The Best Four (Five? Ten?) Days in Gaming

Gen Con is an experience unlike any other. There is an energy there that really isn't present at other conventions, and it's one of those conventions that extends beyond the confines of the halls and into the community around it. For four days in the late summer, Indianapolis becomes Gen Con City.

This year was our fourth time attending Gen Con, and I can say without a doubt it was our most memorable. We were once again confined to a small, 10'x10' booth, where we were able to sell Galactic Cruise and related items, including a couple of new Agenda Card promos (which were, by far, our most sold items).

It was great to see so many people, including lots of amazing folks who we had previously only interacted with online through BGG, our Discord, or our other social media platforms. It's always so interesting to meet those people face-to-face (invariably, people are either much shorter or much taller than I'd imagined them!), and I relish the opportunity to meet all the people who are excited about the game.

We also had the ability to stretch out a bit due to our demo table out in Hall B/C (which, luckily, was positioned on the non-rainy side of the hall during the tornado warning!), where we ran games of Galactic Cruise, Excursions, and Manoomin: The Food That Grows on Water all weekend. Shout-out to our amazing demo team for their perseverance and their willingness to commit so many hours to running the games. The feedback for the two upcoming titles was overwhelmingly positive, which thrills us to no end.

What made the weekend extra special was an event that occurred on Thursday night: The 19th Annual Dice Tower Awards!

We were nominated in six categories—Best New Designer, Best Game from a Small Publisher, Best Theming, Best Production, Best Strategy Game, and Game of the Year—and, as luck would have it, Luthier (my personal favorite game that came out last year) was nominated in those exact same categories. In the end, we took home three awards (Best New Designer, Best Strategy Game, and Game of the Year), while those other three categories were stolen deservedly won by Dave Beck.

To be recognized by The Dice Tower voters in this way means so much to us. Obviously, Galactic Cruise is a game that we love, but it's also a game that is expensive to acquire, requires a large amount of table-space, has a fairly large ruleset...and it's a game that was literally up against Luthier, The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, Sweet Lands, Vantage, Zenith, Eternal Decks, Hot Streak, and Speakeasy, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era! And yet, when the envelope was opened, it was our game that Tom and Eric announced.

In case you missed the award ceremony, the Dice Tower just posted a video of the ceremony HERE.

While a lot of the buzz for us at Gen Con centered around the awards that Galactic Cruise won, a great deal was also centered around the demos of Excursions. In total, we ran 18 sessions it, most of which we ran at the full complement of six players—that's over 100 players who got to experience the game, not counting the hundreds of folks who came by the booth to get the five-minute spiel of the game! The buzz is certainly building for the game, which makes us extremely excited to launch Excursions on Kickstarter on October 6th!

Following Gen Con, we had exactly one day of rest, and then we headed out to an AirBnB for our first official Kinson Key Games company retreat: ~3 days of business discussion, forward and backward planning, and a whole lot of gaming! I can't divulge too much about what was discussed there, but I can tell you all that there are some very exciting things on the horizon for KKG, including some very exciting new games from well-loved designers.

I got to play several new games while on the retreat, and here's a quick ranking of the top five things that I got to play:

5) Acquire. Somehow, I'd never played this one, and I found it to be a real delight, especially considering that it came out well over sixty years ago! There is a timelessness to it that I love.

4) Greylune. For a game that is somewhat slight upon the table, there is a heck of a lot of thinkiness in this one! This game has some really interesting twists on eurogame fare that make it really fun to play.

3) Gunsen: The Battle for Toshi Ranbo. I picked this one up as a bit of an impulse buy at Gen Con, due to my love of Ben Rosset's and Matthew O'Malley's games, and I found it to be really excellent! The card drafting action selection system is fascinating, the combat mechanism is fresh, and the win condition of the game is very climactic. I look forward to playing this one more (and not being stomped by Dennis Northcott next time).

2) The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. I've long been a fan of the Lord of the Rings IP, and Pandemic was one of the first games that I played when I was getting into modern gaming. To see the two things married, and married so very well, was epic to experience. While our game ultimately ended in defeat, the Kinson Key team four-player game was one of the highlights of my gaming career. We'll destroy that ring next time!

1) Nippon: Zaibatsu. I loved this one! The worker removal aspect—the balancing salaries and consolidation bonuses—all of it. The game's production is fantastic, as well.

Honestly, when I plugged these games (alongside the others we played) into PubMeeple, I wasn't sure how they'd shake out (especially those top 3), but that's the magic of ranking systems. Sometimes you don't know what your favorite game of a weekend was until the ranking engine tells you!

And now, after what was basically two weeks of travel, business, and gaming, I am back home. I'm exhausted, congested, and extremely happy.