The Basics of the GenCon Events Catalog

Let’s start really easily with the filters and what you need to know.

• Event Type: The type of event that you might want to play. The big ones are RPGs and Board Games. There are events like TCG’s, Seminars (Panels) and other events. But the big two people come for are RPGs and Board Games.
• Game System: What type of game are you playing. Might seem redundant, but if you want to track down a specific game, say Blood on the Clocktower, you can do that through this. So it simplifies some filtering.
• Day: Which day is it on?
• Start Time: When does it start?
• Company/Group: What company is running it. It’s a great way to say, I want to find anything that company X is doing because I’ll be interested in one of their games. I don’t care which one or when it is. So filter by that.

And there are a few other things that matter a bit later.  Has it sold out or already happened, doesn’t matter now, or when you sign up for events. The system will tell you that. The age let’s you know if there are age restrictions. And the level of experience, well, how much you need to know. Most of the RPG and Board Gaming events will be none because they want to teach you the game and get you to buy it.

The Events Themselves

So what do you need to know about the events themselves? I can go into this in detail, but most of the GenCon event stuff is self explanatory. But let’s talk about a few things of note on them.

• Tickets Available: How many people will be at this event. It is going to determine how likely you are to get into it. The more tickets, the easier it is to get into. The fewer, you get the drift. Also important to note if you want to get all the tickets or multiple tickets because you’re in a group.
• Get Tickets For: The big part of the GenCon event catalog is picking what events you want to go to before the events are live. If you are interested, select one of these, if you have a group, pick all or one additional depending on how many you need.
• Only Get Selected Tickets If All Are Available: It does what it says, but it’s important to see it’s there. Again, if you want to play with your friends, you don’t want to sign up only to get one ticket instead of all of them or two of them.
• Cost: How much does it cost? There are free events, but most of them cost. Why, the companies want to pay their people some and this is one way to offset it. Plus they are paying GenCon some as well
• Ticket Method: Another one that is important to note. If it’s electronic, easy, you just show up with your badge and they scan it. So the thing you need to get into the convention is what you need. But it might be paper tickets. And those you either grab at will call ahead of time or have shipped to you. I recommend the latter, skip the lines when you can.
• Duration: Another easy one, how long is this event going to take?
• GM(s): This is the person who is going to run the game. They use GM (Game Master) which is normally an RPG term, but it’s just the instructor/teacher for the game.

Wish List

Finally we have the Wishlist. As you add tickets for yourself and others it’ll allow you to order a wishlist. And I’m not toing to say that there are great tips and tricks for this. And I will get to how you process this in a minute, but order them how you want. It’s meant to be the one that you most want to make it to at number one. I use it slightly differently. Sometimes the GenCon event I’m most excited for has two hundred or five hundred tickets. I don’t need to put that one as high.

Instead, I use it to rank the ones that I’m most interested in with that lower 4-5 person count higher. It theoretically let’s those process first because of how GenCon processes everything, I say theoretically. So let’s get to that day of signing up for events.

How to Actually Get Events at GenCon

GenCon’s main system is on the day that events go live, May 19^th in 2024, it is going to kick off at 11 AM Central time (noon Eastern). You want to be on right then and you want to be on your wishlist page. When the time comes the page will change and you’ll be able to process your wishlist. Keep in mind, mobile, it’s okay for using the site. But that’s only so relevant.

Your wishlist is going to drop into a queue. I clicked within a minute of the go live time last year and was about 5,000 down on the list, maybe slightly further. So events get processed through as you go through the queue. This is why I say the wishlist only kind of matters. I’m assuming that their backend system processes X number of wishlists at a time. So if they go through ten at a time, which seems possible, your wishlist is going to be ranked and compared against the others to make it more likely that you get yours. I want to explain how they do this programmatically, but that’s not going to be useful.

So the processing will take a while. But you don’t need to babysit it the whole time. Check every 15 to 20 minutes to see where you are in the queue. And once your list processes you can go through and update any that you might not want anymore. And you can buy all your events at once. Then after the fact if you want to add more or you missed out on something you really want but there is another event for it, you can add those in and process them separately. Only that first four hours, maybe, is it going to be that hectic and slow a queue.

Additional Tips and Tricks for GenCon Events

Overbook when you create your wishlist. I don’t do great at this, but add in multiple times for a game that you might want. And at the same times that you have other things. If you’re planning on an event at that time,  make sure you have an event at that time.

The other one is book early events. A lot of people get together at GenCon and stay up until midnight or two in the morning every day. It’s fun to do, it’s fun to play games late into the night. It’s fun to have a beer or two while you do so. But I don’t do that every night, maybe one time. Two reasons, it helps avoid con crud, but also it lets me schedule early events. Events that start at 8 AM or 9 AM, less likely to have people sign up for them because it’s early. And especially on the first day when the dealer hall opens, sign up for events starting around then.

Buy generic tickets. This is something that I haven’t really done. But it’s possible to buy generic tickets. The minimum amount is $2 for an event (unless it’s free). So if you want to play a game and it’s at an odd time, say that 8 AM or Sunday, but you  miss out on tickets, you can show up with generic tickets. If someone doesn’t show up, you can get into those events. Now it’s a risk, you might be sitting there with a generic ticket that you can’t use at the end. And you need to plan on enough, so a $8 event, 4 $2 generic tickets, to do the event.

There is playtesting and new things. Sometimes they are trickier to find, but if you know a company is coming out with a new game, search that company or game. You can sometimes get in on playtesting a game which is fun as well.

Finally, you can add friends. The good thing about adding friends is that you can buy for your friends then. This allows you to coordinate events better. If you both or all in your group want to do all the same events, add them to both persons lists. Then process, and whomever is higher in the queue is going to get more of them and sign up there. Just don’t sign up with the other persons.

Final Thoughts

You won’t get everything that you want. But the good thing about GenCon is that there are several thousand events and more will be added. So there are always going to be interesting things to play. And if you’re like me, you don’t overload with events. I generally pick early and later events. Then I’ll wander the dealer hall during the day demoing as many games as I can. But that’s what works for me. You might want more consistent events.

Hopefully this is interesting and useful for  you as you attend GenCon and start browsing the event catalog.

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Plus then Village Green with some solo play. A game that I would probably give an 8 as a multi-player game but a 6 as a solo game. At least with how the solo is in the book. I mess around with it a little to see if I can make it more interesting for myself. And I think I found a way that I like to play it better.

The Game – Village Green

Village Green is a fairly interesting little game where you are competing for the best green between a number of villages. Think about the subplot to Hot Fuzz almost. But instead of everything being done for the greater good, you are picking cards to fill out your green. They might have trees, a pond, a gazebo, and generally they have flowers as well.

With those, you create a 3×3 grid. And on the edge of that, both for columns and rows, you add in cards to score for that column or row. It makes creating your green a very interesting puzzle. You need to think about scoring in both directions, kind of like Criss Cross. And while Village Green feels like it should be more interesting solo, I found that it was actually less.

GenCon Events

I think it is an interesting topic to talk about. And in particular, I like to talk to new attendees about going there. One of the best pieces of advice that I received when I went was not to over schedule. And I didn’t, but I also wish that I scheduled less than I did. I think we average two things each day, maybe one day with three. So 9 or so total events, and it was great to do them, but by the end, so maybe it was 10, we skipped one.

Why, because it’s so much fun to do the games that are on the floor. Some of them might be prototypes, a lot of them are games that you can buy at GenCon from companies. It’s more interesting than picking out specific events with a few exceptions.

This year, I looked for events that are going to be unique. If it is playing a game I can likely play elsewhere, I am not going to do it. So instead, I looked for the kick-off events for a few games, Sagrada Legacy and The Batman: Everybody Lies. Plus then playtesting for prototype games. Now, those prototype games might not be great, but it is something I can’t play elsewhere.

Maybe I’ll find that I want to schedule more events while I’m there. And by then it’ll be too late, but I suspect the wandering around the dealer hall, hitting up a ton of different dealers to get demos of games, that is going to be more interesting than finding a 3 hour RPG to play some morning.

The Drink

Just an old fashioned again. This time with Blackstrap bitters. They have kind of a molasses and spice flavor to them. It’s nice, a little bit sweet as well. Definitely a good one to drink.

Upcoming Streams

Well, I am going to be streaming on Wednesday. I am not sure what I want to play for sure. It might be some more Paper Dungeons roll and write and I can continue through the story on stream. I do want get to a bigger game, I just haven’t learned another yet. I could maybe play through a scenario of Perdition’s Mouth, but it is a very large game on the table so you wouldn’t able to see everything.

Maybe I’ll pull out Under Falling Skies, we’ll have to see. But that could be a good, lighter, campaign to get to the table quickly here, while I take the time to learn a bigger game. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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The first game that we played was a mid-Alpha version of a game called Roll Player Adventures. If you’re not as familiar what Alpha or Beta testing is, Alpha testing is when you’re testing out a concept and still fine tuning it. You’re seeing what works, what might not work, and taking notes on that, Beta testing is more focused. You have a professional or nearly professional looking copy of the game around and you can play through it, you’re just looking for those few flaws that are left, but the mechanics are generally locked in. This was the earlier stage, and there were things that were just pieces of paper, or the story book was just pages in a binder. With that said, this was one of the highlights of the con. The game play was already a ton of fun, the story in the game was good, and the table was great. Role Player Adventures is going to be a cooperative campaign game where you are winning the favor of different groups, fighting different monsters, and reading story as you go. The game it’s based off of Roll Player, is about rolling up your D&D character and manipulating the dice to get the best character possible, and this one allows you to use a character in a game for a real adventure. We had a good group, so it was a bunch of silly fun, and the story was well crafted so that it was serious, but also lighthearted at points.

The following day, we played an RPG to start our day. The game was run in the Savage Worlds system and themed around The Dresden Files. If you’ve read many posts, you know that I love The Dresden Files. It was an interesting game to play, and I definitely had a fun time playing it. However, I didn’t love the system that it was run in. Savage Worlds is meant to be that kind of setting agnostic system, where you can play a Dresden Files game in it, but you could also play a World War II game in it with no magic, or it could be a Sci-Fi game set on a far off planet. I don’t think that is a major flaw with the system, but as a person who played a magic user, I had spells that were all flavored with ice. The spell cards though, were just like “blast”, so my “ice blast” did “blast” damage, and it could have just as easily been fire damage, force damage, any sort of damage. It made the system too devoid of that flavor that would make a character seem unique. The game itself was fun, but I will knocked the GM for the game a little bit. We had the BBEG for the one-shot on the ropes in the first battle. Instead of just having this generic BBEG bite it, he had them escape after a lot of unlikely things happening. It would have been better to let us win, and then have the BBEG’s cousin show up later in the final battle to get his revenge. Overall, I had a good time, but it was lacking.

To end the day, we played Village Attacks. Village Attacks is a tower defense game. But as compared defense game where you are the heroes fending off wave after wave of bad guys. In this game, you’re the bad guys, who are fending off wave after wave of villager who is coming to your house with torches and pitchforks. We had a couple of different experiences with the game, but we both ended up liking it. I had a fun group to play with, and we bum rushed the objective of the game. The game played pretty fast, probably an hour and a half after being taught the game or a little bit less. And you feel the tension of the game as more and more bad guys are placed onto the board. The other cool thing was that we got the scenario, and the full set of scenarios that we played as well as some character sheets for moving some guys from another game into our game.The downside was that my friend got stuck in a game with a person who had slept 1 hour thus far for GenCon, didn’t pay attention to the rules, and then left for ten minutes to go get pop and didn’t actually help the team in this fully cooperative game. So that was frustrating, but my friend still liked the game a lot, and that led to the other downside, it’s hard to find the game right now. And both of us want it, because it’s a very fun game.

The Saturday started out with the North American Championships for Ice Cool. And I love the game already, I learned a little bit from watching other players who were “better” than I was, and I made it to the semi finals. I won’t go into this too much, because I’ve already written about this game. Needless to say, it’s a game that I love, and playing in the tourney was a lot of fun. I might have been able to make it to the finals, but ran into a bunch of bad luck in the first round, which was just kind of funny. There were a few people who took this silly penguin flicking game too seriously, but overall, people where there to have fun.

Our other Saturday event wasn’t actually a game. We went to Hobbit Drinking Songs with Marc Gunn. That was just a funny old time, and even though he had some issues with his amp, the room was small enough that he was able to just play without the amplification and everyone could hear it. He’s a good performer and he has a lot of fun songs to sing. Also learned about ALEP (A Long Expected Party), Hobbit/Lord of the Rings event that happens in Kentucky. Seems like a small educational event and celebration of Tolkien’s works.

Sunday we were supposed to have two games. We actually skipped the first one, the Harry Potter miniatures game because the game just costs too much, so it wasn’t really worth the demo. We should have known because it was a miniatures game. But we did play in a win a box game with the new expansion for Marvel Legendary. That was a fun time, and I really liked the expansion. The most interesting part was that we were the only two people there, so that meant that one of us was winning the expansion, and with having spent $8 total between the two tickets, my friend who has collected most of Marvel Legendary, was able to get the game at a very discounted price. The expansion itself was a lot of fun, and we flew through the game, but just ran out of time at the end before dealing the killing blow, not because we were losing, but because we got started a bit late while seeing if other people would show up.

Overall, I think we planned out basically the perfect amount of gaming and events. With the Harry Potter Miniatures Game, I think that it would have been fun, but our Sunday would have felt a bit full. When we go back in the future, I think we’ll want to keep ourselves as busy as we were this time. A good balance of having things to do, but as you’ll learn in the next article, there is a lot to see and do on the dealer floor.

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There are two big things to note that we did, since there were two of us, when when we went through and picked events, we always selected, a ticket for yourself and one other person, and only process it if you can get both tickets. This meant that we would get into events with the other person always, and since it was our first year, it’s a good way to get a feel for what is going on and both of us will be able to keep track of it better. In future years, I could see us branching off and doing our own thing, or if we get more people to join us, then we might also see more splitting up on events.

The other thing we did was we had both of us grab the events in our wishlist, so that when the moment came to process everything, we could both hit submit for processing and whomever got onto the wait list higher would make the purchase. Turns out that the other person I’m going with was able to get in about 1000 people higher on the list than I was.

Even with that, there were several events that were sold out that we were interested in. Out of the fourteen or fifteen we had our our lists, by the time we were at the top of the queue, we were down to nine that we could get into. Once the wishlist is processed, we didn’t have to worry about our spots, so we decided to drop two and got down to seven events that we’re doing.

Overall, it ended up costing us $46 for those few events. GenCon charges for the events that you get into because, otherwise, you’d end up with people signing up for a ton of things and then just skipping out on them or doubling up on things and picking whatever one they felt like doing more. While I don’t love dishing out extra cash when I did already for the con itself, I get why, with 60,000 people that you’d need to do that.

So what are we doing?

Thursday: 3 PM
Role Player Adventures – Role Player is an interesting game where you are rolling up a D&D character, basically, and using abilities to manipulate your stats. The original game to me felt like half a game, but with a name like Adventures, I’m assuming we’re going to use our characters for something, such as adventuring, instead of just rolling them up. This one is also interesting because it’s a prototype of a game that they’ll be coming out with.

Friday:
9 AM
Savage Dresden – Our one RPG on the list, Savage World is the system that we’re going to be playing in, and I don’t know anything about that system. But the world we’re playing in, the the world of Dresden Files, and if you can’t tell, I really like the Dresden Files series, so I’m excited to play an RPG in that setting, though it won’t actually have Dresden in it.
6 PM
Village Attacks – Our most expensive game on the schedule. But this was the game that I really wanted to get into, and the other person I’m going with was excited with as well. And you do get something out of it more than just playing a game. You get a scenario with it, now you obviously need to own the game, which I don’t. But Village Attacks seems fun, because you’re playing the monsters dealing with the Villagers who are coming after you with pitchforks and torches while you just try and live your best life.

Saturday
9 AM
Ice Cool North American Championships – This one is just a bit silly, it’s the penguin flicking game that I really like. However, one that I’m just okay at. But they have a North American Championship there with a chance to go to the World Championship in Latvia. It should be a silly time, I don’t expect to do all that well, but I’ll put some effort into training, plus I can say that I competed North American Championship.
8 PM
Hobbit Drinking with Marc Gunn – I don’t know much about Marc Gunn, but apparently he does nerdy drinking songs. That should be fairly entertaining event to just sit back and enjoy. A good laid back thing after an a morning of competing at penguin flicking.

Sunday
10 AM
Harry Potter Miniatures Game – I know nothing about this game, other than that it’s a Harry Potter game. It seemed like something interesting to checkout on Sunday when things will be slowing down as a lot of people will be leaving early. We’re actually staying around that whole day, so that should be fun. All I know is that I want to be Neville.
2 PM
Marvel Legendary – Now, you know I’m not a huge fan of this game, but it’s a play and win event. So you have a chance to come out of it with something, and the other person is a huge Marvel Legendary fan. I’ve grown to like it a bit more, but it’ll be nice to not have to learn how to play a new game again.

That’s my GenCon schedule. GenCon also does one nice thing, and that’s that you can buy generic tickets. Using the generic tickets, you can get into an event you didn’t sign up for, if there is still room. So I got $6 worth of those, they come in as $2 tickets, so if an event costs $4, I’d need to use 2 tickets. But I feel like that’s a pretty nice schedule for GenCon and I’m really excited for it.

Next article on GenCon will talk about different places or things that I’m thinking about doing around the Con, since we won’t want to be there all the time, or only eat the Con food.

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