Another year, another Gen Con gone. Weird to think I’ve been going most every year since 2012. In a lot of ways, Gen Con is my friend con. My wife loves it for the cosplay, panels, and workshops. I have friends who are heavy boardgamers. Friends for whom its an industry event. And for me its always been about playing rpgs. As all of us have gotten better at understanding our own wants and needs, and we’ve changed over time, we’ve shaped the con to fit. In a lot of ways it feels like a lot of smaller cons in parallel, each of us having dramatically different experiences outside the dealers hall and the crowds. This was mine.
The RPGs
A lot of my friends play rpgs casually, but I’m the obsessive expert of the group. So every year I put together a big spreadsheet before event registration goes live and figure out our schedule. Most years I pick a mix of trad, trindie, and OSR. A fair bit of BRP and Gumshoe, OSR games from creators I know (of) online, plus whatever new game grabbed my eye. This is the first year I went in a different direction. Even as my tastes have changed and expanded, I guess I wasn’t sure if they would entirely come along for the ride. But I’ve changed a lot in the last few years and I figured maybe my approach should change too.
Thursday
Swords of the Serpentine
I pretty explicitly picked this game because the designer, Kevin Kulp, was running it. I’ve liked him since I first ran into him online and I’d heard from friends that he’s a stellar GM. Both proved true in person. He was lovely.
The adventure itself was a nice take on a classic. A poor but esteemed noble heiress unexpectedly inherits a profitable salt mining operation in a swamp outside the city. A wealthy merchant is more than willing to buy it, but the city won’t approve the sale without an inspection. It hasn’t been properly looked into for years. So a city official who’s about to retire comes with them for one last job to make sure everything is running fine. Only the heiress is also a corrupt sorcerer, the merchant is a con artist, and the official is a priestess of the god of commerce. Revenge and a cult of an evil salt god is discovered and chaos ensues.
Kevin was a legitimately incredible GM, the premise was fire, but my favorite thing about the whole game was the combination of characters. Along with the heiress, the merchant and the priest, there also came assistants to each. The noble’s nursemaid, the merchant’s hired mercenary, and the city official’s aide. Stroke of genius. On the one side, it provided three sets of potentially competing shared interests and natural pairs for splitting the party. On the other side it brought in this fantastic light on high class vs low class sensibilities and opportunities. Approaches to problems were structurally bounded and mechanically supported. Incredibly good setup for a one shot.
I had a blast and everyone at the table was wonderful. There were two small things that for me kept this very good game from being one of the greats. First, the hired mercenary played a little too much into the “my combat abilities are my personality” trap. It still led to some interesting situations, but I think it closed off some potentially really strong scenes and roleplaying opportunities. The second was a very bad choice on my part. I was playing the heiress(weirdly, the first of 3 I played at the con). I was secretly a powerful sorcerer. And that secret part is important, because I didn’t much have the opportunity to use my magic in front of other players. Near the end of the game I decided to go big and I locked everyone else in with the big bad, with me on the other side of the door. In the moment it felt like a good move. Swingy, dramatic, a lot of narrative impact. Completely made sense for the character. But it was, I don’t know, lonely fun? It kept me out of what I’d guess would be much more fulfilling and interesting interactions with other players during the final showdown. Certainly for me, but also for them. It denied other people really cool moments taking me down as the heel, or compromising morals, or dealmaking or… The action was the metaphor. It closed a door I should have left open.
Small issues aside, this was a really great opening to the con, and I’m incredibly happy I got in. Swords of the Serpentine is by far my favorite Gumshoe iteration these days. The setting is cool, the character options are great, and every time I’ve played it I’ve had a blast. Add this to the tally.
Triangle Agency
I was super curious going into this game. The quickstart and all the early screenshots of the book are drop dead gorgeous. Absolutely fantastic layout and graphic design, pretty thoughtful and clever new mechanics. If I had to explain it by way of another game I’d say it gives off Paranoia vibes by way of Severance. But it looked different enough I wasn’t sure how it would feel in play.
The players lead double lives. They work for a reality controlling agency, attempting to stop anomalies from destabilizing our world while also struggling their way through more typical life issues on the side. Everyone plays both an agent and someone in another characters life.
Mechanically, the game is pretty cool. You roll a pool of d4’s, hunting for three’s(its a theme). At least one and you succeed. But without more the GM accumulates points to make the players lives harder. Each person has a set of weird abilities, as well as things they should be doing for commendations and things they should avoid for demerits. The company is always watching and judging your productivity. We got stickers!
The GM, Sean(probably game designer Sean Ireland?) was excellent and the players had me laughing through most of the experience. It was incredibly silly. Which was kind of a mixed blessing for me. The session was a ton of fun. But for me, and I want to explicitly emphasize that its for me, silly doesn’t have lasting power. I’m not sure I would play it again, not because it isn’t well designed, or beautiful, or clever, or whatever, but because the thing it was doing and doing well just isn’t a type of play I enjoy often. Unlike Thirsty Sword Lesbians coming up, TA had humor without the type of emotional entanglement that keeps me engaged long term. I respected it and liked it immensely, but I didn’t fall in love.
All that said! It was an incredibly cool and unique game, I was very happy to try it out, and had a great time doing so. If you do like that type of thing, I highly recommend taking a look.
Spire
Easily my least favorite session of the con. I saw that this year Rowan Rook and Decard was running a multi table Spire game. I like Spire a lot. A multi table game early in my Gen Con experience is still one of the best things I’ve ever done at the con. It should have been great!
Each table was set to assassinate one of the council of rulers of the Spire. We also had to make sure that no one killed the single council member who was secretly an asset for our side. Win and we have a chance for real and lasting change. Only, we weren’t playing a game so much as a story. There was a set ending. We were expected to succeed and so we narratively couldn’t be allowed to fail. The person we had to keep alive? Body double! Doesn’t matter if we protect them or not. If we couldn’t kill the council member? Well, there’s gangsters who want them dead too for other reasons and can do it for us. Fail a roll? Oh well! Story must go on. Actions felt meaningless. I literally failed the roll to kill the council member and right after killer birds did it instead.
I will give credit where its due. The GM at our table was great at character work and made every npc feel distinct and memorable. But thats not nearly enough to save a bad experience. We had tickets to a similar Heart event Saturday night(amusingly set on a railroad) and immediately went out and cancelled our tickets. Not nearly my worst game I’ve ever played at Gen Con, but maybe among the most disappointing.
Friday
Thirsty Sword Lesbians
Due to some deeply bad experiences my first few Gen Cons, I tend to only sign up for games either run by their publisher or, ideally, run by a creator or GM I know. It hasn’t made for a perfect hit rate, but its a lot better than average. This year for a bunch of reasons I made an exception and signed up for a game run by Tabletop Gaymers and this will absolutely not be the last time. Easily tied for best game of the con.
I’m not sure what quite makes a game go from good to great to memorable. Good players and a good GM for sure. High energy. Engagement. A cool system or setting. But that extra bit? I’m not sure. Chemistry? Creative alignment? The little extra that makes a game magic.Whatever it is this table had it.
The scenario itself was pretty straightforward. Our intrepid crew heard a weird signal and nearly crashed on an unknown planet next to a mysterious research facility. We broke in to find out what nefarious nonsense was going on and put a stop to it. But how we got there! It was unbelievably over the top. It was flirty, fun. The stakes were bigger than life and also incredibly personal. Everything tied into dark pasts and deep regrets, past friends and enemies to lovers and… I don’t think I can capture that feeling. But I got out of the game wishing we could keep playing.
The session was also personally meaningful. In games as in life, I’ve often found it tough to be flirty. There used to sometimes be a sense that unlike all these other people around me, what I was doing had the unwanted and ineffable whiff of creeper vibes. Intellectually I knew that was nonsense, but the feeling persisted. I’ve since heard some other trans women share the same thing, which is validating if not entirely comforting. Add to that a discomfort in playing explicitly queer games, my in the closet ass clearly not being queer enough, or at least sensing hidden existential landmines, and it made it a struggle to even want to play games like this in the past. I avoided Monsterhearts for the same reason. Call it play culture, or context, or following the lead, but in all cases this table made it easy. The game is flirty, the players were flirty, and I got to be too, free of baggage. Not the type of magic I came for, but magic nonetheless.
Zombie World
And now for a very different kind of magic! Before I remotely touch on the session, I have to call out the most absolutely mindblowing thing I’ve ever seen at a con. In the Magpie rooms they have a rule. If someone raises a finger in the air, everyone else stops talking and does the same until the entire room is quiet. It took less than a minute. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Eight tables of loud gamers entirely quiet in less than a minute. Absolutely unbelievable! And even afterwards, the room usually stayed quieter for probably ten to fifteen minutes. A person at our table looked shellshocked whenever it happened, like their life had been irrevocably changed. I hope to god other companies copy this because it was incredible.
So once upon a time back in 2019, I got this little boxed pbta game about zombies and it blew my mind. Incredible form factor and some legitimately brilliant mechanics. Perfect for conventions. It was the top of my wishlist for games to play. And then Covid happened. Fast forward to now and I finally got to play the game as it felt meant to be played. Ish! And it mostly lived up to expectations. That said, the session was probably second to last for the weekend, almost entirely due to one player.
He knew the rules well but couldn’t read the social dynamics. He would ignore what other players said and take contradictory actions, like trying to pick up a key someone had just picked up. He would talk over players, declare group actions without checking with other players, never passed the ball or set up other players actions. He tried to tell other players what rules to use to the point the GM had to tell him to focus more on being a player. It didn’t quite ruin the session but it was close.
It wasn’t the only thing that was a bit off. A good chunk of character creation is setting up your enclave, and then the session immediately had us leave and not come back until functionally the epilogue. This gave a very strong external threat. One of the more clever things ZW does mechanically is provide several moves for negotiating with or dealing with NPCs. But the only move available for use with other PC’s is to escalate and eventually act with violence. You either work things out narratively as players or you push to make things worse. Its a great way to make a Walking Dead rpg. But heres the thing. Pressure that forces immediate action against NPCs is more likely to create group solidarity. To get the most out of the types of moves the game provides you want slow cooker pressure. Hard choices while slowly turning your enclave from home to prison. Stewing in it is much more likely to cause dissension to build up. The scenario we played largely forced us to work together and so we didn’t get to use some of the best bits of the game.
The second part that I found pretty frustrating was that two of us easily started with plus four in a stat. Which is bad. Seven to nine is where pbta lives. I dont want to play a min max game, I want to live in the bubble of complication. Make things worse! Fail forward! Its a zombie game and we had no party deaths. No one got bitten. There was really only one player who was ever in real danger and he forced the issue because he wanted to see what would happen.
That said, there was a fair bit of good. The mechanics ended up exactly how I thought they would. You don’t get to choose your past(card), and you can’t make your worst trauma(card) just go away, but you can choose(pick one of two cards) who you are right now. Beautiful! Cards instead of dice felt great. Picking scarcities and resources to create your enclave was quick and effective(thank you Quiet Year). Theres a bite deck that everyone draws from that doesn’t get reshuffled until someone gets bitten. And it all worked well.
Everyone but the one was great. We had some fantastic players and the GM did a good job with what they had. Very happy I finally got to play it, and would absolutely play it again. But I do wish I didn’t need to say that with so many caveats.
Saturday
Call of Cthulhu
Call of Cthulhu is one of my favorite con games. It has some of the best and best tested modules around. I almost always seem to get good players for it. And it always ends big, either with a ton of gloriously messy character deaths, or some kind of world saving triumph. This lived up to expectations. So once again, like SotS and TSL before it, I was an heiress. The party was, one player part of the wait staff aside, invited to a new years party where absolutely nothing weird was going on! We had some fun interactions as time passed with slowly growing worry and weirdness, before discovering a missing artifact and an awakened horror as the mansion lights went out. The game ended with a perfectly gruesome party gone horrible. A growing wormhole was the ball dropping, and a bunch of degloved guests floated in the air the the worlds worst balloons and bloody streamers.
If I have one complaint its that the middle of the adventure had one too many choke points. I prefer a bit more chance for exploration. But even with that the game was great. We had a fantastic group of players and a great GM. The session was exactly what I wanted it to be, and it did it with style.
Rapscallion
Magical pirates! Everything about this game was a blast. We had some incredibly fun personalities, a bunch of bigger than life abilities, and a ship that talked and hungered for other ships. Character creation was a bit long for a one shot, and we didn’t get to explore a fair bit of what we took time to create, but it was a joy. We drew a big map, made some wild backstories. The writing was excellent and inspired a lot of cool ideas and tough choices. On a system level some of the most fun I’ve ever had during character creation.
I played the Chronicler, a djinni and friend of mermaids who sought to catalogue all the leviathans of the sea. We were in a competition with the three best other pirate crews in the seven seas. The self proclaimed pirate god of luck tasked us to reacquire the harp that kept his sister, according to legend the goddess of pirate misfortune, locked away. Shenanigans ensued, twists were had, identities were revealed, and our crew saved the day!
We didn’t quite have enough time. The first three quarters felt great, but by the end we felt the clock ticking and it felt a little like we were rushing. Which in fairness, not a terrible problem to have. Ship combat was exciting. NPC’s and scenes were great. Moves created as much trouble as they solved, but always moving things forward. I very much hope to play or run another game of it in the future. Loved it!
Sunday
Pico
Hot Damn! I went into Sunday thinking nothing could match TSL, but I was wrong. This game was an absolute joy. All I knew going in was this was the new game by Wildsea designer Felix Isaacs, probably the first public beta of it, and that you play bugs. Everything about this experience was perfection.
In Pico you play bugs going together on adventures now that humans have mysteriously disappeared. Its cute, its sweet, lighthearted and fun. Each of us played a different type of bug with very different abilities and roles. The writing is stellar. All the characters and abilities were evocative and we were up and playing within ten minutes. We knew very quickly who our characters were and what they could do. And this game had momentum. We got more done in maybe two hours than most games the rest of the con got done in four, and that was with rules explanations.
The game is in beta, so I’ll keep things short and a little vague here, but in general its a lighter version of the system behind Wildsea. Almost every change I saw I liked. Its simplified and streamlined, but doesn’t lose the creativity or nuance. I found it to be a much better on ramp to learn the game. And it has a couple new tricks in the bag that did wonders for our table. Art, which they already have in stacks, is legitimately delightful, and got our group on the right tone and frame of mind immediately. Unsurprisingly, design and layout, even at this stage, were fantastic.
For our adventure, we set off into the wilds to find out why the hogs had gone missing. We met a divine Cat, saw ancient and unspeakable horrors, met strange creatures full of wisdom, and crossed a dangerous gale. And huge credit here to Felix GMing it. The speed with which he responded to some of our questions and requests and came up with new situations and scenarios was incredible. And every bit of it was good. Absolutely unbelievable GM. But equally, I have to talk about the players at the table. I was playing with my wife and a good friend, and we had two other players at the table as well. One played a mall goth who wanted to be cool and fit in, and the other played a gentle giant with a heart of gold. And they were both incredibly creative. And the timing! They passed the ball, they helped make everybody else’s ideas better, they shared the spotlight and just really elevated the game. I don’t think I stopped smiling at that table for three hours straight. I walked out wishing it was a campaign. Can’t give it a better compliment than that.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall I had a great time. I got to play some games I really love, some systems I’ve wanted to try out for a while, and playtest a new game I’ll absolutely be buying once its available. I had a lot of very good players and GMs, and a few phenomenal ones as well. Several games were incredibly memorable and are up there amongst my favorite one shots of all time. It felt like a really strong year.
Boardgames
I used to be as or more into boardgames as I was into rpgs pre covid. I have several friends who work in a game store and we used to play new games together constantly. I was pretty good at learning fast and teaching, and I even had a pretty high first game played win rate. After covid that all changed. With rpgs, I learned to love playing online. It looked different than in person gaming, but it opened up doors. I could play with more and more different people from further away. Boardgames didn’t translate. The thing I love is the tactility, and boardgame arena or tabletop simulator lost whatever magic the form had for me.
Skip forward to that first vaccine. I finally got to play boardgames again. A friend sat down to teach me this new card game. Not particularly complex. It looked fun. And a couple minutes into the teach I found myself wishing I could play something easier, like Terraforming Mars. Terraforming Mars is not an easy game. Its a chonky four hour engine builder game. What it is is familiar. It turns out that, for me at least, learning new games is a skill, and its a skill that needs regular practice. I used to be very good at it. Its just pattern matching. Go on BGG and theres a very deep and clear cut breakdown of boardgame mechanics and themes and approaches and complexity levels and… And if you know all those you mix and match in your internal rolodex and new games are just variations on a theme. But I let mine decay.
Learning boardgames these days feels like work. More than it should at least. And so, wandering through the dealers hall, it felt like something I used to love engaging with was suddenly noise. All this feeling of too much blurring together at the edges. My friends all got excited for the hottest new thing and I just walked with them and felt a sense of disconnect. I miss it. I miss it a lot. I’m not sure at this point if its something I’ll be able to get back to, or worth the effort to do so, but its a noticeable void. The one game I did learn this weekend, Four Humours, I played twice, which helped. It still felt like I wasn’t quite engaging as much or in the same way as everyone else at the table though. I don’t know. Gen Con was always the tabletop convention, board games and rpgs both. Somethings been lost.
People
My favorite thing about Gen Con, outside of the games, is meeting people. One of the weirdest thing in this hobby/industry/communit(y/ies) is how many people I’ve known for years who I’ve just never met in person. Gen Con is kind of a wonderful opportunity to bridge that gap. Richard, Tony: it was absolutely lovely to see you both again. Sid, Mike, Sam: it was wonderful to meet you all in person. I was really enjoying our chat about games and would love to again in the future. Hope you all had great cons and please feel free to hit me up on discord!
Queer Normativity
I saw more trans people in the last four days than in the last four years. If you know what it means, you know how I feel. It meant the world.
More broadly, things felt different than they have in previous years. Some of that is me being more aware, probably hyperaware. But the times they are a changing. Most tables people put pronouns on names and characters with little or no prompting. The bathrooms near Magpie were gender neutral. There were a lot of flags, a lot of pins, a lot of swag. I still have quite a bit of anxiety around going out that I didn’t before. I feel… small sometimes. Traded my voice to walk. For four days I went without that particular anxiety. It was like flying.
Loneliness
I traded one anxiety for another. I still mask. Not a lot of people did. Many of my friends didn’t mask. Most of those that did didn’t mask inside crowded restaurants or outside of the convention center. Which… people! Cmon! Holding food in hand does not make you immune to covid. I don’t have the pto to afford the risk, and know too many people affected by long covid to gamble. I still have some remaining symptoms from when I got it back in March.
It was the first convention I ate most of my meals alone.
Thursday night I told myself it would be my last Gen Con. People kept confusedly asking me to come have a meal with them, as if my friendship with them provided us both immunity. It made me feel like a crazy person, yelling about a revelation that would never come. And guilty for effectively demanding they change their behavior if they wanted my company. And disgust for my own rigidity. And shame for having gotten someone sick previously. I had the sick satisfaction of seeing a close friend get sick two days later, who knows with what, which is the kind of awful told you so that makes you feel fear and shame mixed in with your empathy. I had to simultaneously be worried about him and worried about him having spread whatever it was to all the people he was around at the same time and worried about myself and… Its poison.
I feel like my friends have moved on into a place I can’t follow them. And because most of them have moved it makes me feel like I’m the one who has left them rather than the other way around. It makes me feel like a bad friend. Its isolating. I don’t know what to do about it.
Lessons Learned
In some ways this was one of the best cons I’ve ever had. In others it made me want to never go back. If I do go back I’m going to play more indie games. I’m going to play more games run by Tabletop Gaymers. I’m going to make sure to reach out to people before the con and schedule meetups rather than hope I run into them in a lobby. I’m going to challenge myself to be a better player at the tables I play at and play more types of characters I don’t currently play. I’m going to make time for chonky boardgames and see if I can reconnect. I’m going to bring less stuff with me to make packing and hotel check out easier. I’m going to keep working to make each con experience for me and those who go with me that little bit better.
If I go back.
Thanks for reading.
The Bone Box Chant 