Gen Con 2026 was fine – Part II – The Events

The second post of approximately three about Gen Con 2026. First is here if you haven’t seen it: https://everythingisfine.fyi/2026/08/11/gen-con-2026-was-fine-part-i-the-trip/

So what did I actually do at Gen Con this year? Somehow simultaneously a lot and also nothing. Here’s a quick rundown of official stuff I did:

• Franchi$e – an upcoming sports management deckbuilder (it was billed as a deckbuilder, but it’s not – the designer has since updated the tagline for when their funding goes live). It was an entertaining enough game. I’m probably not going to buy it, but I had a good time playing it and would play it with friends if they had a copy. (It had a lot of Lords of Baseball in it, which I liked a lot when I first tried it, and like a little less now but it’s still enjoyable and I’ve hardly played it.)
• Above and Below: Haunted – It’s the old worker placement/adventuring game Above and Below, but a sequel of sorts with ghosts. Enjoyable to play. Would play it again, but not a lot, but it has more variability in it than the original.
• Kinfire Delve – I’d actually played this before (Chris Grace taught me how to play at Clocktower Con 2025, so I’m kind of a big deal) so I decided to jump into a session of it where you could win prizes completing in-game challenges. I ended up playing with a family. We were able to beat the hardest boss in the game and complete all the challenges we set out to do, except for the ones based on completing the game quickly. (I think we would have won a grand prize if we would have finished in 45 minutes; we took closer to an hour.) Good game – I’ve thought about buying it, and I still might in the future.
• Mighty Shot! – A silly little game that tries to play kind of like a MOBA in that you summon minions and march them up a board to damage your opponent, and your opponent uses abilities to try to kill them. (And vice versa.) The core gimmick is that, to kill minions, you flick pucks at a target printed on a special playmat. (The target kind of looks like a curling house; flicking the pucks felt very Crokinole-like.) It was surprisingly complicated, but started coming together pretty quickly. I wouldn’t buy it, but I’d play it more.
• Surviving the GAME: Was billed as a sort of tactical shooter deckbuilder. Host never showed; game never happened.
• Laundry Files RPG Session: I like the Charles Stross novel series, and none of the Call of Cthulhu sessions being run by the group I usually look for sounded interesting, so I went for this instead. It was a very basic scenario, but it showcased how the system works and was a good illustration of the novels’ universe as an RPG. I’ll look into sessions in the future. Maybe I’ll buy the books, but I already have enough RPG books for games I’ll never actually play.
• True Dungeon: A friend needed some people to fill out a group, so I tagged along. I did True Dungeon once before, and it was fine. This time, it was also fine. They’ve shortened the runs from seven rooms to five in order to lower the ticket prices. Five isn’t really long enough, but I’ll certainly never pay the hundred-and-whatever dollars the seven room version costs. (Honestly, I wouldn’t pay the eighty-whatever for the five room one, either.) Entertaining, but I can find lots of things that are entertaining for that kind of money. Maybe a board game? I wonder if I can get any of those somewhere?

This year I also did something I’ve never done before at Gen Con – I GMed two games. First, a session of the Root RPG, where the adventure is meant to parallel the novel Mossflower in the Redwall series. (I knew little to nothing about the Root RPT, Redwall, or Mossflower going in.) It was a good time; the players seemed to enjoy the adventure and it went better than I would have thought. Second (and last – these two events were my actual first and last events of the con), a Call of Cthulhu adventure taking place in a dilapidated, haunted, eldritch Appalachian folklore-based theme park. I had a blast here, and I think my players did, too. Lots of great moments, both from the story itself and the way the players interacted with it. Both were good times. Would GM again.

No stage combat classes, though. And no mega games, or burlesque shows, or Blood on the Clocktower. (Since my con friends generally don’t want to play, I should start getting into the random hallway games, but weird strangers…)

And the vibes were good. Last year, I had a fantastic time in events, but moving from thing to thing felt like a drag. This year, the events were fine to good. Nothing mind-blowing, but still always enjoyable, and moving around the space felt pleasant.