Gen Con, the biggest tabletop games convention in North America, will be held this weekend in Indianapolis (starting tomorrow), and once again I’ll be missing it but still thinking about it. This year marks five years since the last time I attended (though it was canceled and delayed for a couple years because of the pandemic). Pictured above is me at the Lucas Oil Stadium during Gen Con 2019, before any of us had heard of COVID.
I’ve got some ambivalence about it: Gen Con was the big event I attended each year, because our family schedules just didn’t really allow for me to travel more frequently, so its absence has definitely been felt, particularly because I’m still on all of the email lists about new releases and publisher events and meeting schedules. I miss being able to see so many folks in the tabletop industry in person, and to be surrounded by people who just love board games as much as I do. I miss the opportunity to hang out with several of the other GeekDads, running around the exhibit hall during the day and then playing games late into the night. I miss hosting our Gaming with GeekDads events, meeting some of our readers and playing games with them. I miss playing suitcase Tetris.
I don’t miss the headache of trying to get a hotel room, though. The biggest thing still keeping me away, though, is that I’m still not sure I’m ready to risk COVID to attend a gaming convention. The fact that so many people behave as if it’s no longer a factor just makes it an even higher risk, because it means we’re not all in this together anymore. The precautions you take on your own are basically the only thing you can count on, because there isn’t a concerted effort to minimize the risk for the convention as a whole. Until something drastic changes, I’m not sure when I’ll finally feel ready to return.
I had also held out some hope that maybe Gen Con would finally decide to move to a different city—a few years back when Indianapolis passed some legislation that would be harmful to the LGBTQ+ community, there were calls for Gen Con to move, but the official response was that they were locked into a contract until 2023 and couldn’t afford to break that contract. Last year, they announced that they had re-upped until 2030, despite the fact that the Indiana legislature passed a slate of bills attacking LGBTQ+ folks, particularly trans youth. It’s becoming harder to square my desire for the tabletop hobby to be more welcoming and inclusive with traveling and spending my tourist dollars in a state that is so antagonistic to the very people I hope to play games with.
I understand that for publishers and vendors at Gen Con, this can be a tough decision, too: the number of sales they make at a big show like Gen Con may make up a significant portion of their yearly income. Though I’ve also heard anecdotally that it’s more and more expensive to get a booth at Gen Con, so it’s possible we may eventually reach a tipping point, but it will still be a while until there’s any other single event that’s anywhere as big.
We used to write a group post every year about the games we were looking forward to, and then some follow-ups about our favorite things about the convention. Today I spent some time scrolling through BoardGameGeek’s Gen Con preview, a list of 633 (as of this writing) titles that will be available to demo or buy at Gen Con—when I’m not attending, I don’t always pay as much attention to the emails about it, so I’m not up to speed on a lot of them. It’s a huge number of titles, and I’m sure it’s not comprehensive because there may be publishers who hadn’t submitted their games to be included. I was surprised by how many of them I’ve gotten to try at least once sometime in the past year, and there are a good number of them that I really need to sit down and write up.
There are several games that I wrote about when they were crowdfunded: Cascadia: Rolling, Nocturne, Terminus, Metrorunner, Stonespine Architects, Hello Kitty: Day at the Park. There are some expansions or sequels to games that I’ve enjoyed, and would definitely be looking up if I were there: Clank! Catacombs – Lairs and Lost Chambers, Planet Unknown: Supermoon, Bullet Palette and Bullet Paw, In the Footsteps of Marie Curie. And there were a couple on the list that I don’t know much about but sound really intriguing, like Gibberers, a game about creating a new language to communicate with aliens. I’d also love to try the Slay the Spire board game, which I didn’t back when it was on Kickstarter and am feeling a bit of FOMO about.
At any rate, I definitely have enough games right now that I should be writing about—to a degree, I feel like I never quite got back up to speed after Gen Con 2019 and am still playing catch-up—so it may be a good thing that I’m not going to come home next weekend with a pile of new games. Maybe seeing this list will give me the nudge I need to buckle down and share with you some of the games I’ve already played and have been enjoying.
In the meantime, if you’re attending Gen Con this year, have fun and be safe! And if, like me, you find yourself far from Indianapolis, may you find some people and some time to enjoy some board games at home!
