Gen Con 2026 Recap
I made my annual high summer pilgrimage to Indianapolis as I always do, alongside my wife for the second straight year. This was a pretty good iteration of Gen Con, severe weather notwithstanding. Here's what I got up to while I was at the show.
Wednesday
My wife and I drove down to the show from Wisconsin, stopping for lunch with my grandparents in the Chicago suburbs. Once in Indy, we realized that our parking reservations had been messed up and spent 20 minutes on the phone with ParkWhiz getting that fixed. With that finished, we grabbed our badges and tickets from Will Call and headed to dinner at Greek Islands with Kati of The Play Reports. It's a great spot and just far away enough from the convention center that it's still walkable but not overwhelmed by congoers. We headed back to the hotel to recuperate and prep for our schedules proper.
Thursday
The day did not begin auspiciously! Traffic was terrible and what should have been a 25 minute commute from our hotel took well over an hour. This meant that we didn't arrive at 9:30 as planned and subsequently missed the Running of the Nerds. I still made it into the exhibit hall early and made a beeline for the Burning Wheel booth, where I picked up Interceptor. I grabbed the preview version of this at last year's convention and I was excited to get the finished product. It's got delightful production values and plays fast, destroying your patrol officer's morale as the world heads for apocalypse in a session of about 90 minutes. I played a session with Luke Crane at the Hilton (which is way farther from the exhibit hall than I want it to be!) and then spent a couple of hours more in the exhibit hall.
Thursday evening I headed to Games on Demand where I linked up with my friend Mike. I was cajoled into playing Legend in the Mist. I found its predecessor, City of Mist, incredibly disappointing, so I didn't have high hopes for this one. Unfortunately, despite the game's killer art, I found a lot of the problems I had with City of Mist persisted in this one. Every move is either a long process of collecting and negotiating over which tags apply or piling and scratching far too many tags to make the dice irrelevant. Once that ended, we headed back to the hotel again.
Friday
I spent Friday morning browsing the exhibit hall again before heading to my afternoon game of Apocalypse World. This was a prewritten scenario taken from the back of a Harn module and it was the highlight of the con. Instead of fully creating the scenario at the table as is encouraged by many PbtA games, the characters came with prewritten backgrounds and we only determined their histories with each other. The situation quickly moved from an uneasy detente between missionaries attempting to convert a plains clan and the traditionalists resisting them into out and out conflict as various traditions (good and bad) came under fire and the clan's rivals returned for revenge. My character lost the struggle and won the epilogue, as most of his rivals died and he was able to return from exile and lead the clan.
Friday evening I tried out Million-Colored Sun, a rules light sword and sorcery RPG. We played a fun little adventure that was a pastiche of S&S tropes with a somewhat silly bent. I had fun with it, but I also wasn't running out to find a copy.
Saturday
Saturday morning I headed back to Games on Demand for a two hour slot. Unfortunately, my boarding pass was called last and all of the games I was interested in were full, so I ended up playing Public Access. I love PbtA games generally, but I generally dislike investigative scenarios and I particularly don't like coming up with the solution to the mystery rather than figuring it out. We spent almost half of our session on this one creating characters and making the scenario and then raced through what we'd made to a rather unsatisfying resolution. I think a big part of my bad experience here was that the game and I were not a good fit, and trying to squeeze the entire game's loop into this slot was the rest of it.
For lunch we headed over to Shapiro's, another highlight of downtown Indianapolis. I love the sandwiches and pie there, but it's hard to go wrong with anything. Afterwards, I headed to play Defy the Gods. It had some interesting play in trying to control your power, adopting the system that I believe originated in Apocalypse Keys, where rather than weak hits and strong hits, instead the 7-9 range is the target and rolling 10+ means your power gets out of control. This led to some fun situations. Defy the Gods is not afraid to wear its queer allegory on its sleeve. That's something I enjoy in small doses, but I'm not sure that I'd want to play this one for a campaign length.
Saturday evening my wife and I met up with Kati and Scott of XP Rolls for dinner at Encanto Alebrije. This was a new place for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed my cochinita tacos. My wife dashed off to her evening game and Kati, Scott, and I lingered at the table for a long time chatting. We'd planned to play board games afterward, but after looking at the time, we decided to play a quick session of Interceptor instead. We all had a blast and wrecked some cars before wrapping up for the night.
Sunday
Despite the short day, I managed to cram two sessions in. I started with a GURPS Star Trek scenario set on the Federation-Tholian border in the TOS era. This would've made a great episode of Star Trek, but it wasn't a great showcase for GURPS. I had a lot of fun playing it (deadpan Vulcan humor is very much my jam), but there wasn't much involvement from the mechanics.
My last game of the con was Shadowdark with Kati. She wrote a bit about her experience running here, but I wasn't playing the scenario that was the focus of her report. I backed the initial Shadowdark campaign, but found it kinda bland when I read it. Still, I thought it was worth checking out at the table. Unfortunately, I liked the game less than I expected. Always-on initiative really slowed things down and I think the group would've benefited from a caller or the like. One of the players was extremely nine years old and was quite disruptive, which definitely didn't help my experience. Still, I had fun playing with Kati even if I probably won't sign up for a Shadowdark session again.
Conclusion
That's most of what I got up to at the con this year. While in the exhibit hall, I grabbed the Dungeon World 2 beta, Runequest: The Apple Lane Campaign, all the Kala Mandala zines I was missing, IsaacIsAfraid's The Knight Errant, the final three issues of Yggdrasil MGZ, a few Eclipse Phase scenarios that I was missing, a physical copy of Fatherfog, Carved in Stone, some zines from Brad Kerr, Amanda P., and Amanda Lee Franck, and the Ath Cliath boxed set. If there's anything you'd like to hear my opinion on, let me know and I'll move it up in my reading queue! I also picked up a severe case of con crud (the first in about a decade), but I've almost fully recovered at this point. I'm looking forward to next year's trip already!