Gen Con 2015 Recap

Hello World,

This year I was lucky enough to go down to Indianapolis and attend my very first Gen-Con. For those who are unaware, Gen-Con is the largest tabletop gaming convention in North America. Boasting over 60,000 unique attendees over the span of 4 days. Over those 4 days I was able to meet professions in the industry, learn a lot about tabletop game design, and even try out a number of new games.

Along with attending the con, I was also working at the Third Eye Games booth, selling a number of RPGs. While at this booth, I was able to get to know the founder of Third Eye Games, Eloy Lasanta. Who I would like to say is a very nice and friendly guy. Who was willing to give me advice about game design, and even invited me to attend the Ennies, an award ceremony for tabletop games. At which I was introduced to a number of big names within the industry. The event was a blast, and it was the first time I have ever really felt like I was part of the industry.

During the rest of the con however, I was able to play games via the con’s Game on Demand service.  This allowed me to hop in and try games that I have been interested in, and wouldn’t be able to my normal gaming group. The first of which was a game called Ryuutama, a Japanese roleplaying game focused around light hearted travel. This has been on my radar for a long time and I had such a great time playing it. The unique mechanics, and overall feel of the game got me hooked. I enjoyed it so much in fact, I bought it during the con.

The other new game I got the chance to play was Inspectres, which is an interesting RPG which has group playing stars in a ghost busting reality show. The premise and mechanics were interesting, and it gave me some great ideas on how I can improve Consortia, but overall it wasn’t my cup of tea.

With the shear amount that I saw and learned at Gen-Con, I would be a fool not to go next year. But this post is only the beginning of my Gen-con retrospective. Over the next few weeks I will be releasing a series of blog post which go in depth with what I learned at the con.

Thanks for reading,

- Patrick Lapienis