This was my tenth Gen Con, and in some ways it was the best, although I think that’s more about the people at this point and a little less about the games I saw and played. That said, I did see a lot of great new games, and had a hard time paring my “top games of the con” list to ten, but almost everything that I even considered for the list was on the shorter side, with the exception of Railway Boom (the last cut). It was a little bittersweet, as it was also the first Gen Con where I wasn’t there representing Paste/AV Club, although I am very grateful that publishers continued to open their metaphorical doors to me even as a solo act.
Gen Con, for the uninitiated, is the largest board game convention in the Americas, attracting over 74,000 attendees to Indianapolis and over 800 vendors. It’s held over four days in late July or early August, with a very unfortunate habit of landing on or just before the trade deadline. It’s the main place and time for publishers in this market to release new games, with a lot of ancillary activities like author signings, artist booths, and even some celebrity sightings (apparently Felicia Day and Mychal Threets were there).
Some big picture thoughts first: here were three big themes I noticed at this year’s Gen Con:
- Shorter is better. The vast majority of games I saw offered playing times of 45 minutes or less. Games are smaller, shorter, and many of them are $30 or less, some as little as $9-10 for a full game. I saw lighter or family-level versions of Wingspan, Distilled, and Azul. There were still a decent number of heavy games there for sale or previewed for an upcoming Kickstarter, as well as at least one (Ada’s Dream) that only had a deluxe Kickstarter version available for sale, but I am not bringing home anything with a playing time over 45 minutes, and that’s not by my design.
- What’s old is new again. Bringing out-of-print games back, as is or in new skins, has been a trend for a few years, but it was as prominent as ever this year. Tigris & Euphrates, Schadenfreude, Scoville, Camp Grizzly, North American Railways, Las Vegas, and Hacienda are just some of the as-is reissues; Hanami (Samurai), Wild Magic (Vampire), Six Sojourns (Eight-Minute Empire), Gold Country (Spectaculum), and Skyward Republic (Skyward) are some of the old games made new again.
- The forest is overpopulated with critters. We do not need any more games with adorable woodland creatures. Please. I’m begging you.
If you haven’t seen my Gen Con wrap-ups before, here’s how it all works. I use BoardGameGeek’s invaluable preview and create a list of games/publishers I want to see, and work my way through the exhibit hall each day, talking to publishers and demoing or playing everything I can. I take notes, which gets a comment maybe 30-40% of the time (usually good, people respect the pen and paper method), and then dump everything into this recap each year. I rank the ten best games I saw, and then I run through everything else, sorted by publishers, and those are listed alphabetically.
Here are my top ten new games of Gen Con 2026:
1. Drillers (Czech Games): I’m pretty sure this one sold out before Saturday, for good reason. Drillers is a midweight game where you send your mechs into an abandoned mine to collect ore and other valuables, opening up new levels by spending some of your resources, but avoiding going too far down to where you won’t have the fuel to get back up. You do all of this via hand management, building your deck to get additional powers so you can go deeper into the mine later in the game. I’ve read comparisons to CGE’s Lost Ruins of Arnak; there are some structural similarities, but Drillers is simpler mechanically and tighter thematically. (That’s not meant as a knock on Arnak, which I also enjoy.)
2. The Glasgow Train Robbery (Salt & Pepper): This is is a cooperative heist game for two players, with no talking allowed, as the players try to pull off a mission on The Great Train Robbery of 1963 (which had 15 participants, not 2). You each have different skills and must go through all of the steps from planning the heist to executing it, finishing all five plan cards before the train reaches its destination. The art is very stylish and the game play appears to be tight.
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