Some of my favorite moments are stumbling across zany things in some of the smaller booths. They are often something that’s been out a few years but I’ve just not seen (or at least remember) them before. Hobby Japan is always good for something small and different. Guessocracy: Roll & Vote is a party game of insta-memorizing the pips on a group of dice. Phase Shift had Widget’s Workshop where players try to build robots using clear cards displaying their body parts. They also had Drop Drive, a space-faring game with all the trimmings (pirates, mining, planets) but almost everything is dropped onto and scattered all over the board at some point or another. The role-playing folks at Paizo were announcing Pathfinder Quest. Part boardgame, part role-playing adventure, it was promoted as having a wealth of branching options for a boardgame of this type.

Hobby Japan

Guessocracy: Roll & Vote

In Guessocracy: Roll & Vote, three to six players battle it out to memorize collections of dice after only glancing at them for three seconds. To start the game, a set of dice are rolled into a box, after three seconds, a cloth is draped over the top to hide the dice.

With the exception of Gloomies, everything I checked out at the Ravensburger booth built on or expanded something that came before. That’s not necessarily bad, though. Sandcastles of Burgundy and Minecraft: Builders & Biomes – Junior are both kids’ versions of their larger siblings, but pretty far removed from their complexity. Disney Villainous Unstoppable! has also been given a slimmed-down treatment to make the game faster and more approachable by younger gamers. However, this does mean it is not compatible with versions that came before. Gloomies, the true newbie, has players decorating the board box with flowers, trying to make specific combinations to collect cards and points during the first half. The game then flips over to players using the cards collected to take back all those planted flowers. Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons gives a D&D spin to the line using standard D&D heroes and even a 20-side die for some tasks. Finally, Star Wars Villainous: Cold Tactics, which is also compatible with what’s come before, brings in Admiral Thrawn and Count Duku as playable characters.

The Sandcastles of Burgundy

The Sandcastles of Burgundy is a two to four player game that has a bit of a nod to its older brother, The Castles of Burgundy. Rather than try to build out a kingdom map, players in Sandcastles are racing to gather resources for their market town, then trying to find (under the castles) the right meeple and lure them to your market. If a player gets two matching color decorations, they can also try to grab a matching animal from under a castle.

Restoration Games was in full bloom on the Gen Con exhibit hall floor. A raging battle between film monsters was in one corner of the booth showing off prototype bits from the upcoming Battle Monsters, a wargame based on the Legendary-owned IP of classic monster films (Kong, Godzilla, etc..) Return to Dark Tower: Expeditions is an expansion to the base game adding new heroes and a sort of extra questline that is independent of the main game objective. Thunder Road: Vendetta – Interstate of Decay will be an expansion that introduces a replayable campaign where players can upgrade their cars between races. Finally, there is the Unmatched line of fighting games. So, so many more boxes of Unmatched. Battle of Legends Volume 3 is out, Bruce Lee is coming back in a box with Muhammad Ali, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-op box is due out soon, and the popular London-themed Cobble & Fog box is coming back into print. The last of the character design contest entries will be released in a Stars & Stripes box. Finally, we now know there will be some sort of Hellboy themed release next year.

Battle Monsters

Front and center (metaphorically, it was really on one of the exposed corners) was a busy area where Restoration Games was showing off a prototype for the upcoming 1 to 4 player game, Battle Monsters. It just completed a crowdfunding campaign, so don’t look for it to release before Q3 or Q4 next year (2026.) It’s a Restoration Games take on the old MIlton Bradley Battle Masters game from the early 90s. It was a wargame collaboration with Games Workshop so had a theme leaning towards GW’s Warhammer Fantasy Battle but with much simpler mechanics.