The World on My Table – July ’15 (Gen Con Edition)

The News from Gen Con

Enough about me for a minute. Yeah, I played some games this month, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about Gen Con, the largest gaming convention in the New World. Touted as “the best four days in gaming,” Gen Con opens its doors yearly in Indianapolis, Indiana, to welcome a record-breaking number of attendees from across the globe. Gen Con ’15 saw over 60,000 unique attendees flooding its halls for organized tournaments, casual matches, demo games, new game releases, and dozens of other events. Feeling like you missed out on the action because you couldn’t attend? Don’t worry; neither could I, but I’ve been feverishly collecting all the hot news racing out of Indy over the past week.

While most of the large European publishers try to time their major game releases and announcements with Essen SPIEL (the international game fair held in Essen, Germany, every year in October), there are always new games dropping at Gen Con from North American publishers and some of our friends overseas. Here are a few of this year’s hottest commodities:

I’ve spent the first half of the year raving about Upper Deck Entertainment’s Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game, which released late 2014 and was just about the most perfect tribute to that sci-fi horror series a fan could ask for. It left me hotly anticipating their follow-up, Legendary Encounters: A Predator Deck Building Game. Well, Legendary Encounters: Predator dropped at Gen Con, but even that release was overshadowed by some major announcements about the future of the series. Browncoats, we’ve got official confirmation that the next game in the series will be Legendary Encounters: Firefly…and yes, it should still be fully compatible with the Alien and Predator-flavored versions, although I can’t even begin to fathom what that means. Dutch and Ripley fighting Reavers? Xenomorphs popping up in the middle of The Train Job?

Even more exciting (and unexpected) was the announcement of Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, which looks like it will use the semi-cooperative game engine from the company’s Marvel Legendary series rather than the fully co-op Legendary Encounters engine, although it should still allow for some degree of vintage Kurt Russell/Summer Glau mashup. Finally, Upper Deck released their newest superheroic card game, the Vs. System, a non-collectible revision of their earlier Vs. CCG. While the intro Vs. System set focuses on Marvel properties, the company hopes to bring in the full range of opponents implied by the game’s title–at the very least, you should be able to go Avengers vs. Justice League at some point in the future.

IELLO, the French publisher that brought you King of Tokyo from designer Richard Garfield, teased a new collaboration with the legendary Magic creator. This one’s called Bunny Clan, a sort of long-eared take on Game of Thrones. We don’t have much to go on aside from the teased card art, but that at least is colorful and lively. The vibe is most comparable to that found in many titles published by IELLO’s co-patriot Libellud, such as Seasons, Dixit and Mysterium.

IELLO also unveiled more details about their upcoming cooperative deck-building game Big Book of Madness, in which a group of naughty apprentice magicians has accidentally unleashed the terrifying creatures trapped in an ancient book and must quickly master the spells required to defeat them. This one’s another charmer, with art from the legendary Naïade (Seasons, Tokaido, Lords of Xidit) and tiny lectern to house the deck of enemy cards (which include the titular book’s binding into their card art).

Speaking of Libellud, their English-language release of Mysterium, previously known as Tajemnicze Domostwo, was one of the major releases of the show. In Mysterium, a group of mediums have gathered at a creepy old house in Scotland to decipher ghostly visions and solve a murder that occurred in the house’s walls. One player, taking the role of the ghost, must get the other players (the mediums) to correctly surmise the suspects, locations and potential murder weapons important to the case, and then have them discover the true culprit before the seventh hour is through. Although all the players are on the same team, communication is seriously hampered: the ghost can only communicate by handing the other players cards depicting vague, surreal imagery, hoping they will notice the connection between the card and the intended clue, with all-new artwork being one of the most striking changes present in this version of the game.

Two of the old standbys in the American games market, Fantasy Flight Games and Flying Frog Productions, both had plenty of plastic and chrome on display. Fantasy Flight brought in fleets of Star Destroyers and other weapons of mass destruction for their Star Wars: Armada fleet-scale tactical miniatures game. They also made a splash by announcing a large-box expansion, Return to Hoth, for their campaign/skirmish game in the Star Wars universe, Imperial Assault, to be released later this year. Flying Frog countered with a limited release of Caverns of Cynder, the newest expansion for their “Weird West” dungeon-crawling adventure game Shadows of Brimstone, as well as a bonanza of mini-expansions and a standalone expansion for their Colonial America-era Gothic horror deck-building card game, appropriately named Dark Gothic: Colonial Horror.

The biggest game releases of the convention, however, were from European publishers. Aside from Mysterium, two of the hottest new releases were Rattle, Battle, Grab the Loot from Portal Games and Codenames from Czech Games Edition, from designers Ignacy Trzewiczek and Vlaada Chvátil, respectively. These game design superstars of the post-Communist world have each built their fame on combining smart, convention-breaking design with a strong sense of fun, as evidenced by the games under question. Rattle, Battle is a pirate-themed game that re-invents dice rolling: after throwing the dice into the lid of the game box (“Rattle”), they become pieces in a tactical naval battle where their relative positions and their values matter (“Battle”). The spoils of these battles are then spent in ports to upgrade your ships for the next round.

In Codenames, the players split into two rival factions of spies all gathered around a grid of 25 random words, representing other agents whose allegiances are known only to the two team leaders. The goal of each team is to correctly identify all codenames belonging to their own faction based on the clues given by their team leader, clues that can only take the form of a single word and a single letter. Meanwhile, one codename is the Assassin–if any player incorrectly identifies that word as belonging to their faction, their entire team instantly loses. Generating a huge buzz already, this promises to become a party game staple.

One surprising game at Gen Con was The Grizzled, originally published in French as Les Poilus by a small publisher, now available in English via the incongruous intervention of Cool Mini or Not (a Kickstarter-centric publisher known for games like Zombicide and Super Dungeon Explore). A huge departure in tone and subject matter, The Grizzled is a sensitive and artistic take on the life of a common soldier in the trenches of World War II. Rounding out the list of big releases was Discoveries, a dice game depicting the Lewis & Clark expedition’s contributions to the study of American flora and fauna.

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