Gen Con recap - Day 1

Day 1 of Gen Con came in hard! It's our second time here, and as I remember 2 years ago there was a bit less going on. (I guess 2022 was still recovering after COVID). Especially the early 2 hours are brutal, as everyone is linig up to get the hot games they have on their wishlist.

We split up first to parallelize our queueing times. 😆 I beelined for Lost Fleet, the new Gaia Project expansion, which only has 50 copies each day. At first I was stumbling around, not finding the booth (even though I checked the map dozens of times beforehand). In the end I still got lucky. 🤞 Meanwhile Reni went to get 🐈Boop the Halls, the Christmas themed Boop-version. Of course she also got us a Boop cat plushie, as it was irresistible. 😍

Then we bought some more stuff, which was a challenge. Some of the aisles were so bogged down by foot-traffic and lines that we literally stood for minutes without moving. 🙈 Pretty rough, but after the initial lines were gone, it all became walkable. (Pro tip: if you don’t desperately need the hype games, start like 2 hours later).

We got in a few demo too! We started with the Lair prototype. A 2p game from Kids Table BG , in which players first construct dungeons, that their opponent will have to explore with a clever action-point system. Really amazing stuff, can’t wait for the real thing! 🥰

We also got a detailed walkthrough of Minos, the SPIEL release from Board&Dice, a mid-weight euro with a cool dice drafting action programming mechanism! 👌

A very interesting title we got an overview for was Metrorunner from Thunderworks Games which is a cyberpunk themed euro with a nice mix of mechanisms.

After the exhibit hall closed, we headed over to the BGG Hot Games room. If you are up for new hype titles, this is the event for you - that's if you can get tickets… It is self-teach so learning from our mistakes 2 years ago, we went for simpler stuff as we only had 2 hours. We chose Intarsia and Agueda - both amazingly beautiful, albeit a bit too simple.

We finished the day in the Open Gaming area by playing some of our new games: 🐺 Lone Wolves, 🥕 Diced Veggies and 🏔 Tranquility: The Ascent, but that's a story for a future post!😉