bork, a Transylvania immigrant whose village was overrun by ghosts. The system is simple to understand and very clever. You roll a pool of D6 dice based on your attributes to see if you were successful, but every turn you must also roll a ghost die with a Ghostbusters logo instead of a 6. If you roll a Ghostbusters logo, something unexpectedly bad happens, even when you roll well. Our DM was very sharp and funny. He ran us through a meta adventure that took place at Gen Con and involved Pokemon. I know a lot more about Ghostbusters than I do Pokemon, but our middle-aged group managed to figure out we were meant to “battle” with Slimer as though he were a Pokemon, which led to our group’s success. The system is so breezy, zany, and roleplaying forward, it’s now officially one of my favorite systems. I would gladly play a full campaign as Bork. He loves being a Ghost Blaster! Go for America!
Roll Camera! – As someone who has worked as crew on a film set before, I wondered if I’d find the theme of this cooperative worker placement board game fun. Would the game have me wrapping cables at 2 am or getting lost for several hours on an errand to get camera batteries? None of those things happened and I did have fun! Roll Camera! was a solid game to end the show on. Everyone plays as a different member of a film crew with unique mechanical abilities. (I played as the lead actor with the ability to change the script. Notably absent from the game: the screenwriter! I suppose actors can have Final Draft on their laptops, too.) On your turn, you roll dice representing different types of film workers. With the help of your fellow crew members, you use the workers to build sets, implement ideas, film scenes, and solve problems. Every turn, there’s a new problem on set, which are hilariously accurate to film production. Once we got over the hump of understanding the game, it was chaotic in a fun way. Our group weathered many challenges by pulling the right metaphorical levers. After Roll Camera!, Paul and I caught a lift to the airport. And that was a “wrap” on Gen Con 2026.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you played any good tabletop board games this year? Any disappointing ones? I want to hear about them. What kinds of tabletop games do you like? TTRPGs, 1v1 deck builders, Euro games? Reply directly to this email or leave a comment by hitting the orange button below.
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