Gen Con 2025 Review
Table of Contents
Took me a minute, but I’ve finally had a spare moment to process my thoughts on this year’s Gen Con. There was no runaway favorite like The Gang last year, but I’m pretty happy with the collection of games I walked away with. Now my big challenge is organization! My current storage solution is overflowing1, so this year’s acquisitions are sitting on a chair in my dining room2 until I can clear out some space for a new board game room.
Anyway, here’s this year’s haul!
My favorite new games⌗
As I alluded to in the intro, I’m not 100% sure there was a stand-out game for me, so instead of ordering my top N games, I’m going to give my top 4 games that I played and purchased, and which were released since Gen Con 2024, in no particular order.
Beasts⌗
Publisher: Pandasaurus
Links: BoardGameGeek
Beasts is a cooperative card-shedding game where you’re not allowed to talk about the cards in your hand. I think of it as a spiritual successor to The Game: it plays very similarly, and I think fans of either will enjoy the other in the same settings. For my shelf, I think Beasts will be replacing The Game because it adds another aspect to the puzzle (the titular beasts show up during the game to throw a wrench into things), and of course it’s beautiful. I’ll hang onto The Game for travel purposes, since it’s in a smaller box.
Typeset⌗
Publisher: DVC Games
Links: BoardGameGeek
This was a little bit of serendipity. I stopped by DVC’s booth while wandering the aisles in the vendor hall when one of their other games caught my eye. But I’m a type nerd, so I had to ask about a game with printing/movable type theme. It turned out to be one of the games I enjoyed the most this year. I love a (verb)-and-write, I love a word game, and when you add in the component quality and the small-box form factor, this game seems like it might’ve been designed for me.
Wriggle Roulette⌗
Publisher: Oink Games
Links: BoardGameGeek
I have to stop by the Oink booth every year. I’ve got quite the collection of their games! This year was a prolific year for Oink: I bought five games from them, and I still need to play two of them. But Wriggle Roulette makes this list precisely because I’ve played it several times when I could have opened one of the ones I haven’t tried yet. It’s just dumb, quick, silly fun. Teaches in a minute or two, plays almost as fast, and resets quickly for repetition. It’s a game that fits around unrelated conversations. A great little way to fill time, and one that will see a lot of play.
Vantage⌗
Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Links: BoardGameGeek
I picked up Vantage just based on what I’d been hearing about it for the past year or so, but I didn’t get to play it until about a week after I got home. It’s listed as a 2-3 hour game, but our first session took just short of 53. I played with 3 other players (4 total), and that felt pretty close to ideal. I’m going to aim for 3-4 in the future4.
The game is challenging to describe, but here goes. It’s a cooperative adventure game about crash-landing on an alien world and exploring it, but each player lands in a different location and explores more or less independently, while in full communication with one another. It’s possible to meet up and join forces, though. You begin the game with a mission, but there’s no real pressure to pursue it. Jamey Stegmaier lists Breath of the Wild as one of the game’s many inspirations, and I can see it. Yeah yeah yeah, we’re here to establish a colony, but I’m going to see what’s up on top of this cool-looking ridge.
And Vantage is vast. There are 1700 cards and 8 books in that very densely packed box. The amount of text that was written for this game is staggering, especially when you consider that most players will only ever read a small segment of it. And yet it doesn’t bog down in text! You spend most of your time taking game actions, with little bits of lore and lush illustrations peppered in. The game frequently had me asking questions like, “why would [this thing] ever be relevant?”, but before long I felt confident that every one of those questions has an answer somewhere.
But it’s also the game I bought that’s the hardest to recommend. I loved my first session, and I’ll be scheduling some more, but it takes long enough that you need to plan around playing it. I don’t think it’ll come off the shelf on a whim at most board game nights. If you think it’s something you want to experience and you’re willing to invest some effort into organizing a group of players to get together enough times to get your $90 worth, get it. But if you don’t have the community for it, the money may be better spent elsewhere.
All that said, one of the most important design decisions in Vantage is that it’s not a campaign. You can play it with different groups of people every time. There’s not a huge barrier to entry for new players, and most of what you bring from one session to the next is a greater familiarity with the game’s systems and the foreknowledge of some parts of the world (“this region is icy and will do damage to you if you try to traverse it without the right gear”). It requires effort to schedule playing it, but not on the same level as something like a tabletop RPG or a legacy game.
tl;dr: Vantage is a great experience, but it’s long and variable enough that you have to plan to play it. I wouldn’t have spilled this much ink (this many electrons?) on it if I didn’t think it was special.
Other games of note⌗
12 Rivers⌗
Publisher: Good Games Publishing
Links: BoardGameGeek
I like the combination of worker placement and simultaneous drafting of resources, scoring conditions, and turn order. There’s also a lovely tactility to acquiring resources by rolling little pearlescent plastic marbles down a track. I’ll probably pick up a copy when I can, but they sold out at the convention.
High Tide⌗
Publisher: Underdog Games
Links: BoardGameGeek
Cute little free-form (boardless) abstract. I don’t have too many opportunities for 2-player games, so I initially skipped it at the con, but it’s charming enough that I’ll probably end up grabbing it if I see it on the shelf at my LGS.
Vegas Strip⌗
Publisher: Allplay
Links: BoardGameGeek
Bidding game with a semi-cooperative twist: players win individually, but each round they’re assigned to a new team, and each team shares their winnings.
Perch⌗
Publisher: Inside Up Games
Links: BoardGameGeek
Bird-themed area control game whose cute visual design and clever component design belie its cutthroat mechanical design. Definitely not a casual experience. Perch’s biggest flaw is that too much of the information in the game is public, so especially in the last round the game is prone to slowing down as players calculate and recalculate their scores, compute the exact point value or all actions they could take, etc.
I like the game and would recommend it to anyone looking for that kind of experience, but I can’t see it coming off my shelf often enough, so I skipped it.
Railroad Tiles⌗
Publisher: Horrible Guild
Links: BoardGameGeek
Excellent tile-laying game from the creators of Railroad Ink. Tiles launched with about a million optional expansions, but I’ve only played the base game. That was enough to convince me to pick it up once it hits my game store.
Art⌗
I’m not sure why I haven’t showcased more of my art acquisitions in prior reviews, but I do make sure to carve out some time to wander up and down the art show. This year I picked up:
- Two neoprene playmats with Magic: the Gathering art:
- A print of the Black Lotus art by Scott M. Fischer that was used as the trophy for the 2023 North American Vintage Magic Championship
- An original painting by Tran Nguyen
Bags⌗
Okay, I know exactly why I don’t usually have a section on bags, but this year was an exceptionally good year for them.
For a little background: I’ve been a VIG member of Gen Con for a few years now, which includes a swag bag, and I’ve always maintained that in most years the best part of the swag bag is the bag itself. This year’s was a small cross-body bag that’s just a fantastic size for carrying a notebook with a few pens, a water bottle, and a small snack.
The other bag pictured is a canvas tote bag from the Pandasaurus that was free with a purchase of (I think) $25. This is absolutely brilliant, and I carried it around and used it for the rest of the convention. It’s not uncommon for vendors to have bags, but most of the time they’re paper or polypropylene. Canvas is a huge step up from that, and if any prospective convention vendors happen to be reading this, I want to stress that a nice canvas bag as a promo for buying your wares makes me want to spend money at your booth. More of this, please!
Food⌗
Lumpia Queen returned, and they even have an online ordering system now. So not only do they run through their lines quickly, they have a way to skip the line entirely! Definitely a staple from now on, and not to be missed.
El Venezolano is a new one (I think, at least). Great arepas, great sausage, great tequeños. They’ve often got a serious line, but they move through it at a reasonable pace.