Gen Con 2024

(Good thing they had these signs)

The “best four days in gaming” are behind me, so here’s a quick recap of Gen Con. I also shot some video on this trip, but I may not get a chance to post that anytime soon. So for now, here’s the text version.

This was my first Gen Con since 2019. According to my notes from that year, I was still working on After the Fog and a Carrisor game called Rogue’s Court. The 2020 event was canceled for Covid, and in the years following, a combination of trepidation and cost kept me away - and I wasn’t sure if I would get value from going.

So this was my first year back at both Origins and Gen Con (read the Origins post here). I decided that for freelance work, and general catching-up with friends, it was time to return. It helped that I have a friend who could get us a hotel room, which is nigh impossible, and it hurt even less when he managed to get his employer to pay for it.

Playing The Harvest with friends at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum

Wednesday

Alaska, my bird of choice, has a direct flight from Seattle to Indy. On the Tuesday before Gen Con, that flight is filled with professionals who have to go early and set up booths. On Wednesday, it’s filled with ordinary gamers like me.

I fly often enough that I had a free upgrade to good seats, and yes, everyone around me was heading to Gen Con. Woe unto anyone else who has to get to Indy on that day.

After landing in Indy, I headed straight to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum, for a glimpse at the newest product from Geoff Engelstein, GHQ. This is a chessboard wargame written by Vonnegut before his writing career took off - if the game had been a success, he might have become a game designer instead of an author. As it happens, the game did not succeed, but on balance that’s probably a good thing.

The Vonnegut museum was lovely, and I caught up with some industry friends, and played a quick game of The Harvest. I didn’t get to play GHQ, because those tables were busy, but luckily Geoff showed it to me last year. 

From that party I headed to the Slippery Noodle, for the Diana Jones Awards. This industry award is named after a partially-destroyed copy of the Indiana Jones RPG, and it is given to random talented people and assorted quality products every year at Gen Con. This year it went to an organization, United Paizo Workers. I had to look that up, because I never made it inside, chatting for hours with friends on the patio.

My face on a shirt!

Thursday

Across the street from the Hyatt is the popular breakfast place, Patachou, which had a half-hour wait on Thursday morning. So my friend Paul Peterson and I sought breakfast down the way, at the Lincoln Square Pancake House. It was delicious and quick, and the waitress called me “darling” about nine times. I must be getting old.  

I brought my Osmo Pocket 3 to Gen Con, to shoot interviews and B-roll. This is a great little camera, and it’s how I shot the latest GameStorm and JoCo videos, though I obviously have not learned to use it properly. Several of my shots from Gen Con are out of focus, because I had set it to focus just once at the start of the shot. If it misses, it’s wrong for the whole take. This was my first time using the wireless microphone, however, and it worked like a charm. At least when I remembered to turn it on.

Over at the demo hall, I visited the USTA’s demo setup, and organizer Bill Leighton loaded me up with some Tak swag: A copy of the new Tak Puzzle Compendium by Noah Fields, a huge Tak challenge coin, a sticker, and more. After quickly losing two Tak games to Bill, I walked over to the exhibit hall, seeing more games and more friends than I can remember. I did buy a set of lovely tokens from Ghost Galaxy for my candy game (photo below), which as of this blog post I still haven’t announced, but will do shortly, I promise.

I had dinner at Harry & Izzy’s with my friend Bo Radakovich, former web-show producer, current game maker, and co-star (with Paul) of The Game Designers, my one-minute “opening credits” video from 2013. Bo and I came up with a new game about Santa Claus that needs to be made as soon as possible. 

The Hyatt set aside some free gaming space in their ground floor restaurant, “Fat Rooster.” Bo and I played a game of Stage Blood, something else that’s coming soon to Crab Fragment. It’s a simplified version of Coat of Arms, which I’ve been working on for two years, but this time with fewer rules. I do like fewer rules.

Late Thursday at the Hyatt bar, I met a man wearing a T-shirt of my face. He asked “is this you?” and we had a nice chat and took a selfie. And for the rest of you, if you want to be wearing my face or my logo the next time you randomly meet me, check out the designs at our Zazzle shop!

Lovely new candy tokens

Friday

In line at Starbucks Friday morning, I met a retailer from MIssouri who encouraged me to bring back Secret Tijuana Deathmatch. I would love to do that, but honestly every time I meet someone with a favorite Cheapass Game, it’s a different one, and I can’t bring them all back. Still, it is always lovely to meet a fan of the back catalog.

I took a moment to walk across to the Lucas Oil Stadium, a gigantic facility that looks like a Dickensian workhouse on the outside, except absurdly large. This place has become Gen Con South, with the entire stadium floor covered with gaming tables, sales booths, and a games library. This was today’s location for the Tak tables, and I said hello to the players in the first round of their tournament.

In my only scheduled meeting of the con, I showed Bread Basket to a publisher. I don’t think it went very well. Honestly I don’t even think that game is finished yet, but I’m eager to keep working on it, because I like the idea. I even want to make a new deck for Halloween, “Dread Basket,” because I feel like I will eventually make a game for it that I like. I asked this publisher what other card games he’d like to see and he said “anything good,” which is not much direction, but I’ll keep hustling.

At the Calliope booth I played a copy of Rob Daviau’s ShipShape, which is part of their Titans of Game Design series. This game is charming and it has an interesting stacking component, and a brilliant name, so I had to pick up a copy. 

I sat down to help some publishing friends playtest a new economic game. It had a fairly common theme (let’s say it was “dragons,” though it wasn’t) and they were worried that this theme was overdone. I said that was not a great metric, since every theme has been used many times, and that it mattered more whether the theme and the mechanics worked together. They were proposing a wholly different theme that just didn’t make any sense. So I hope the designer of that game appreciates that I went to bat for his idea. Or maybe “dragons” was just a placeholder that he expected to change, I have no idea.

Six of us went to St. Elmo Steak House, although I ended up having the chicken, because the waitress told me that I ordered my steak wrong. When I get steak-shamed by the staff, I default to the cheapest entree. It’s a personal failing, I will freely admit.

Friday evening I managed to assemble a six-player test of the candy game, then a five-player game of Stage Blood. Gen Con is a nexus of tremendous game designers and playtesters, and there’s no better group for feedback. So when I finally get around to posting those games here (honestly, any day now) they should both be pretty good!

Look at me, eatin’ right.

Saturday

Before Gen Con I had scheduled just one meeting. When I booked the flight, I was sure I would be packing a bag of games and pitching them to everyone, but then a plan emerged that I might produce a line of games myself, through a nameless enterprise in partnership with Atlas Games. So lately I have been focusing more on getting those games in shape, and less on pitching to other publishers.

Nevertheless, as I walked the halls of Gen Con, meetings occurred.

Saturday morning I had booked a meeting at 10:00 in the Marriott lobby, and before that person showed up, I had an equally productive unscheduled meeting with someone else who was just passing through. Both meetings resulted in offers of freelance work, so that one hour might have paid for my whole convention. 

I can’t talk about either of these deals in detail yet, but one involves inventing new lightweight card games (yay!) and the other involves development and graphic design for a CCG.

Back at the exhibit hall I bought a set of adorable chibi Princess Bride miniatures at Impact. I also threw in a Serenity model for good measure. These will go in the stack with my one million other unpainted minis.

I had lunch with some of my Seattle peeps at Steak and Shake, a Gen Con staple. This restaurant has gone up and down in quality over the years. This year I think it might be the best ever. It's kiosk-based ordering, fast and accurate, and the steakburgers are very tasty.

And since this lunch was my first real food of the day, I fell down and took a nap. See “getting old” above.

Saturday evening I met former Cheapass demo monkey Bill Fogarty in the Hyatt, and we played several games including the candy game, The Harvest, and Tomb of the Ancients. Bill was flying home to Florida the next day, and hoping that the weather didn’t slow him down. Hurricanes tend to do that.

Rob Daviau is thrilled that his delayed flight has led to gaming at the airport

Sunday

Sunday started with an awkward 8:00 coffee meeting, with a publisher who has been sitting on one of my games for upwards of six years. He’s still intent on making this game, but he can’t figure out how and when, and I’m likely to take it back if only I can find someone else who wants it. He did propose that I could run a crowdfunding campaign with him, and he’d handle distribution, but I’m not sure I have the time or the staff for that. We shall see.

Next was a 9:00 meetup with Michelle Nephew from Atlas. We have been talking with them about spinning up a new line of games, with myself as the designer/publisher, using Atlas for sales and distribution. At the moment I’m trying to put together a half-dozen potential candidates, from which we will choose a flagship game, and run a crowdfunding campaign sometime in 2025. Everything seems good on that front, though we are still trying to find a suitable name for the imprint. “James Ernest Games” is the fallback.

At 10:00 I pitched Tomb of the Ancients to a publisher who I think is perfect for it. They liked it on first blush. They had good questions and took my demo copy. So that’s a pleasant result; we’ll see where that goes. 

After that it was just a few more hours of scouring the dealer’s hall for good B-roll, talking myself out of buying a stupid hat, and saying hello-goodbye to a dozen more Gen Con friends.

Getting to the airport was hairy. Every cab and rideshare was booked. I looked for a Lyft and found them expensive and slow (see your driver’s info in 1-28 minutes), so I asked another traveler if I could split his ride. Then sadly his ride took forever and never found us, and we ended up piling into a third car with two other gamers headed out of town.

At the airport I ran into Rob Daviau, above, who had been delayed by weather in his attempts to fly east. We played The Fractured Flat, a new abstract that I’m working on (one more game in the “coming soon” stack), and we came up with some solutions to its current assortment of problems. I can think of no better designer to throw at that game. I also handed him a copy of The Harvest, in case he wanted something to read on the plane. 

Many of my friends (and Facebook friends) experienced weather delays getting home from Gen Con, including some Seattle folks who were flying through Chicago. But my direct flight was just fine; we left a little late, but arrived a little bit early. Folks, if you don’t want to be controlled by the weather in cities you don’t care about, spend a little extra and book the direct flight.

Once again on this flight I was surrounded by people from Gen Con, including Jordan Weisman in the seat ahead of me. We caught up a little as people boarded, and then I spent the next four hours kicking his chair.

All in all, Gen Con was a whirlwind of interesting people, games, and mostly unplanned meetings, packed into a very busy four days. It was exhausting, and I wish there was a way to spread it out a bit, with time in between for resting. As one friend said, I’m just as tired as always, but these days it takes less effort.

I did not get nearly as much playtesting as I would have at a smaller con, so I’m looking forward to having no meetings or obligations at Dragonflight next weekend.

Will I go to Gen Con next year? Probably I will. Let’s see if I can swing another free room.

Hmm, is Gen Con in town?