The Best Board Games at Gen Con 2024

This was my eighth Gen Con and in some ways it was my most successful one. I always go in with a huge hit list of games to see and booths to visit to get info on all the new and upcoming releases, and this year I hit almost everything. If I didn’t get to something, it was a logistical problem, like games that sold out before I even got to the booth to see them, rather than poor life choices on my part. (I did make poor life choices, like drinking bourbon while playing a game of Brass: Birmingham that lasted until 3 in the morning. I recommend the game, and the bourbon, but not together.) The flip side is that the roster of new titles this year wasn’t quite as good as what I think of as the ‘average’ Gen Con slate. We had more IP-based spinoffs and reskins than ever, a trend that I don’t think is going anywhere at all; and a lot of new editions or rethemes of older games, which can be great to get something out of print back into circulation or turn a decent game into an excellent one. Both of those take up some of the oxygen that might otherwise go to entirely original ideas. Movie and TV fans are probably nodding their heads in agreement. That said, I still saw a ton of new games I liked, and barely got everything home—some years I bring a second suitcase, and of course the one time I don’t I end up struggling to fit it all in what I did bring—and then arrived to see a review copy of another game I saw and liked at Gen Con was already waiting for me.

1. Rock Hard 1977

Rock Hard 1977 (Devir) was the best game I saw at Gen Con—full disclosure, I received a review copy at home a week prior to the show, so I knew something going in—between the incredible theme, some novel mechanics, and the integration of the two. Very, very few games do such a thorough job of matching the game play to the game’s concept and theme. You’re a wannabe rock star in 1977 who must balance the quest for fame—playing small gigs, recording a demo tape, paying for some promotion—with the mundane things like holding down a job to pay the bills. If you need some more energy, there’s always cocaine candy, but don’t get hooked on the stuff or you might end up crashing. It’s a worker placement game with some set collection for more points, but can you really put a price on fame? Oh, and the best part is the designer: Jackie Fuchs, who you might know as Jackie Fox, the bass player for the influential 1970s rock band the Runaways.

2. River of Gold

River of Gold (Asmodee) is a light Euro game in the same universe as Asmodee’s Legend of the Five Rings deckbuilder and RPG, but it’s mechanically unrelated and wonderfully simple. You gain points by collecting silk, rice, and porcelain to deliver to customers along the river and by building at locations on the banks of the river. Each player has two ships on the river they can move the number of spaces shown on the die roll at the start of their turn, or they can sell to a customer whose value matches that on the die (if they have the demanded resources), or they can build in the matching region. Turns are very quick and your choices are pretty simple, although as the game goes on you can gain some more abilities and have the power to alter your die’s value more easily.

3. Let’s Go! to Japan

Let’s Go! to Japan (Alderac) comes from designer Josh Wood (Santa Monica, Cat Lady) and is based on his own experiences: He planned and saved for several years to take a trip to Japan, and was all set to go in the summer of… wait for it… 2020. So he turned the planning into a board game while he waited for the country to open back up, and it was one of the most thematic and best-looking games at the convention. You’re a tourist going to Tokyo and Kyoto, trying to do the most you can in seven days while also managing your mood and energy levels and deciding how much to travel between the two cities. A lot of the scoring revolves around set collection mechanics as you gather cards for different places you visit, but the tension comes in from the limited time you have within the game to do all the things you want to do. The art, credited to five different illustrators, is fantastic as well.

4. Little Alchemists

Little Alchemists (Czech Games) is the lighter version of CGE’s heavy game Alchemists, a two-hour game that ranks in the top 200 all-time on BoardGameGeek. This isn’t just a kids’ version of the original, but a midweight version that I think still offers plenty of what people like in the first game, just without as much complexity or anywhere near as long a play time. It has seven chapters where you add a rule or other twist in each one, so by the fourth scenario you have a medium-weight game already, and it comes with a companion app that has a tutorial and some cartoon cut scenes for flavor. It was a Gen Con release and should be out to retail any day now.

5. Faraway

Faraway (Pandasaurus) has already had quite a bit of buzz this year for its ingenious mechanic where you play eight cards over the course of the game from left to right… but then activate them right to left, which can lead to some unintended consequences. You’re a traveler walking a path, laying down a card for each place you visit, and then at the end of the game you turn around and walk back the way you came, activating the cards in reverse order. The cards are extremely busy and I didn’t find the icons that intuitive, but the game play itself is strong.

6. Nova Roma

Nova Roma (25th Century): Nova Roma is a one- to two-hour game that combines worker placement, area control, and contract fulfillment. Players work to help build the city of Byzantium, also called New Rome at the time, and will send their family members and representatives around the map to gather resources, build buildings, dominate the sea trade, and race in the hippodrome. (No hippos, hungry hungry or otherwise, were harmed in the making of Nova Roma.) It has a variable action selection mechanism where you place your worker on a grid and take the action in that row or column, increasing its power if you have other workers in the same row or column.

7. Tower Up

Tower Up (Monolith/Pegasus) hits the sweet spot of simple rules with elegant scoring, so you can teach it quickly without giving up the strategic challenge that the best board games share. On a turn, you either take a card showing 2-4 tower pieces in some combination of colors, or you place two pieces from your supply on the board. You place one piece on any open space on the city, then one on an existing tower adjacent to that one. You score the second one by moving up the marker on the matching color’s track on your player board, which will mean more points at game-end. When all four of your tracks reach a scoring line on your board, you get a bonus turn. Thus any tower that has no empty spaces next to it will remain untouched till the end of the game, giving points to whoever has their cap piece on top because they placed the last level on it. There are also three objective cards in every game for things like having your caps in four brown buildings or in five buildings that are connected via roads. The rules are short, turns are fast, and there’s a ton of take-that to it. It’s not out yet but I did receive a review copy, which usually means a retail release is coming soon.

8. Life in Reterra

Life in Reterra (Avalon Hill) is a tile-laying game with huge variability set-to-set because of the five sets of double-sided buildings and cards that come with the base game. You draft one 2×2 terrain tile to add to your board, eventually creating a 4×4 tableau, trying to build terrain areas of at least seven squares and lining up symbols to allow you to select and place a building for extra points or powers. It’s a bit of Kingdomino and a bit of Tiny Towns, but still felt like something novel, and I’m not just saying that because I wiped the floor with my opponents in our full play-through. (I did, though.)

9. Vale of Eternity

Vale of Eternity (Renegade Games) is a light card-drafting game for two to four players, where you try to summon and tame magical creatures and use the effects of the cards you’ve gained. You’ll select two cards from the market row in each round and can sell them for jewels (the currency in the game) or tame them into your hand. You can then pay the cost of a card to summon it to your play area—but your area can only have a number of cards in it equal to the current round number. You can remove a card from your play area, but you have to pay its cost all over again. You can earn points from various card effects, and the player with the most points after ten rounds (or if any player has 60 points) wins. It plays in under 40 minutes, and was released last October at Essen.

10. Fairy Ring

Fairy Ring (Asmodee) is a light family game that offers more than enough for the adults at the table; I spent much of Gen Con saying it’s a game you can play with your kids that isn’t stupid. The scoring is a little advanced, although at my demo we had a girl who was maybe 8 or 9 who had no problem keeping up. You play a mushroom card from your hand to your tableau, either at one end of the row or stacking on a matching stem, and then move your fairy token around the table, through all players’ tableaux, the number of spaces shown on the card you just played. If you land on an opponents’ card, they score it based on the rules for that color; if you have that same color in your tableau, you score it too. If you land in your own garden, only you score it. It’s a card-drafting game where you pass your hand to your neighbor after each turn, and you’ll play 12 cards over two rounds before scoring. The fun is in the anticipation—you have to figure out your options because other players’ plays can alter where your fairy will end up landing, and maybe turn a good play into a lousy one.

And, with apologies to my editor, here’s everything else I saw, demoed, or played at the convention, listed alphabetically by publisher:

25th Century: Witchcraft is a retheme of the excellent 2022 game Resist!, going from the Spanish Civil War to witches trying to defend themselves against supernatural enemies while facing angry villagers who want to burn them at the stake. Both are strictly solitaire games; Resist! is fantastic, but I have never beaten all of the game’s scenarios.

Águeda: City of Umbrellas is based on the festival of colorful umbrellas held every summer in the titular city, in Portugal, with a tile-laying and pattern-building mechanic that plays out like Azul Lite. You move a tourist meeple onto one of the streets on your board when you’ve filled it with umbrellas so you can gain points from the pattern. They also have new editions of the 1998 Reiner Knizia game Circus Flohcati and the 2012 Inka & Markus Brand game Sausage Sizzle!

Alderac: Undergrove is the latest release from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, who returns to her nature roots with a game of fungi and trees. Players place tiles and their seedling tokens on a common board that represents a forest floor, where the mushrooms are helping improve the soil and feed the trees you’re planting. You’ll manage four resources—carbon, phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen—to grow your seedlings into trees, move up the carbon track, and score three public objectives. As with all of Hargrave’s larger games, Undergrove draws heavily on the science of its subject, and I’d also say as with most of her games it’s not as complicated to play as it appears. It also offers a little more player interaction than Wingspan does.

Misfit Horrors is a cheeky tableau-building game where the massive deck of cards changes each game, as you insert a card into a sleeve to combine a creature with an adjective to create a misfit that can give you resources, points, or new actions or powers. You’ll pay cash for each card you build, although cash isn’t hard to come by, creating a 4×4 tableau, with most of your points coming from collecting sets of resources—either six of a kind or two of each of the three resources—to grab bonus tiles that start at 12 points and decrease in value as players claim them.

Allplay: River Valley Glassworks is a light, abstract strategy game built around its token selection mechanic. You place a glass token from your hand into one space on the river that has the matching shape, then take all tokens from an adjacent space, placing them on your board into columns to score points based not on their shapes, but their colors.

Lure is another of Allplay’s imports to come in a small, square box (Sequoia, Sail), based on a Japanese game called Dice Fishing. It’s a quick-playing game of rolling dice of varying sizes and using them to bid on fish. The fish often require both a total value from the dice you’re spending and for a specific value to appear somewhere in the dice—so, a total of 6 or more, with one of the dice showing the value 3. There are also lure tokens that can get you extra points, let you tweak a die value, or even function as an additional die, and some fish can only be caught with a lure token’s help.

This was also the first time I saw the Allplay reprint of the Knizia classic Through the Desert, which has been out of print for at least six years, and now has its first-ever expansion, Through the Desert: Bazaar, which has four mini-expansions in its box. It’s a twist on the typical area-control game, where you place your camels on the board to create chains that cordon off areas, giving you points for their size and for what’s shown on the spaces you’ve surrounded. It’s a top 60 all-time game for me and I am never parting with my 2009 edition.

Arcane Wonders: There was quite a bit of buzz around the hilariously-themed Video Game Champion, an ode to 1990s 16-bit games. Players are trying to play their videogames as much as they can while also managing to do homework and visit their grandparents, scrounging money when they can, playing new releases, and more. You select your action by taking a chip from an action grid, which gives you the action from that column and that line, a mechanic I also saw in this year’s Nova Roma. They also had Mezen, an abstract tile-laying game on a 5×5 board that I didn’t enjoy; and a reskinned Taiwanese game now called Vegetable Stock, where players try to manipulate the prices of five different vegetables to maximize the value of their holdings, but where the market for any vegetable can crash if the price gets too high.

Asmodee: As usual, Asmodee had a ton of IP games at the con, including more games in the Star Wars universe, but they still had several new games that weren’t tied to any of their IP deals. Inori is the latest game from Space Cowboys, the imprint that gave us Splendor, and has some similarities to that earlier hit despite coming from a different designer. Inori is a light and very quick-moving game that manages to combine some worker placement, some engine building, and some resource management without getting too heavy or long. Players place their meeples on spirit cards or the Gret Tree to claim tokens in five colors (the same five colors as the cards) or sometimes manipulate meeples on the board already, even moving opponents’ meeples to try to screw with them. When a spirit card’s spaces are filled, it scores, giving one point for every token each player owns in the matching colors. The game runs four rounds and in each round players add another spirit card to the board, while they will also add some meeples as it goes along. I stalked this demo table for three days and finally got a play-through of two rounds in the final hour of the convention. It was worth it, and if I’d kept ranking games I saw, this would have been next at #11.

Fromage is an upcoming game of cheesemongering from the designers of the great deduction game The Search for Planet X. As someone who is lactose intolerant and who despises blue cheese of all sorts, this game should be a nightmare for me, but I liked what I saw. It’s a game of worker placement and resource management with a modular board that rotates on each turn, where you have to wait one to three turns to get your cheesemongers back depending on where you placed them (similar to the underrated game Corrosion). You’ll craft soft, hard, and blue cheeses, filling orders and creating pairings, while you can also increase your powers by raising livestock and crafting buildings on your board. It’ll be out in North America in December or January.

Tree Society is a new game in the line of their 2022 hit Forest Shuffle (which had a new expansion out), but it’s from different designers. Tree Society has a similar card structure to that of Spellbook, where each card you buy has three different levels, although here you will buy them at their lowest level and then pay to upgrade them through level three until you complete and score them. You get money by selling one fruit card from your play area each turn, with the value tied to what other fruit cards are visible at that moment, which seems to reduce your agency and limit how much you can plan. I thought this one looked fiddly and perhaps too luck-driven.

Avalon Hill: Betrayal: Deck of Lost Souls is a new card game in the Betrayal at House on the Hill line. It’s a 3-5 player title where players work together to try to defeat whichever of the six curse cards on the table has afflicted them so they can escape the house—but one of the players is a traitor and is secretly working against the team. I’m not a Betrayal player to begin with, so the lore here was lost on me, and one comment at our table was that the font on the cards was really hard to read. Avalon Hill also had the fifth edition of the 1983 role-playing board game hybrid Talisman, which is available to pre-order.

Bézier: Seers Catalog had the punniest name of the convention, at the very least. It’s a card-shedding game (like UNO), but you want to get rid of most of your cards without being the first player to go out completely. You play a single card or a set/run on your turn, and can beat whatever’s on the table with a higher value of the same thing—a single card on a single card, a run on a run, etc. Cards go from 2-13 with five colors, but there are ‘artifact’ cards that give you all sorts of special powers to change the outcomes of tricks or even entire rounds.

Sandbag is a trick-taking game where the goal is to win as few tricks as possible, with a sandbag card you can play once per round to ensure you lose that specific trick—but having sandbag cards in your pile at the end of the round will cost you points.

Blue Orange: The third game in the Next Station series, Next Station: Paris, was available for the first time, with a new map, new objectives, monuments and overhead crossings you score by traversing. It’s a flip-and-write like the first two; I thought the original one, Next Station: London, was excellent, but didn’t like the changes in the second one, Next Station: Tokyo.

Shadow House is a series of social deduction games for 3 to 8 players that has roles like in One Night Ultimate Werewolf, with one player the culprit trying to bluff their way to the end of the game—or pass the culprit card to someone else. It’s the first English version of a 2013 Japanese game called Hannin Wa Odoru. Blue Orange had a banner up for their cooperative party game Link City, but I didn’t see it in the booth or for demo.

Buffalo Games: Buffalo, which also owns Gamewright, had two games from designer Eric Lang (Rising Sun, Blood Rage). I (heart) Manatees is a very light tile-laying game where the actions you get to take depend on the column from which you drew it. You’re building a habitat for the huge manatees by building a tableau of tiles and adding or moving manatees around it—or even using the shark action to steal one from another player. Wrath of Fire Mountain is a co-design with Phil Walker-Harding, and it’s an even lighter game of area control where you roll a die and take the shown action, often placing a cave person on one of the tiles—sometimes in the region where dinosaurs hatch, sometimes on the volcano tile itself. You can take control of the volcano to shift the tiles on the board, and once the volcano is full, it erupts, and you score based on where you have your workers.

Burnt Island: I reviewed a light game called Mycelia, published by Ravensburger, earlier this year; Burnt Island published another game called Mycelia, and it’s completely different, although they both involve mushrooms. This Mycelia is card-based, with a board that grows as you play, where the mushrooms on cards give you points and further actions and you use the wind to spread your spores around the board. The art is pretty great and more realistic than the art in the other game of the same name, so I hope that will at least reduce some of the confusion. I didn’t get to see their heavy game Endeavor: Deep Sea, which was completely sold out by day three of the con. It’s the follow-up to 2018’s acclaimed Endeavor: Age of Sail.

Capstone: Capstone is bringing back the hard-to-find asymmetric two-player game Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, where one player plays as a witch and the other a witch hunter. Each player has a customizable deck of cards for their character, so the game has a ton of replay value and is more complex than the typical two-player title. It’ll be available in the U.S. at the end of August.

Tangram City is a new tile-laying game from Uwe Rosenberg, designer of some of the best games ever in that genre, including Patchwork. The tiles are double-sided and each player has some information on upcoming tiles that is secret from other players. You score for creating the best-looking rectangular tile patterns. It’s been out in Europe since last year.

Pirates of Maracaibo is a standalone spinoff to the game Maracaibo, this one merely co-designed by that game’s designer, Alexander Pfister. It’s a little lighter and a little shorter to play, in the same general setting, and the idea is to give players a more accessible introduction to this world of building a pirate crew, plundering, selling, and keelhauling. The original Maracaibo is one of the top-rated games on Board Game Geek but I found the game play kind of ponderous, so this is probably going to end up much more my speed.

Cephalophair: Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs is a streamlined, 20-minute adventure that fits in your hand and gives you a taste of the Gloomhaven dungeon-crawl experience. You play as a solo adventurer who has been cursed and is now the size of a mouse, and must battle enemies to reach the end and reverse the curse. It’s a lot of game for a small box, and retails for $20.

Crafty Games: Tabriz is the long-awaited follow-up from designer Randy Flynn to his 2022 Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia. It’s a bigger game with an absolutely stunning board, although the game play is not as long or involved as the board might imply. Players move their three workers through the bazaar to gain any of the five resources they might need to fulfill a contract to weave a carpet, also gaining skills to make the workers and their actions more powerful as the game progresses and the contracts get harder to fill. It’ll be out in Q4.

Sardegna had the best box design I saw at the convention: The small box unfolds into the game board, showing the map of that Mediterranean island. It’s a simple area control game where you have seven cards, each with a unique role, and play them to try to explore the island and get into the right regions for scoring. This is a reworking of a 2005 German game called Kreta (Crete) that I don’t think was ever published in North America.

Buru is Crafty’s other big new release, but as with Tabriz, it looks way heavier than it plays. (When I say ‘heavy,’ I mean difficulty, not physical weight. I saw some heavy games of the latter kind, too, but if it hurt my back to lift them, I’ll tell you.) Players bid their tokens to the four quadrants of the board to collect resources and hire locals from the island of Buru to fill contracts and pay tribute to the spirits for bigger rewards.

Czech Games: SETI is Czech’s next big, heavy, table hog release, promising a 40 minutes per player playing time. It’s a science-themed game around the search for life somewhere near us in the solar system or galaxy, with cards based on real missions or initiatives in the SETI project. Over five rounds, players use limited resources to build their engines so they can conduct research, send probes elsewhere in the solar system, or direct their telescopes beyond the system to search nearby stars and planets. It’s due out at Essen.

Dead Alive Games: Cyber Pet Quest is a casual family-level game that lets you customize the difficulty level to your group. It’s a cooperative or solo campaign game where the players play as bionic pets searching for their missing owner, collecting items and moving around the city, across 12 chapters. It’s due out in October. They also demoed an upcoming game called Lunar Skyline, a two- to six-player trick-taker where each card has two icons and players can follow suit in either, and the winning player of a trick takes one card and uses it to start building the skyline on the moon. It’s set in the universe of their 2023 hit Lunar Rush, but has totally different mechanics.

Devir: Cities is another tile-laying game from Phil Walker-Harding (Cacao, Bärenpark) where you’ll build a city with 2×2 tiles over eight rounds, collecting scoring cards, buildings, and various tiles to try to fulfill “achievements” (objectives) for points. It looks pretty light compared to the typical Devir release in this medium-sized box.

Planta Nubo is a very heavy game co-designed by Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, A Feast for Odin), Andreas “ode.” Odendahl (La Granja), and Michael Keller (La Granja, Agra), and if you know those games you probably have some idea what you’re in for here. It’s a massive worker-placement and engine-building title where players are growing plants in the treetops over a damaged world, requiring at least 30 minutes per player.

Sand is more my speed when it comes to heavier games, as it’s not quite so punishing. It’s a game of pickup and delivery and resource management, with a little area control sprinkled in, as players try to sell goods across the post-apocalyptic desert on their mutated caterpillars, scoring for the seedlings they sell and contracts they fulfill. It’s by two first-time designers. Devir also has a new edition of a small game from Wolfgang Kramer, Flash 10, first released in 2013.

Dire Wolf: Clank! Legacy 2 Acquisitions Incorporated should get out to Kickstarter backers by the holidays, with retail to follow afterwards. It’s the second ‘season’ for the fantastic legacy version of their competitive dungeon-crawler board game Clank!. Speaking of which, the digital version of Clank!, announced last May, is now in beta on Steam and should be available to everyone by the end of the year. The digital version of Cascadia is in Early Access on Steam as well and looks incredible—but these are two of my favorite games of all time, so I may be a bit biased.

Envy Born: Sirens is one of a series of four tiny-box games Envy Born has just put out, where two players compete to draft cards showing bits of sheet music and symbols to make the most valuable song. The specific goals change in each round and it also has a solo mode. There’s an app that will play the song you’ve created as well.

First Fish: Mistwind is a gorgeous pickup-and-delivery game from designers Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu (Sagrada), where players send flying whales around the map to bring goods to various locations while also building routes with outposts to connect those sources to customers for more efficient deliveries. There are also some worker-placement elements and cards that allow you to make your actions more powerful.

Flatout Games: The two Cascadia roll-and-write games, Rolling Rivers and Rolling Hills, were out for demonstration but won’t be available to buy until October. Each includes four different maps you’ll fill out based on the dice rolls, combining a wildlife token and a nature token to choose what to mark off. You score as you complete habitat cards and check off certain spots on your scoresheets. The two boxes have different sheets and one different die in each, but you can integrate them to play them together and go from 1-4 players with one box to up to eight players with both.

Nocturne is a set collection game with a novel bidding mechanism where players place bidding tokens on the tableau of forest tiles, as you must bid a higher token than the last player did—but do so on an adjacent tile. That can mean the bidding ends because everyone passes, or because the bidding has snaked into a corner and there’s no legal play for anyone else to make. You’ll try to fulfill contracts and score end-game bonuses as well, playing over two rounds that represent day and night. The art, by Beth Sobel, is incredible. Some of the scoring on the tiles reminded me of the tiny-box game Sea Salt & Paper from last year.

Floodgate: The party game Landmarks has one player giving single-word clues to all of the other players to try to direct them along a map of hexes, where only the clue-giver knows the goal hex and which ones hold traps or other items. It launched at Gen Con and will be out in September.

Geek Attitude: Babylon is a three-dimensional building game where players place pillars to build more floors in their hanging gardens, then adding statues, bridges, fountains, and stairs to score points based on their placement and/or height. It should be out later this year.

Grand Gamers: La Familia Hort is a light farming-themed game with some creepy Tim Burton-esque art where players manage just six plots of land, sowing and watering their crops, selling them for more if they’ve been fully fertilized. It was published in Spain in 2020, and this is its first North American release.

The Fog: Escape from Paradise has players trying to get their people off the island as a mysterious fog rolls in—and up the bottom of the board—even if it means shoving some opponents’ people out of the way. You get action points in each round and have specific movement patterns to which you are limited. There are several ways to gain or lose points beyond merely escaping, and the people can only land on matching spots on the boats, or on the stern for fewer points.

Tír na nÓg has players taking the roles of bards, trying to tell stories over five rounds to place 15 cards in three rows next to their player boards, with each row having its own scoring mechanism that varies by game. The heart of the game is the way you claim story cards from the ring of 8 in each round, as you place a token between two of them to try to claim it—but an opponent can claim the other edge and may swipe it if they go ahead of you in the removal phase.

Hachette: The Hachette family of publishers had a whole slew of new releases, but Sky Team, which just won this year’s Spiel des Jahres a few weeks ago, was the reason for the huge lines at the booth. They also had one of the runners-up in In the Footsteps of Darwin and now have a sequel, In the Footsteps of Marie Curie, coming this fall, although the game has entirely different mechanics and looks like a richer play than the Darwin game. It’s due out at Essen, as is Festival, a very light tile-laying game where you create a 3×3 grid of fireworks tiles to try to match objective cards.

Kronologic: Paris 1920 is the first of a series of murder-mystery games where you gain two pieces of information on a typical turn, one of which you keep a secret but the other must be shared with all other players. Each box has three crimes, each of which can be played up to five different times, so there’s more replay value than in the typical one-and-done deduction game of this strain. It’s from the co-designers of Turing Machine, a more abstract deduction game where you’re guessing a secret code.

From the Moon is a heavier game from the prolific Johannes Goupy, whose games include Faraway, Pixies, and Rauha. You’re building bases and launching missions from the moon out into the solar system and beyond, since the Earth is beyond repair (no lies detected), gathering resources to power your rovers and load them up with workers, represented by some very detailed miniatures. Jamey Stegmaier reviewed the game recently and said his three-player game took about two and a half hours, which I’ll take as more accurate than the box’s suggestion of 30 minutes per player.

Middle Ages is a brand-new retheming and retooling of Marc André’s Majesty: for the Realm, his follow-up to his hit game Splendor. The art and components here are really something—you’re placing interlocking tiles now, not cards, and each tile’s art is unique, so it looks like you’re really building out a medieval village. That said, I played this all the way through and was reminded of the facets of Majesty I didn’t love, and I think the two tiles that involve attacking other players might be overpowered.

Seaside is a highly portable game that comprises a set of wooden tokens and a bag to hold them, and that’s it. Tokens are blue (sea) or white (beach—just beach), and you draw from the bag until you get a white token, placing blue tokens on the sea part of your playing area and white on the beach side. Each token has symbols on it, like animals, rocks, or waves, that have some action or additional power, and you will play until the bag is empty. The player with the highest stack on their beach wins.

Happy Camper: Trio isn’t new, but it finally has a proper North American release. Previously known as nana as well as Trio, it’s a hidden-information game where players try to collect three sets of cards of matching values, or to collect two such sets where the sum or difference is seven, but can only do so by asking other players to reveal their lowest or highest cards. (You can always choose to reveal your highest or lowest card too.) There are only three cards of each value in the deck, so if someone has a card you need but it’s not their highest or lowest, you have to wait until it moves to one extreme or the other. It’s a fantastic and quick-to-play game.

Iello: King of Tokyo Duel shrinks the box and the KoT experience to make it shorter and ramp up the push-and-pull aspect. You can still win by bludgeoning your opponent to eliminate all of their health, but now there are two tracks, for fame and destruction; if you pull either track marker all the way to your end, or get both simultaneously into a specific zone on your side, you also win. Most of the mechanics are identical to the original—you have a unique monster and a health counter, and the dice show health, attack, and energy sides along with markers for the two tracks that replace the 1-2-3 victory point sides. You can only move on a track if you roll at least three dice with its symbol. It’s due out in October.

Indie Boards & Cards: Sherlock The Game is Afoot is a clever deduction game for 2-5 players with Clue/Cluedolike elements where you want to either guess which card in the deck is the suspect or just be the last one standing after every other player has tried and failed. It’ll be out to retail in October.

Indigenous Action: Klee Benally was a Diné activist, musician (Blackfire), artist, and environmentalist who fought to protect indigenous rights and lands in the American Southwest until his death last December at 48. He also designed the semi-cooperative game Burn the Fort, released right around the time he died, to promote the idea of indigenous resistance. Players represent different Native historical figures, fighting colonialists who are trying to build a fort on indigenous land. The players win if they succeed in burning the fort down before enough wagons reach the fort to move the colonialists’ train to the Golden Spike, which ends the game with a loss. However, players can break alliances with each other and try to win the game on their own. For concept and theme, it was one of the best games I saw at the convention, up there with Rock Hard 1977, but I didn’t get enough of a sense of what actual game play in Burn the Fort would be like to judge it fully.

Inside Up: Terminus is a tight action management & route-building game with points coming primarily from your public and private objectives; it’s a heavier title and takes two hours-plus, with up to five players.

Keymaster: Parks: Roll and Hike is the third game in their extremely popular Parks series, along with the shorter, small-box version Trails. This roll-and-write game contains six national parks, each with a unique rule tweak or two, and has players taking actions based on dice rolls, where opposing players also get a secondary action based on what the active player chooses. It was available to buy at Gen Con and is due out to retail in September.

Harvest is a remake of a game of the same name published by Tasty Minstrel and is a sort of Agricola Lite, without the pressure of feeding your family every few rounds that makes Agricola a little too stressful for some folks. It’s a farming game with card-drafting and worker placement as you move to different actions, ranging from collecting resources to clearing land and putting up buildings to increase your powers. It sold out at the convention, including a deluxe edition, and is out at retail now.

KOSMOS: The poker-themed small-box game The Gang was one of the biggest hits at the convention, as it combines Texas Hold ‘Em (the game, not the song) with a cooperative game like The Crew. Players bid as a prediction of how good their hand will be at the end of the round; if all players bid correctly, the team wins that round and gets to open one of the bank vaults they’re trying to crack.

Last Night: Panda Royale is a dice-drafting roll-and-write game for two to 10 people where each die color has a different power or function. You start with one die in round one and gain one die in each round, playing through ten rounds before the game is done.

Matagot: Kyoto no Neko (“The Cat in Kyoto”) was certainly one of the cutest games I saw at the convention, as you play as a kitten in the city of Kyoto, trying to grow through encounters as you move around the city board. It’s pretty light and plays in 30-40 minutes, with great cartoon art and a strong table presence. Movement is determined by dice rolls and the setup is variable, so the items and people you meet will vary from game to game.

Manhattan Project: War Machine is a tight dice-rolling engine builder with a big table presence but just a five-page rulebook. You don’t have a ton of turns in the game, but you gain something on almost every opponent’s turn as a secondary effect of the actions they choose. You play as a country trying not just to build an atomic weapon, but trying to build up your military to become the world’s strongest power. It’s in the same universe as the 2012 game The Manhattan Project but is otherwise unrelated.

Galactic Renaissance is also a big table hog, this one from Christian Martinez, the designer of Inis. That game was all about controlling areas on the board through conflict, but Galactic Renaissance is an area control game with zero conflict. You send your emissaries out from your home planet to establish links and gain influence from other planets across the galaxy, building your deck as you go, trying to get to 20 victory points via cards in your deck and public objectives … but to win, you need 30 victory points. The twist here is that you must get 10+ points on a single turn to go from 20 to 30 or more to win the game, so you have to plan ahead and build your deck to create the opportunity for a big play.

The physical version of the digital card game Slay the Spire was a big hit for Matagot, although I’m confused at how a single-player, $10 deckbuilding app ended up in a gigantic box that plays up to 4.

Mighty Boards: Rebirth is an upcoming tile-laying game from Reiner Knizia, with a lot drawn from what I consider the best game of his 400+ published titles, Samurai. It’s set in Scotland and has simple area control mechanics, with bonuses in certain areas of the map. It plays in under an hour and lacks the extreme competitiveness of Samurai, which is out of print anyway. (Someone needs to bring that game back.)

Mindclash: This Hungarian publisher is best known for its heavy, 2-3 hour Euro games, but they’re releasing a lighter two-player game later this year called Ironwood, a card-driven and highly asymmetric game. It’s played out on a board where the two players have very different goals and will engage in combat to try to occupy certain spaces or drive their opponents out. It gives off a bit of a Root “duel” vibe, between the setting and the asymmetry, without Root’s economic/objective cards component.

They’ve also got another heavier title in Septima, a game of simultaneous card play where players are covens of witches trying to gather ingredients for potions to heal villagers—but there are witch hunters about, and if you’re too bold you may attract their attention. It’s lighter than the typical Mindclash release, but still has a 50-100 minute play time.

Mindware: Ziggurat is a retheme and update to the great kids’ cooperative game Mole Rats in Space, which itself was designer Matt Leacock’s spinoff of his Pandemic/Forbidden series of co-op games, just made for kids as young as 6. Ziggurat is similarly accessible, but has an all-new theme (you’re explorers trying to reach the top of the ziggurat and avoid the fire spirits) and now has a six-part campaign that also introduces legacy games to a younger or just less experienced audience. The first game plays exactly like Mole Rats in Space did, while each subsequent game adds new rules tweaks or other elements. I dug Mole Rats in Space, but the components and art here are a huge step up.

Mr. B: Lords of Baseball certainly has a great theme, at least from my perspective, as you play as the owner of one of the original eight franchises in the National League in 1901, rolling through 3, 5, or 7 seasons where the focus is on the economic aspects of the game rather than the play on the field. You can upgrade your stadium, hire a better manager, or build up your farm system to try to make your team more profitable. It’s a heavy box and takes two-plus hours for a full campaign. No word on whether the game’s commissioner even likes baseball.

Moose Games: In Wild Flowers, players build a community garden by playing one to three flower tiles per turn, occasionally adding bees for scoring. It’s very light and plays more like one you’d save for your kids than for game night. It hasn’t been released yet.

North Star: Sacred Valley is a tile-laying game of terrace farming, set in Peru before colonization, with a terraced board that rewards players as they move up. Tiles you place can also help your opponents, and you score primarily by building larger areas of your crops, while also gaining by hiring specialists to help your farm grow. North Star also had Biomos, which I just reviewed here last week; and a preview of Nature, their reimplementation of their hit game Evolution, which makes the game more modular and easier to learn. That’s due out in 2025.

Oink: The Japanese publisher behind Scout and Deep Sea Adventure only had one significant new release I saw, a light tableau-builder called Moving Wild, where you draft cards and try to line them up with animals and habitats in the optimal pattern to form the best national park. As with most Oink games, it comes in a tiny box. The game was previously published as Zuuli in 2022 but I don’t think it saw a North American release.

The Op: Gnome Hollow was one of the biggest hits of the convention, and you could barely get near the Op’s booth on the first two days as people rushed to buy or demo it. It’s a tile-laying game with a slew of ways to score, although the main mechanism is to lay those tiles to create larger mushroom rings on the table that result in greater rewards by allowing you to move a peg from a more valuable space on your player board, unlocking both more points and stronger powers. Completing a ring lets you sell a mushroom at the market, giving you access to treasure cards that you can cash in immediately or use as longer-term objective cards. It’s a medium-light game but there are more rules to learn than the typical game of that level has.

Stalk Exchange is indeed a stock-market game, this time of selling flowers and manipulating the market to help your “hedge fund” gain value. It has a semi-cooperative aspect, as you can work with other players to boost the values of the flowers you own, or you can go rogue and try to undercut the values of the flowers they have by either affecting the price or trapping some on the board so they can’t be harvested. It’s a 2-5 player game that runs about 30 minutes.

Pandasaurus: Courtisans—the spelling of the name will bother me forever—has players competing to make the cards in front of them the most valuable of all sets, while trying to play cards to make opponents’ cards less so. On your turn, you play the three cards in your hand: one to your own play area, one to any opponent’s, and one to the Queen’s Table, above or below it. Once you’ve exhausted the deck, the game ends. For each of the six families (colors), you score one point per card in your area if that family has more cards above the queen’s table than below, and lose one point per card if that family has more cards below than above. There are a few cards with special rules, including Noble cards that play double, Spy cards that are played face-down, and Assassin cards that let you kill a card wherever you play them. I played a five-player game of this that took maybe 20 minutes. Pandasaurus also had a new edition of the 2009 Wolfgang Kramer game Finca and an expansion to last year’s Beacon Patrol.

Paverson: The publishers of Distilled had a new expansion for that game, the cards-only Cask Strength, as well as a demo of their next big release, Luthier, a heavy game where players play as instrument makers somewhere at the height of classical music, using worker placement and hidden bidding to try to build the most valuable instruments or hold the best performances or expand their workshops. It’s on Kickstarter now and due out in 2025.

Pegasus: The publishers of the 2023 Spiel des Jahres winner, Dorf Romantik the Board Game (which I will never not misspell as Dork, sorry), were pushing that title, of course, but did have a very intriguing new title from Michael Kiesling (designer of Azul) called Intarsia. It’s a very abstract game of tile-laying where the tiles nest in four concentric layers, worth more points the more pieces you fit into each of your spaces. You also gain some points from objective cards but the bulk come from how you draft and place those concentric tiles.

Portal Games: Portal had a lighter spinoff of their heavier title Gutenberg called, naturally, Printing Press, a 30-60 minute title where each player has a unique scoring mechanic and player abilities. Players will select and lay tiles, mimicking the types used in an actual printing press, so they can meet the specific demands shown on customer cards. The box also comes with gears to use with the original Gutenberg.

Renegade Games: Renegade’s new releases were mostly reprints and new editions, including Heroscape, RoboRally Transformers, GI Joe: Battle for the Arctic Circle (based on Axis & Allies), Risk 2210 AD, and Nexus Ops. Among their original concepts were two from Shem Phillips, designer of Raiders of North Sea and the whole series of worker-placement games that has followed. Legacy of Yu is a solitaire game with a nonlinear campaign where players try to build up their village to defend it from barbarians while also constructing canals to save the village from an upcoming flood.

The second game from Phillips is a co-design with his frequent collaborator SJ McDonald called Ezra and Nehemiah, a very heavy game of worker placement and resource management set in ancient Persia. I won’t pretend to know more because I saw the game and lifted the very heavy box and was pretty sure it was heavier than what I like to play.

Resonym: Avant Carde is a deckbuilding game that draws (no pun intended) more than a little from UNO, where you’re trying to build the best art gallery, where cards numbered 2 through 7 also have powers while those with higher numbers don’t, making them less useful over the course of play. I also got a little Machi Koro from the way the cards worked.

Rose Gauntlet: Wild Gardens is a big resource-management game on an ornate board with a rondel-like path for selecting your actions. You move around the path to forage for ingredients you can use to cook meals for your guests to score points. It draws a few things from Wingspan, including the fact that you get one fewer action in each round. The board is an explosion of pastel colors, and even after a few minutes I found it hard to look at and to discern what was important on the board from what was background.

Turnip is a small-box bluffing game with some amazing art—I especially loved the Tax Turtle—where you have several ways to try to score just off a hand of a few cards. Each player starts with the same card values but stashes one card to try to score it for the round, then playing other cards face-down and essentially daring someone else to call their bluff.

Roxley Games: Skyrise wins the best-looking game award; it’s a huge update to the 2008 game Metropolys, with a bigger box and a fabulous 3D board representing the floating city on which players will compete for control of various neighborhoods. It’s still an area control game at heart, with the same chain-bidding mechanic as Metropolys and the same scoring for the tallest building in each region, but the board is now modular, the game is played over two eras with an intermediate scoring, and you can’t just end the game early by building your last city. Roxley also had an expansion for their two-player game Radlands, a new mini-deck of cards called Cult of Chrome.

Sit Down! Magic Maze Tower is a new sequel to Sit Down!’s Spiel winner Magic Maze, removing the timer from the original but has the same theme of players trying to work together without speaking to escape a building. It also brings in a fifth player, gets rid of the “do something!” token, and has a series of maps rather than a modular board. It’s due at Essen.

Slugfest Games: Positano will be coming to Kickstarter soon, and Slugfest did it right by placing the demo at a busy corner in the exhibit hall because you couldn’t walk past the prototype without stopping. It depicts the cliffside village, located on the Amalfi Coast of southern Italy, with its colorful, staggered buildings heading up the side of the hill. You’ll score points for your buildings—but only if they have a view of the Mediterranean, so you might want to build something to block other players and steal that view for yourself.

Solis Games: Space Lion is an asymmetric capture-the-flag game (like Battle Line or Riftforce) that plays straight with two or allows for 3-5 players where you duel each of the neighboring players. Each player starts with a unique deck of cards representing their army that can be upgraded as the game progresses, as they might over three locations between them and their opponent(s). It also contains a solo mode.

Starling: Everdell Duo was out for demo only and promises a smaller box with a little more direct interaction in a two-player version that otherwise maintains most of the mechanics of the original. Seasons will be determined by the movement of tokens on the moon and sun tracks, and you still gain workers in each season as in the original Everdell.

Synapses Games: The new edition of the heavy worker-placement economic game Yokohama, previously published in 2016 by the now-defunct Tasty Minstrel Games, looks incredible, with great art and components along with easy-to-read fonts everywhere. (I’m old, so this is now personal.) It sounds like we may see new editions of other games in the Yokohama line as well, including the two-player Duel and the roll-and-write.

Tangerine Games: Nestlings is yet another bird-themed game, with dice placement and resource drafting on a large board with five different placement areas, where you are placing a matching die in each of the areas to put yourself higher in the drafting order to claim whatever resources might be available in that area on that turn. Collecting resources allows you to fill out the “resource ring” track on your board for your points, or to feed your nestlings for smaller but more immediate scores. Both the dice-placement mechanic and the resource-management aspect seemed fiddly to me; I can’t see why committing multiple dice to an area just to move up in the drafting order would be efficient—or fun.

Quartz the Dice Game is based on an out-of-print 2015 game, obviously just called Quartz, that adds dice to the game and reduces the push-your-luck aspect of the original. You’re all playing as dwarves, mining for different colors of gems while hoping to avoid the unstable (black) crystals in the bag, which cost you 3 points apiece at game end, although those give you reroll tokens to use on the dice-rolling part of your turn. Some die rolls let you steal crystals from other players, but you can protect yours by moving them from your mining cart to your treasure chest.

Trick or Treat Games: Trick or Treat has kicked off a line of new editions of out of print games, starting out with the 2015 game Gold West, which I do not remember at all from its original form. It has a clever mancala-like mechanic where you place resources in a ladder on your board, then selecting all resources from one space and dropping one in each space up the ladder as you go, using whatever’s left after you reach the top. Players are all mining around the same lake in northern California where there are gold, silver, and copper deposits, collecting them to be able to build camps or settlements for points—or looting, taking a penalty to still be able to gather resources—and eventually move their trains, fulfill objective cards, or claim some space in the Boomtown, which changes with every play. Future titles in the series include Scoville and At the Gates of Loyang.

Van Ryder: Gateway Island is a very clever conceit for a game—it has 21 scenarios in a small box, and each scenario introduces a new game style or mechanic. At the end of the rules for each of the scenarios there’s a recommendation for another game you might like that incorporates that mechanic. The game first came out in Europe in 2022, but this is its first North American release (and it’s out now).

WizKids: Beyond some of WizKids’ IP titles, at Gen Con they had Trail Story: America (previously announced as Americana), a game about hiking through the American wilderness in the 1930s, gaining points for the encounters you have and writing in your journal about the experiences. It’s a big game in a medium-sized box, listing a 90-120 minute play time. They also showed Tales of the Arthurian Knights, an overhauled version of the 2009 game Tales of the Arabian Nights; it’s a story-driven game with a huge adventure book that drives you through the sprawling narrative, with dice-rolling to determine your success or failure at various challenges. And they demoed the upcoming two-player game Star Trek: Captain’s Chair, with six unique decks representing six captains from the franchise. It’s a longer and heavier game than a lot of IP-based properties.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.