Gen Con was once again sold out for all four days. Nearly 72.000 attendees and, despite some absences due to crazy economic conditions, more than 574 exhibiting companies. They keep building hotels in downtown Indy but the Con is using up pretty much all of the convention center so I don’t know where there is further room for growth. I suppose more and more things will keep spilling out into the hotels.
Here’s a short collection of things that didn’t fit elsewhere. We have hats, miniatures, some sort of Werewolf game, yet more Heroscape love, and obviously, Purdue University’s Department of Philosophy. Bet you didn’t see that coming.
Riftbound: League of Legends TCG
True to their past tendencies, when Riot Games decided to make a trading-card game they kept it entirely in-house. Riftbound: League of Legends TCG looked like it was released at Gen Con. It’s definitely a trading card game, with all that it entails. 
Folks familiar with the computer game (or the Netflix series, Arcane) will see that each of the starter decks are built around one main character from the game lore. A few items that stand out of the TCG crowd. Players are not directly attacking each other, they’re trying to gain control of various nodes. This is a sort of nod to the videogame where you’re fighting each other but mostly so you can take over the opponent’s locations. Another somewhat unique aspect is how cards are played. Players gain an automatic increase in playing power (mana?) each turn, rather than needing to play special cards in their deck to provide it. However, cards also have a casting cost. Thus one might have two cards that can’t come out until the fourth turn, but they’re cheap enough to play that you can get them both out at once.
I had to take this photo of the little furry Teemo, one of my favorite characters from the videogame. He shoots his little poison-filled dart gun and can go invisible if he stands in place for a little bit. His capstone power is placing little invisible landmine-like mushrooms all over the place that poison and slow down enemies who set them off…
My Hero Academia Miniatures Game
There was a My Hero Academia (or as I call it, My Hero Macadamia Nut) miniatures game on display by Catalyst Game Labs (partnering with the streaming service, CrunchyRoll.) There were some cool figures on display, lots of movement in the sculpts. I could see some of the powers in the series fun to use in a game but I don’t need another miniatures game… <sigh>
This guy shoots tape out of his shoulders. (Yes, that’s his superpower…)
This lady can touch things and make them float, but not herself or she’ll get queasy. She’s also a minor love interest for the main character.
The main character in the series. He had no superpowers as a child but managed to inherit some from the superman-equivalent #1 Hero. Now he spends his time messing up his body because his bones can’t yet handle all the strength his superpower puts out.
Another great character. She has frog powers: sticky feet, long tongue… and can carry items in her stomach and barf them back up. Let’s see them manage to get that power onto a game card…
Hats
There are always a broad number of vendors selling stuff uniquely suited to the gamer-type crowd. We visited a hat booth to get ideas of possibly making our own, although I doubt they will get nearly as cool as these…
It’s the jaunty wizard hat!
Not sure what’s with this one, unless it’s really really windy from one side of the hall.
This is the hat that Hermes wishes he had.
I wish I could pull off that green hat.
Purdue Department of Philosophy
I was surprised to see a booth for the Purdue Philosophy department. However, on second thought I figured it was a better recruiting opportunity than at the Indianapolis Colts game the next week.
Unfortunately, I came across the booth after hours so did not get to participate in the festivities…
365 Adventures
Coming next year, the 365 Adventures: The Dungeon. A sort of advent calendar but for the whole year. Each day has a small dose of role-playing activity that slowly ties the entire year together in one long adventure.
Werewolf / Social Deduction
There are fans of every game. I’m not a big werewolf/social deduction game person, but there are plenty of people who are.
The large hallway that runs adjacent to the playing hall was wide enough to set apart about a third of its width to play games. This area was broken by rows of chairs to make many little cubicles fit for playing games. Each group had its own green-vested leader and there was much bobbing of heads up and down as the day night cycles progressed much faster than they moved for the rest of us. Not wanting to lose any more days of my life to the activity, I moved on…
Warhammer 40k, and more…
Vowing to make sure I spent time with my boys on Sunday and not get distracted by game analysis, we signed up to do a sort of quick, Warhammer 40k-lite game where we ran through a short maze of rooms, getting attacked at every turn.
Each room had some treasure chests containing equipment to make us stronger, more dangerous rooms had better equipment. We went with the very lowest level entrance and managed to evade death slightly longer than I first expected. There were definitely rules we “learned” as we went along. There was a lot of “oh, had I known that rule, I might have dies slightly slower.” If you want to know how to play, you roll dice to attack, to see how many dice you roll to damage the opponent, who then also rolls dice to see how much damage they prevent. Every time we entered a room we rolled dice to see what sorts of bad guys were in the room. And then rolled dice to see how many of those bad guy figures were present. My son was quite interested in Warhammer 40K coming into the convention. Now, and after looking at prices, not so much.
On a positive note, we were all able to use a nicely painted Warhammer 40k figure during the game. After our glorious deaths, we went next door to the paint-and-take area and painted the free figurine they gave us. I’ll let you decide which figure is which…
Nearly identical…
While waiting for our Warhammer 40k event, I took in the last bits of an Age of Silmar game. Same company, but slightly more of a skirmish game. There was a lot of dice rolling in this one, too…
Photo Ops
The hallways aren’t “filled” with locations like this but there are a few different places around set up for selfies and other photos. I believe this Horrified backdrop looks pretty lonely because I think it was getting to be after hours.
Can’t Get Enough of that Heroscape!
The massive, pretty much unplayable Heroscape set up in the corner of the Renegade booth. It inspired my son so that when we got home, we got this…
It takes about 2 to 3 turns just for our troops to move far enough together to start beating each other up. In our first game I had grand ideas about paratroop-ing crabs to create lava with lassoing robot support, but my son’s army ended up being almost a perfect counter. I rolled poorly as well so it was a literal bloodbath… (well, if lava crabs or robots bleed blood…)
Goodbye!
(Yes, the ending even gets its own header line…)
And on that note, I conclude my official Gen Con 2025 coverage. I do have some role-playing game tidbits, but I’ll probably relay them a while later as a sort of fall RPG post that people can read or ignore as is their want.
Thanks for reading!
