Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / GenCon 2026 Wrap up

Transcript

GenCon 2026 Wrap up · Pick Up and Deliver

• Pick Up & Deliver 851: GenCon 2026 Wrap up Transcript Welcome to Pickup and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. [ Intro Music ] Greetings, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The cicadas are out. The sun is shining. We are living the dream over here. Today I will be talking to you about my experience at GenCon 2026. For those of you aren't who aren't in the know, GenCon is the four best days in board gaming. Or so they declare. It is the largest domestic board game convention, and it could be the largest board game convention in the world. It's hard to tell because GenCon and Essen count their attendees differently, so it is very difficult to tell which convention had more people specifically at GenCon. They talk about how many badges they sold, how many different people got badges. It's seventy to seventy five thousand people a day at spiel. They count turnstiles, so they count how many people came through the door each day. So spiel will report that they had two hundred, two hundred and fifty, three hundred thousand people at their con. GenCon will say we had seventy five thousand. Seventy five, seventy or seventy five thousand people a day, which if you think four days is two hundred and eighty thousand. So on any given year, GenCon might be bigger or Essen spiel might be bigger. But I've never been to Germany for their board game convention. So GenCon is it for me? What I thought I would do today is talk a little bit about my experience at GenCon this year. Share what I saw. I thought I would do that through five memorable, memorable moments at GenCon. and then fill it out with other conversation. So first off, how is it that I go there? I go to GenCon as part of my role as a partner in X, Y, Z Game Labs X, Y, Z. Game labs is a independent board game company in the Chicagoland area. We make a variety of games, but we are best known for Arch Rivals, which is a knitting and crochet themed, cozy, slightly competitive game for two to four players. Can you tell I just spent the week explaining that? Um. In the past we have produced another a number of other games as well. We made a really cool game about Bigfoot called Bigfoot Roll and Smash that nobody liked. Um, we made a game called, uh, Robot Lab that some people have liked. We made a game called Tiny Tina's Robot tea Party that sold very well. Uh, that is out of print now. And we have a game on the way called Titania Ascending, which has been in production for a very long time. It's been kind of in limbo as we got some expansions done, and hopefully we'll see Titania soon. More on that to come. But we have a booth at GenCon. We rep every year and some years we have way overdone it and found ourselves exhausted and unhappy. The last couple years we have figured out a way to do GenCon in a way that makes it fun. And what we do is we bring enough people that we can keep like three people in the booth at all times, and we divide the day up into three sections that are about three hours long, because the booth has to be open from ten a m to six p m. And so we divide it into three hour sections. That's eight hours, but we do three hour sections. So they overlap because you have to be there a half hour beforehand and stay a half hour after too. So that's nine hours to like clean out, set up or clean up. So with that in mind, at the beginning of the con, we all just talk to each other and sign up for one shift a day or sometimes two shifts a day. With nine. With eight, we had eight people there. This time we wanted three in the booth every time, so we needed nine people like nine shifts filled with eight people. Sometimes when it was busy, we'd have four. Or when you didn't have anything going on, sometimes you'd go hang out. But essentially what it means is that I attend for I work in the booth for three hours a day, and then I have time to walk around and look at stuff and enjoy the con, try out games and so on. So that's what I'm doing at the booth at the con, please. Next year, if you're able to be there, come visit us at XYZ Game Labs. I will be talking about this more. I'm going to make an effort to talk about this well ahead of it, so that if you're able to come, you can come. I will say we do also bring a booth to Pax unplugged, which is a convention that happens in Philadelphia every year. But I am not able to go to that one because of when it happens during the year, it does not fit my work schedule. It's right around finals, and I'm always very busy with school, and I don't have time to take four days and go to a convention. Maybe someday. So I want to talk about my top five moments or top five things that happened at the con. Five interesting things. That's what it is. Number one, it was lovely to see people. I know there are a number of people with whom I have a parasocial relationship. As Cordelia, who is a board game influencer on TikTok. She and I have exchanged messages before and it's nice to see her. We saw. I saw her for a minute and chatted a little. Uh, we saw, I saw, um, Kervin, who is a board game influencer on TikTok. He publishes his company is called For Why games, F o r w h y. They did a Kickstarter last year for Marsh hollow, which I played at GenCon and that is in production, I believe I saw a number of other people as well, and it was really fun to do that. One of my highlights, of course, is my friend Rolfe, who works at Flying Frog Productions, the makers of Last Night on Earth and Shadows of Brimstone. He is a very good friend that I've known for a long time. He's my game master. When I mentioned playing Amber, the Diceless role playing game every other week, he's the game master for that, and I usually get to see him in person once a year at GenCon this year instead of meeting during the day for an hour, which is what we've done the last few years. We decided to meet after work one day, and so we got to spend several hours together, which was super fun. We chatted about life and caught up and just shot the shit, walked around and looked at stuff. We got a chance to play a game. We actually played the Cyberpunk Legends Cooperative card game, which was okay. I will talk more about that in the board game espresso episode about Gen Con. But, um, yeah, generally it was really lovely to see him and a really good time. It's nice to develop these relationships that you can touch in with on, on, uh, once a year at this kind of event. We also had a lovely time. And as I'm thinking about talking to people, I had a lovely time talking with people who like our game, our travels, this, uh, cozy cooperative or this cozy game about knitting and yarn craft has some very serious fans, people who really, really enjoy it. And we really like seeing them. So we're always happy to talk with them about what they've been enjoying about the game, to see the things that they've made, to introduce the game to new people. Uh, we had decent sales this year, not quite as many as we'd like, but so that's how the life goes. We also made some connections that might result in things. And that's part of the reason you go to an event like this. So really fun from the meeting people and talking with people perspective. Second highlight was sort of serendipitous. One of the evenings I wasn't sure really what I was going to do, and Rob, who is my design partner and good friend and his two children, and I say children, they are both. One of them is just entering college, the other is just graduating from college, so they are not young. They had tickets to Muppet trivia at the over at the Marriott and they had one extra ticket. So I'm like, oh yeah, I'll I'll go to Muppet trivia knowing that I would do terribly. And I did terribly. Um, there were well, here's the thing. So they had twenty questions. Here's a little beef. I'm airing a little beef. I didn't, I, I was not a huge fan of the way that the person running the Muppet trivia ran it. Some of her questions were had a kind of openness that could allow for a bunch of different answers, which isn't my favorite. And then she had one answer at the end, which was sort of like, how many different kinds of puppets can you think of? And you got a point for every kind of puppet you could think of. So like, one of the people got like, I don't know, twelve points from being able to think of different kinds of puppets. There were only twenty questions. So like, even if you did really well on the Muppet trivia, if you don't know a bunch of puppet names, you could, you lost. Certainly the people who won were ones who were able to name a lot of puppets. But okay, sure, whatever. I don't care. I was never going to win, so I don't really have that much invested in it. But I do like a good trivia game, and I thought I wasn't super keen on the way that they handled that one. Anyhow, when we were going to Muppet Trivia, we had about twenty minutes beforehand. We got there early. They didn't really open the door until right before the trivia was supposed to start. So we're trying to figure out what to do. And we noticed that there was a room that was open. There were a bunch of empty seats, and there was a guy kind of packing up some stuff. They had finished the game, and so we went in and got talking to him. He was a, um, Call of Cthulhu GM game master, and I had literally just been saying to Rob while we were walking, that if I had the opportunity to play a new role playing game and the time, here's the time is the problem, I would want to play Call of Cthulhu. I thought it was a really interesting system. I've been listening to some live plays of it. I think it would be a lot of fun. So that would I thought that would be a really nice thing. And this GM was telling us how he had. He was a little frustrated because he had had some people who had booked tickets for his game and then returned the tickets at the last minute. So then he had openings in his game, and it wasn't quite what he was hoping it would be. And he said he'd been having that problem kind of so. Well, I said I'd been wanting to play Call of Cthulhu. We kind of talked together about it and he said, well, why don't you come in, come tomorrow during one of my games, we'll see if we can get you played. So I looked ahead. I found his games on the GenCon schedule and I emailed him and said, hey, I see it's sold out, but we could probably come to the four o'clock game. And he said, yeah, come on, come to it. We'll get you. We'll figure it out. So Rob and I went and we got Preassigned characters and we played Call of Cthulhu and it was very delightful. We had a nice time. There were a few things about the way the game ran that I might have done differently if I were the GM, but I'm not the GM. Every GM is a little different. We had a delightful time. I would say the one thing that I wasn't great for me was at one of the other players in particular just kept talking like he kept talking over the GM. He was like making snide comments and stuff and being funny. We were all being a little funny. That's inevitable. But I think part of what makes Call of Cthulhu interesting is the idea that it would be creepy, and it's hard for it to be too creepy if people are also being really funny, I also, and this is a place where it's GM style, right? Like part of the idea is we were part of the Miskatonic University Parapsychology Club. And I think that's the premise. That's like, you're like in a one shot, your GM might say you are a party, you meet, you meet it. You know, you're having your usual night at the tavern when a stranger walks up to you, right? In a one shot, you don't have a ton of time to like, dink around with long term motivation or that sort of thing, right? So the premise was, we are in the Parapsychology Club at Miskatonic University, and we've been asked by the dean to investigate this parapsychological thing. Well, a couple of the players are like, wait, why are we doing this? Why aren't better authorities doing this? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I guess in my head, I was sort of like, well, because we're the Parapsychology Club. And if there's going to be an interesting, creepy story, we have to have people who get involved with the creepy story, a little failure to engage in the project of improv. I think there, but anyway, I'm complaining too much. It was a lovely time. We had a sort of creepy story to follow. We had nice visual things that the GM gave us to look at. Overall, it was a delightful and grotesque time. My character went mad and died. Uh, those are separate things. Or he actually just got grievously injured, now that I think about it. And we had a great time. Call of Cthulhu is a really interesting story. Part of why my character went mad is I failed fourteen of my fifteen roles, which my stats for some of them weren't great, so I should have. But there were some where I really should have. Like I had a sixty or seventy in medicine and I rolled a ninety five, which in Call of Cthulhu, you want to roll under your stat and you're rolling on a one hundred sided die. So if you have a sixty five, you really should succeed most of the time. And said, I dramatically failed, but that's okay. That's part of what makes it fun. So that was Call of Cthulhu getting to play a one shot of that. It definitely did not dampen my ardor for trying Call of Cthulhu. If anything, it did seed it. We may end up doing some role playing nights at toggle. That would be fun. Next up was the tornado. I don't know, did you hear about the tornado? It actually was a tornado warning at GenCon. We had I was playing the Call of Cthulhu game when this happened. All our phones went off and then it sent. You get sent an emergency notification message. It was funny. A couple people's phones, phones went off. Then a couple more went off and the GM's phone didn't go off. And he's like, because my phone company doesn't care about me. That was pretty funny. Then a minute later, his did go off too. These were a tornado warning, which. If you if you haven't if you haven't lived in the Midwest, there is watch and warning watch means it's potential that this could happen. A warning means we suspect it's going to happen. It might not be around you, but you really have to be ready. And so when there's a tornado warning, you have to shelter, you have to get to the most tornado safe place in the building you're in. Fortunately, I was at the Marriott and we were at an internal room, so we were already in the safe space. There were no windows. We were in a safe space or safest that you could be in that environment. Uh, by contrast, there were a bunch of people who were in Lucas Oil Stadium, and they all had to go into the basement of the stadium in the bathroom, which was probably scary. And then there was a huge storm for like twenty minutes. And then it blew over and the watch ended and we went back or the warning ended and we went back to doing what we were doing. So overall, it was pretty minimal from our experience, but there were a lot of people who were excited and or a little scared about it. If you didn't live in the Midwest, being under a tornado warning is terrifying. Perhaps I heard from some people that they were pretty scared. Our group basically just kept playing Call of Cthulhu because we didn't have to move. The hotel staff was moving people into internal rooms. We were already in one, so we literally had two different staff members look in and see us there, look at the room and didn't say anything. And the whole thing is we were supposed to listen to crew instructions. No crew had given us instructions, so there we were. That was the tornado or lack of tornado. Next up, I had a really. It is always really fun to meet people who are board game famous. As I said, I ran into Kervin and Azkadellia, both of whom have reasonably significant followings on digital media, so it's fun to see them, especially because I know that both of them well enough that they at least recognize me. Kervin knows my name. I don't remember if Azkadellia does or not, but we did walk around to talk to publishers a little bit. We like to make connections with them for toggle gaming, and I did get to see three designers who people who I really like. The first was Ben Harkin, who is the designer, the lead designer and owner of Floodgate Games. We met him last year and he's a very nice guy, and it was really fun to talk to him again. Um, and then we, uh, I did get to chat to two other designers. We had a really fun experience talking to North Star games and telling them how much we love wits and wagers, and how our copy of evolution at Toggle has been beaten all to heck. And I'm talking to this guy and he's a little bit older guy. He's got gray hair and his name tag had flipped around so you could see it was an exhibitor badge, but you couldn't see his name. And as we're talking to him, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is definitely dominant. Dominant Crapuchettes who is the owner and designer. Lead designer of North Star Games. He designed evolution. He designed. Wits and wagers, which is by far their biggest game. Right. And so eventually his name tag does flip around and we're like, oh yeah, you are. You are who we said we. You are who we thought you are. That's amazing. Really cool. So it was fun to get to talk to him. I could tell him how much I, I love wits and wagers. It was a really interesting and important early game when I got back into the hobby. And he might be one of the first game designers whose name I know, because there was a little thing in the book that talked about him. So that was fun. And then I also met Nick little, who was one of the one of the designers of heroes wanted. I really like him. He was a very nice guy. That one was fun too, because we were talking to him. He he works. He's one of the lead development folks at indie cards and games. So we were talking to him about what they had at indie cards and games, and I recognize his name and I'm like, oh, I said, correct me if I'm wrong. In case I'm mistaken, I apologize. But are you one of the co-designers of heroes wanted? And he was very pleased to acknowledge that he was. And it's always fun to be like somebody who supported him back in the day and gets to talk to him about that. That was really fun. And that is a game I've been meaning to get back out. We played that a lot when the kids were younger. I really like it. We just haven't touched it in a while, so it'd be fun to get it out. See how well it holds up. I bet it's still great. If nothing else, the art is awesome. So that's those are some of the board game famous people I met. So finally, I wanted to share a couple lifestyle tips. I am by no means an expert at GenCon, but I have gone for several years now. And so I do like the ability to share with you the the converse, the. Some thinking about how to make the most of GenCon. Now I have never gone as just a straight attendee. I'm always straight. I'm not a gay attendee. Um, our booth is very LGBTQ friendly, so I'm always sort of aware of. Anyway. Anyway, I haven't gone as just an attendee. I've always gone as an exhibitor or a designer, like sort of with work to do there. I enjoy attending and I get some fun out of it, but there's a mix. So with that in mind, as we think about my experience at Gen Con, just remember I, I haven't gone as a regular person. I would say if you go to experience things, you definitely need to book things, book events, book gameplays. The con a lot of the con is scheduled. And so if you want to really get to try some of the interesting stuff, you have to book. But I would say if it were me, if I were going next year, somehow I got to go next year and I'm not doing any work. I'm just attending the con for four days. I would book maybe two things a day really spread out. I would not probably book more than that, and I might even just book one a day. The reason for this is that it just gets very busy. It can feel really overwhelming to go to things. And it's really it feels really bad to be late. So you want to book things and spread them out so that you have time to get where you're going. Time to figure out what you want and you know, not miss your booking at the same time. If you don't book anything, then you're going to walk around watching people do all this cool stuff and realize you can't because you didn't book anything. You just miss out on a lot of things. So if I were going on my own, I would probably do that. I might also try to book myself as a game master and run a couple games to get a free badge. I don't know how many you have to run to get a free badge. I don't recall that, but there are a bunch of games that I have that I would love to play that I don't normally get to, so I'd be really interested in running those games. I would probably run them like a, it'd be a four player game and I'd run it as a three player game. So I get to play two. That's kind of my. That would be. That'd be interesting. But that's a different world where I'm not also trying to sell games and develop games and so on. So that'd be the first thing. Schedule things, but not too many. The second one is really. Take a look at depending. If you're if you're staying in, in a, in a hotel or something close enough to walk. This isn't really an issue, but we often use Airbnbs because we're bringing like we brought eight people this time. So we rented a house through Airbnb and the price of parking has gone up so much that ride shares are far cheaper to go to the con than parking. I mean, it's not dramatically cheaper. Like often the cost of our ride share is back and forth is about twenty dollars, twenty five dollars, and parking is about twenty five dollars a day. Maybe it's thirty now, but the convenience of not having to walk all the way to the parking lot because I'm not parking super close. The convenience of not having to walk all the way to the parking lot might make ride shares a better deal. Now, one of the tricks we've discovered is if you have the rideshare, drop you off like four blocks away from the convention center instead of right at it. It's dramatically cheaper. Like I'm talking half, half the price. And so that part's really good as well. So like most of the time when we would take, we use Lyft, when we would use Lyft, we would walk like four blocks away from the convention and then pick up our, our rideshare there. Uh, and finally, the last advice I would offer this is this shouldn't be too surprising, but pack a lunch. Often what we've done the last couple of years is we stop at Costco on the way down, buy a bunch of groceries, and then because we're at a at an Airbnb, we have a kitchen. We would brown bag our lunch. It saves us a lot of money because obviously if you're buying food at GenCon, it's very expensive. It's also not super healthy. So we're able to eat much more wisely by packing our lunch. Uh, so those are my tips. I don't think they're amazing. I think you probably could figure them out on your own, but that's my experience. Well, that's about it for my take on GenCon 2026. You notice I didn't talk about any of the games I played. I will do that in another episode, the board game espresso GenCon edition. Uh, but I wanted to talk about all the stuff I experienced there right now. And so hopefully, hopefully this was edifying and interesting. And if it has you thinking about going to a game convention, maybe that'll help. Well, that's about it for me today. I want to say thanks for joining me on my walk, and I hope that your next walk is just as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ Exit music ] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.