As many long-time Gen Con attendees know, Rio Grande Games has a demo room outside the exhibit hall where you can go to try current and upcoming releases. This year, Tasty Minstrel Games and Iello also have their demo rooms (#137 and 136 respectively). The nice thing about these rooms is that it is a quieter place to learn new games and play a full game. They are also open until late – 11 pm or midnight, foot those who are busy at the booth during the day. TMG hosted an event at their room Wednesday night to show off their new releases, including producti copies of Scoville and City Hall, and some prototypes.

The Exhibit Hall closed at 8 pm on Wednesday, as everyone worked to ready their booths for the crowd on Thursday. As I was leaving, I snapped a photo of the 3D Krosmaster Arena set on display at the Japanime booth.

I did not get to play as many of the new games as I had hoped. Unfortunately the one full game I played I can’t say anything yet until tomorrow. So here’s a picture of the train car that is my hotel room.

I also learned Imperial Settlers, one of Portal Games new releases. It is a card driven engine building game where each player starts with different abilities and has access to both their own race deck and a common deck. We did not end up playing it as we were told the first game is likely to be longer than the 1 hour specified on the box and everyone decided to go to bed to get an early start the next day.

Alright, off to the exhibit hall for the mad dash of game buying. We get to buy games starting at 9 am so I hope to be done by 9:15. More on today’s loot and what I see this morning in a few hours.