We've had a chance to compile the wish list data for this year, and that means we can take a look at it to see what games are in the highest demand, for a number of reasons.

It also means that if you would like to get the wish list data for your own events, so you can go into more detail in your own planning, just email [email protected] and ask (and remember to include your group name). If you aren't the event organizer for your company or group, ask them to do it - we won't be sending data to individual GMs or anything.

First, the same caveats and instructions from last year still apply:



First, remember this list does not reflect ​overall demand, only high unserved demand - which is expressed here as the number of tickets folks had in their wish lists beyond the number of tickets that could actually be sold, based on submitted schedules. So Pathfinder doesn't show up in this list, for example - that doesn't mean it wasn't hugely popular, just that the schedule Paizo offered had enough space for most of the people who wanted to play (at least overall, I'm not digging into specific events here, but general demand). It's also wort noting this only measures the kinds of events folks put in their wish lists. Many TCGs and miniature games (and most board games, for that matter) don't have as strong a culture of pre-registering. Many players just show up with generics. Late events obviously won't be in this list, either, nor do games that had no submissions this year, for whatever reason (even if they were on last year's list). This is not provided to debate the merits of different games or editions, but instead to help GMs figure out what games they might want to run in response to what players are trying to get into. Second, don't sweat the details too much. There are lots of variables and some strange artifacts can pop up in how events are listed or attendees sign up for them. Friends might double-up and put the same tickets on both their wish lists. Many people will put every session they can find on their list, even if they really only want a single ticket. So the numbers I have aren't exact and don't read too much into these rough rankings. They're not exact, but they are a useful general gauge of what games seem to have a lot of unserved interested behind them. I'm going to break games up by type this year. Might make it a bit easier to parse quickly. If anyone has any questions or would like other data, let me know and I'll see what I can sort out.

The distribution of high unserved demand events among different event types speaks to player habits and the challenges in scaling some events to meet apparent demand. If anyone is thinking about running some events at Gen Con and not sure what to do or if you're a gaming group/company looking to expand, hopefully this can be a bit of a guide: pick something from this list and you shouldn't have much troubling finding players.

What is the point of looking at this list? Well...

With that taken care of, here are the high-demand games for this year:

RPGs





Call of Cthulhu (Mostly 7th edition, but some 5th & 6th. Interest was also concentrated at established groups, but just about everyone had more demand than could be accommodated)



Dungeons & Dragons (Almost entirely 5th, but with some 3.5 or Advanced 1st/2nd edition. This isn't just a hunger for official events, either - independent GMs, as a group, were the second highest overall demand)



Starfinder



Star Wars (Specifically the new Fantasy Flight editions, all three flavors)



Savage Worlds (General, but also some focused interest



Shadowrun 5th edition



Dungeon Crawl Classics



Numenera



Paranoia (2nd & 25th Ann. edition, mainly)



Dread



Dresden Files (Both normal Fate & Fate Accelerated)



Trail of Cthulhu



Delta Green



Fate (Pretty much just Core)



The Strange



Shadows of Esteren



Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition



Mouse Guard



7th Sea 2nd edition



Night's Black Agents



Cypher System



Ubiquity



Mutant Crawl Classics



Kobolds Ate My Baby!



Star Trek Adventures



Conan: An Age Undreamed Of



Doctor Who



Lamentations of the Flame Princess



Traveller 2nd edition



13th Age



Unknown Armies 3rd edition



Hero System



Dungeon World



Mistborn



The One Ring



Urban Shadows



Middle-Earth Role Playing



Masks: A New Generation



Firefly



Clockwork: Dominion



QAGS



Dragon AGE



Champions





Eclipse Phase 2nd edition



Sentinel Comics



Torg Eternity



Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition



I pulled out the RPGs that were in high demand that I don't believe will be out in time for Gen Con, so it will be hard for general attendees to run more events for them:"Homebrew" would have been in the list last year, carried entirely by one Harry Potter event, but this year without that it had enough capacity for the initial demand (as a category).

Board & Card Games





Scythe



Terraforming Mars



Dark Souls: The Board Game



Dead of Winter



Arkham Horror The Card Game



Captain Sonar



First Martians



Zombicide: Black Plague



Exit: The Game - The Secret of the Premiere



Dinosaur Island



The Captain is Dead



Vast: The Mysterious Manor



Sword & Sorcery



Lord of the Rings The Card Game



The Godfather: Corleone's Empire



Blood Rage



Betrayal at House on the Hill



Pandemic



Doctor Who: Time of the Daleks



Alien Artifacts



Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle



Roll Player



Birth of Europe



Great Western Trail



Star Trek: Ascendancy



Battlestar Galactica



I removed a couple games from this list (RoboRally, King of Tokyo, Catan) because their demand was driven by very special large-scale events.

Some high-demand games that I don't think will be out before Gen Con (but correct me if I'm wrong - and I'm sure I missed plenty of other premiers/new releases) included:





Legend of the Five Rings LCG



Fallout the Tabletop Game



Eyrewood Tales: Thornwatch



For other event types, things get more chaotic and individual. For LARPs, unserved demand was for specific custom games or for home-brew games that are driven by the gaming group's reputation and/or the IP.

Historical minis (HMN) did not have individual games systems at the same scale, but Bolt Action and Blood & Plunder were pretty close. Non-historical minis (NMN) were mostly spread out as well, but A Song of Ice & Fire had a lot of demand, with Imperial Assault and Space Hulk also almost making the same threshold I set for RPG, BGM, & CGM.

