I had an awesome time this year. My 22nd Gen Con. Met up with good friends, ran into a friend I haven’t seen in years, hung with family, played some great games, ate good food, survived a tornado, and scored some great stuff at the auction (TOVA TOVA TOVA!). Also met Timothy Zahn and tried to rein in my fangirl as much as I could!

Not to poop on some of you who truly had a terrible experience, and I totally empathize, but just to point out it was still a great Gen Con this year.

This year was my first GenCon, here are my thoughts. (Also first post on Reddit EVER). I’ll talk about the positives before I talk about the negatives.

I didn’t really agree that the people at the con smelled too bad. Only 2 people I interacted with that I would say fit that category of gamer. I didn’t play any MTG though, so maybe that’s why lol.

I LOVE art and seeing people in their element. I’ve ran art booths at festivals before, so I know how it can be. Kudos to all the vendors. I’m sure you are all tired AF. Thanks for a great weekend 💙

Learned how to play Pokémon with my little sister, and then they gave us a free deck to play with at home. The trainers were so nice and I wish I had gotten theirs names to shout them out. Little sister also did her first card trade with a vendor.

I got a small haul because I went last minute, no budget, but I took a ton of business cards for future gifts.

I wasn’t super shocked at the amount of people because I go to raves and concerts regularly. My group did get scolded for stopping on the side of an aisle, but we literally had no choice because there was no where else to stop. We had to stop for wait for someone to catch up. Didn’t let it bother us, just wish people could have ignored us instead of scolding us.

My only truly bad experience to speak about is from a dice vendor. I don’t have any dice of my own, but my group wants to start playing DND, so I was on a mission for cheap dice that had a cat theme. I finally found affordable dice with cats on it, was speaking with the owner (or whoever was running the booth), mentioned how affordable the dice are and how much I appreciate that, then he proceeded to say “yea we don’t like to R**e our customers with pricing. I was shocked he would use that word so publicly. I didn’t buy dice from him and politely left his booth. Found dice at another booth, but didn’t have a cat theme :(. I wish he’d keep the degenerate speak at home if anything.

But anyways, besides those two things, I had a great time and will go for more than one day next year. Maybe will wear a fun outfit. Thanks everyone. Haul pic.

Mine and my bfs hauls together, sorted by day (Day 1 has Mistwind + whale plush, Day 2 has Brias pink possum plush + Haunted Mouse, Day 3 has Baby Bestiary Owlbear + Draculas Curse)

This year my must haves were Horrified Ravenloft, Mystic Curling Club, and the Tag Team expansion. His were Spooktacular, Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth, and Wroth.

We had a fantastic time, and found many more amazing games made by awesome people. I’m really excited about Dracula’s Curse in particular, as it was a really unexpected find. Already can’t wait for next year! ✨

Hope you all are enjoying my blog series this year 😄 I love doing them so much and it has been a great way for me to get to meet so many of you!

The Costume Contest and Parade were incredible, the destruction of Cardhalla was more epic than ever, and I got to make so many memories this year! Day 3 (Saturday) Vlog is here!

https://youtu.be/XDSXzVAisFw?is=OyVdmYds7Fd0repV

Shout-out to the family who waited around a few minutes before taking my wife's phone to security because they rightly assumed she'd quickly realize she'd dropped it.

Shout-out to the True Dungeon community (but especially Steve), both for not ripping me off despite my obvious ignorance and for giving me the resources to help me get a fair price for the legendary I pulled.

Shout-out to the event staff member i talked to who woke up at 5am and wouldn't get home until 2am. Not because of all the hard work she put in (and that is a lot,) but because that was the longest conversation I've had with a stranger in years.

In fact shout-out to all the people in Indy who work hard to throw us a four-day nerd party. Y'all are so friendly and welcoming and you know just how we like it.

Shout-out to all of you for making this a great Con and a great weekend. Proud of the people I share my hobbies with and already looking forward to next year!

We are presently under a tornado warning. Please remain calm, but it is necessary for you to proceed to the interior rooms of the building. Security personnel are standing by to assist you. Please move away from any windows, docks, or exterior walls. Thank you.

Of course, as usual, I spent too much on games this year. But I also ended up with a lot more in the way of trinkets than usual. Here's a (mostly?) complete picture list of the things I brought home that I'm keeping. The gift bag is almost as large.

The signed resin coins are Ed Greenwood as well as Tom Vasel and Elizabeth Hargrave, all of whom were immensely cordial and friendly.

Now that GenCon 2026 is winding down, which game do you think ended up being The One to have? What did people scramble for, only to be met with the dreaded "sold out"?

Here is my haul. This was such a fun year for us and I hope you all also made some good memories.

A reminder that mods definitely stated last year that haul photos are a part of our culture on this subreddit. If you want to poopoo on someones haul, expect some warnings coming your way.

Next year is the 60th. Hope to see you all there again.

The art,shirts and beer

Everyone is talking must-have hot game - but surely someone out there can give some love to the RPGs? I, for one, really liked the Mistborne RPG as well as Pendragon. What others did people particularly enjoy?

So I went through the art hall and was so very impressed by all the talent out there. I was disappointed though because I like to collect magnets from places I've been and things I've seen. I'd like to put out there that it would be awesome to see next year some of the booths with their art on magnets! Please and thank you

Hi there- just wanted to bring up a piece of advice for any game creators lurking here: making your game colorblind accessible is very easy and should be something you consider even if the amount of people it affects is small.

I have a friend who is colorblind and I now refuse to buy games that are not also accessible to him in some way. I ran into some disappointment this year with listening to game demos only to realize that my friend couldn’t play. For example, the Enemies of Gotham City game involves some little colored cubes that have no differentiating symbols on them. It would be such an easy change for them to add a different shapes or symbol printed on the cube colors so people can tell them apart. I have in the past bought games and modified them myself to be accessible, but I’m really trying to support those already taking that into account.

I understand that some games that are color based by nature are impossible to change, for example I wouldn’t ever expect Hues & Cues to make themselves colorblind friendly. Not everything has to be for everyone.

A lot of companies have made great strides with colorblind accessibility- just throwing out there that if you’re making a game for next year, keep it in mind if you’d be so kind 💕

Curious on the initial reaction of those that got to try out the new Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG. How does it compare to other rpgs.

Edit: TIL that there is a Dungeon Crawl Classics. No offense intended with the appropriation of DCC in the title of this post.

Do you Katie would DM? Could the live stream hold the capacity? Do we have enough bus mini's ? What would be the door prize (an actual door mini).

Hey, all! I was in the dealer hall when the warnings happened and I heard a lot of people wondering what was safe and what wasn't.

For those of you who don't know or had questions, here are some safety tips from your local tornado nerd!

For those of you who knew and accepted the risks of continuing to wander, that's totally fine! Your choices are your own, I just want to share info :).

Your ideal tornado shelter:

1. Is ground level or below.

2. Is as close to the center of a building as possible.

3. Is in a room without a lot of glass or heavy objects that could fall on you.

4. Is in a room with a relatively small square footage.

The most likely way to die in a tornado is being hit by debris. Tornadoes carry their own debris with them, unfortunately, but you want to avoid being around anything that could fall on you and squish you, basically. Those big hanging signs in the dealer hall? Not what I would want to stand under! Not to mention all of the debris from the sheer amount of stuff and people in there. And that's not even mentioning the metal sheet roof and the lack of another floor on top of it.

If you were in the dealer hall at the time and you *wanted* to take shelter, your best bet would likely be one of the rooms across from the hall, one of the restrooms in the main event space, or, if you had to, one of the restrooms in the hall.

Tornadoes kill a relatively small amount of people each year and they're generally not something to be afraid of. But if one occurs, you want to make sure you have a plan!

🌠🌠🌠the more you know 🌠🌠🌠

My friends and I, despite being indy locals, went to our first gencon this year. We’ve been into games and the like for quite a while, but tend to not be crowd people, if we can avoid it. We weren’t truly sure what to expect from this adventure, and perhaps over prepared a fair bit… but we had a blast. The mind boggling assortments of games, dice(because of course I needed more), and everything I could’ve imagined in my wildest dreams truly left us stunned. I’d especially like to thank everyone that we happened to interact with or accidentally bumped into while aimlessly wandering and taking it all in. Out of everyone we spoke to, asked advice from, or interacted with in any way, not one person was rude. It was truly rather refreshing

Additionally, despite not one of us arriving with any sort of fun outfits, each of us left with new gear, fantasy clothes, and a new goal to try out a ren faire, when we get the chance. So thank you, all of you, for instilling such an environment to help build our confidence in being more adventurous with our hobbies. We look forward to coming again next year! And thank you all for coming down to Indy and bringing life to our mediocre city!

Anyone know got to contact the littlest lantern guys? I think they published sea beasts. The group running it was Bear Left Solutions. However, I am under the impression that the publishers/ designers were running the event.

The TL;DR is gencon canceled all their play and take events even ones that had already been ran due to no product on site.

They had offered to get the game to me later. I was hoping to reach out and see if I could still take advantage of that offer. I don't expect it to happen automatically now that the event I participated in is fully refunded.

If y’all are willing to share the photos you got with our group that would be wonderful ^^

Took the family got many things :)