Gencon 2023

Gencon 2023 was, as always, a little different from prior Gencons. It sold out (like it did for the 50th anniversary), which puts it at more than 50 thousand attendees. This year, they hit that mark much earlier ... Thursday is usually a much more laid back day with maybe half the crowd you get on Saturday. This year, it seemed worse on Thursday than Saturday. A lot of that was a Disney Lorcana craze, but it spread to most of the main convention center and was actually kind of dangerous; the escalators were disgorging people into a completely packed crowd and, let's face it, your typical Gencon attendee is not that nimble (Alison and I, of course, were graceful as Gazelles). It all lead to the first time in history that a bunch of overweight gamers was called a "dangerous mob" ... https://wdwnt.com/2023/08/organizational-failures-lead-to-dangerous-mob-at-opening-of-gen-con-2023-and-disney-lorcana-release/ Board Game Geek abandoned "the hotness" real time collection of game interest (which was always a driver for checking out games in the past because the sheer number of games on the floor is overwhelming) and didn't even have a dedicated booth in the exhibitor's hall. But they replaced it with "the hotness room" in the connected Hyatt where vendors give them copies of new 2023 games they thought would be hits, and you could reserve a two hour block of time and sign any of them out and give them a try. Alison and I spent eight hours in there (give or take bathroom breaks) and it was a pretty awesome way to get through a lot of games in a short period (like, many times, we'd open a game, look at it, and go "nah"). Cosplay was a little more subdued until Saturday. Magic the Gathering is even further on the outskirts that it has been in the past, waning further in interest. There didn't seem to be even a token computer game room. Miniatures were on display and as meticulously detailed and beautiful as ever, but the actual miniature games tables were much more stock games than in the past; no "I spent a year making this landscape" one of kind games like we saw in prior years. The art section was more bland, nothing really innovative and even the typical "Magic The Gathering" type art seemed a bit more amateurish. Otherwise, it was ... GENCON.  Continue along for the highlights, or you can see all the pictures here!

Moon over Boston from Logan Airport Wednesday Morning Indy 500 racetrack! Someone is excited to be at Gencon The only convention where the 5XL sells out first...

Circle Center Mall is not doing so well, but Indy is actually a big city, and outside the convention area (like the restaurant Mesh, where we ate Wednesday nigh) things were lively.

Crazy crowds opening day (Thursday) ... we turned around and found something else to do for a while.

Miniatures

Cosplay

Fun shots

And the loot. The two big winners were "Forbidden Jungle," a co-op game for 1-4 players that's a exploration/workplacement/tile manipulation mashup that's challenging and fun, and "Galaxy Rush," a two player worker placement game where your placement options are extremely constrained, but the scoring system provides multiple paths to get VP, so it's more about tradeoffs and synergies than about where you place the meeple; makes it fast and dynamic. In both cases, the rules are easy enough to pick up in a single pass. On the more serious front, "Dune Imperium" is a asymetrical deck builder/worker placement hybrid that has actuallly been out for a couple of years, but looked interesting with a ten minute intro. Other games were more impulse buys ... looked interesting, good reviews, but we didn't playtest them much. We did go through about a dozen other games that we didn't pick up, and that I will not mention here.

End GENCON report