Category: Gen Con 2026
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Shadow Scar – Never Mind The UFO, What About The Taxmen?
This is a game where the secretive Shadow Scar Detective Agency tries to keep multiple universes free of the malign influences of Demonic Yokai. It is extremely Anime. I played a one-hour demo of it last year, and enjoyed it, so decided to try a longer scenario. As it turns out, after a quick table-swap…
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Numenera – Worst In Show
On the face of it, this should have been a good game. Highly imaginative setting, game being run by someone picked by the game company in that game company’s space. But it was easily the worst game of the convention for me; Not completely bad, but not up to the same level as everything else.…
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Brancalonia – An Entertaining Disaster
I first found out about this “spaghetti fantasy” setting for D&D a few years ago, the day after Gen Con, when I found a flyer for it in the hallway of the ICC, run over by one of the little carts they use to get around. It’s carefully pasted into my diary of the time.…
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The Last Caravan – Best In Show
This is a “Cars & Aliens” roadtrip RPG; Aliens arrived, fighting broke out, the alien ship exploded for reasons nobody seems to know, and everything is just a bit messed up now. It has the role/playbook approach you see in a lot of PBTA systems, but isn’t one itself – I was playing the Bandage,…
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The Crooked Moon – Somehow, the Ghostlight Express is less creepy than The Polar Express
This was something we spotted last year, mostly because of the artwork, and decided that it could be our “everyone plays this” game for the year. (Our group filled the table, which was a relief because I’ve been That One Guy at a table where everyone else is a group of friends, and it can…
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CBR+PNK – Not ‘Cyberpunk’; That’s a different game
Turns out I didn’t take any pictures of the character sheet from this game, or if I did, I can’t find them. Here’s the card I took some notes on instead. So, this is a “doing the last run” game, the job before you retire that’ll make a huge amount of money or something. It…
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Warhammer Painting Experience – The Games Workshop Outreach Program
One of the events I did was a one hour Paint And Take thing where they gave us a miniature with a base coat, some supplies, and someone to explain a few techniques and otherwise be enthusiastic and friendly while we blobbed paint around. It was a free event, though they did have tickets as…
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Darkspace – Should we be sad that we couldn’t save the Space-Racists?
This is a game I found out about last year at Origins, and I didn’t know much more about it than; The opportunity to try it out came up, and I figured “why not?”. This was my second ‘something weird is happening on a spaceship; go figure it out’ game of the convention. We didn’t…
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Legend In The Mist – Rustic Fantasy & Goo
I’d been seeing some stuff about a game called City of Mist, a sort of Supernatural Noir thing, but couldn’t get a session; Then I noticed demos of Legend in the Mist, their fantasy variant, using the same or a similar system.So I figured, why not? I ran into the guy who’d run an impromptu1…
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Eclipse Phase – Hit It With A Mop?
I’ve played the Fate version of this game before, where at least some of the comedy-horror was unintentional on my part; When escaping from a swarming bug/microbe in a vehicle with a cracked windscreen, it makes sense to stop it from getting in through the cracks, and what we had was lab cleaning equipment, so…