I’ve been on vacation the last two weeks—I’m sure you felt the aching void of receiving this email on Sunday mornings, so for that, I’m truly sorry!

GenCon is America’s largest gaming convention with pretty much any kind of game you can think of, new and old, role-playing and tabletop, plus all kinds of other nerdy things like cosplay, crafting, engineering, workshops, and folk songs about your favorite nerdy show. Plus, it’s you and 71,000 of your closest friends wandering the Indianapolis Convention Center, the several attached hotels, and the Lucas Oil Stadium.

My friends and I tend to spend most of our time in the exhibition hall, where publishers and vendors of all kinds offer demos of new games and items and you can buy, well, a lot of things. See below for some of my haul! We also make sure to spend time in the GenCon games library which has thousands of titles, new and old, to check out. We didn’t make it to the playtesting room this year, but that’s been big fun in the past—you sign up for a slot, play a designer’s game, and then give feedback. It’s great!

Anyway, friends, vacation was great, rest was had, but also I’m tired. I hope you are getting the rest you need these days and that we can all share excitement about what we’ve found and be gentle with each other when we’re exhausted. See you at the bar!

Alice C, board game librarian

Play new things!

So, as mentioned above, these games aren’t in the Free Parking library…yet. I’ll give you a quick run-down of these, but also, consider this an invitation to try something off the shelves here that you aren’t familiar with. Worst case, you don’t like the game, but you spent fun times with a friend and that’s worth a lot!

Rafter Five and TRND are brand new from Oink Games. A lot of game in a tiny box! Rafter Five is a dexterity game balancing cardstock boards and chunky people. TRND is a bit like Rummy because it’s a card-shedding and set-collection game, but very different and themed around chairs!
Tearable Quest (in which players literally tear a piece of paper multiple times trying to get sets of monsters and weapons to score) and Fairy (in which players try to guess something about the next card flipped to score or lose points) are both from AllPlay and were recommended by friend of the bar James Nathan—truly delightful recommendations!
Listen, I’m not gonna lie, Time to Panic and Cosmolancer were both requested by my friend Taylor and I know next to nothing about them, but Taylor has great game taste…
Tacta is a really excellent “infinite playing field” card game that ends up covering your whole table and has players saying, “What? Seriously??” a lot. It’s got remarkable table presence. Barbecubes is by the folks who brought you Tinderblox and is another tiny tin dexterity game, this time balancing tiny vegetables on a grill. Both really ought to be in our library at some point…
Rebirth is a new Reiner Knizia game (he’s one of the most prolific living designers) at a similar weight of play to Carcassonne or Qwirkle. Players are rebuilding post-apocalyptic Scotland with food and energy farms and staking claims on different areas. The chunky castle pieces are even made from a special recycled wood product, decreasing the reliance on plastic in the game—amazing!
And finally Spring Meadow is an older title from Uwe Rosenberg (Feast for Odin, Black Forest, Patchwork). I’ve embarked upon a life-long quest to play everything Uwe has designed and this year, it was Spring Meadow, a charming and puzzly tile-placement game, reminiscent of Tetris, but much more Alpine. My kid and I played it in the games library at the convention and loved it, so this one is second-hand from another Board Game Geek user.