INDIANAPOLIS—If it's early August, you can count on one thing: we're gonna be in downtown Indianapolis with 70,000 other board gamers, forgoing sleep, food, and general wellbeing to play a truly ridiculous amount of new tabletop games at Gen Con, the self-described "Best Four Days in Gaming." Gen Con is America's largest and longest-running tabletop games convention. 2019 was the con's 52nd year, bringing with it a record-breaking 538 exhibiting companies and a truly impressive 19,600 ticketed events. (If you want some sense of what that cardboard chaos looks like, our Gen Con 2019 image gallery is a good place to start.)

And then there are the games—more games than you could play in a lifetime, all being released at once. We sifted through the chaos to bring you a big list of games we think you should be paying attention to going into the last few months of the year. With such a massive amount of games on offer, we couldn't get to everything we wanted to—your correspondent is just one man!—but we think our list has something for everyone on it. Roleplaying games were sadly outside the scope of this article, so be sure to check out our coverage of perhaps the most anticipated roleplaying title at this year's Gen Con: Pathfinder. Developer Paizo debuted the game's second edition at this year's conference more than a decade after the beloved RPG debuted.

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But back to our list—these games should largely be available soon. If a specific title catches your eye, make sure to check in with your favorite local or online game store in the near future for info on when they'll be getting it in. And if you're really one to plan out your play in advance, it's never too early to consider it: next year's Gen Con returns to Indy and runs July 30 through August 2, 2020.

Parks

Henry Audubon, Keymaster Games, 1-5 players, 40-60 min, age 9+

If Parks were a bad game, I’d still be tempted to recommend it based solely on the strength of its stunning presentation. Thankfully there's no need for such silliness; the underlying game is also great.

Parks is a game about US national parks that's a little like Tokaido, in that players all move along a path to pick up various rewards from each spot. But whereas Tokaido is a set-collection game, Parks focuses on resource management. The resources here are sunlight, water, trees, mountains, and wildlife—or, I guess, the memories of those things that you collect as you go along your travels. When you reach the end of the trail, you can “visit” a national park by trading in the correct resources and securing a beautifully illustrated card of the park (the thematic underpinnings get a little shaky here, but just go with it). You can also take pictures, fill your canteen up with water to get special actions, and pick up gear cards that give you ongoing bonuses.


The game features gorgeous art from the Fifty-Nine Park Print Series, and the rest of the components are equally handsome. An all-around lovely little game that could easily serve as a gateway game for newbies or a chill night-ender for seasoned gamers.

Pandemic: Rapid Response

Kane Klenko, Z-Man Games, 2-4 players, 20 minutes, age 8+

Do you love the panicked feeling you get trying to save humanity from a world-ending epidemic in Pandemic but wish the game was more hectic? Friend, have I got a game for you.

Pandemic: Rapid Response, a new Target-exclusive game, puts a “real-time” spin on the co-op classic, trading Pandemic’s globetrotting card collecting for frantic, desperate dice rolling. Players in Rapid Response are an elite team of scientists, doctors, and specialists traveling around the world in a specialized plane while cooking up cures to the diseases popping up in the world's major cities. Each turn, players roll six dice—and can then reroll them Yahtzee-style—in order to generate resources that are used in the cures. Resources are then moved to the plane's cargo hold and are ready to be dropped off in the cities around the board containing outbreak cards (assuming you can roll enough plane icons to get you to the desired location). Watch out, though, as generating resources also causes waste—create too much waste and you lose.


Of course, you're doing all of this under the watchful eye of an always-depleting two-minute sand timer. Every time it runs out, you add an outbreak card and lose a time token. Lose all your time tokens, lose the game. Cure a city to get back a time token; cure all the affected cities to win. Pandemic is a cooperative game that's notorious for its potential for "quarterbacking"—an alpha gamer telling everyone else what to do on their turns—and while that element could still be present here, the game's fast pace makes it less of an issue. If you're ready for a 20-minute panic attack, this is your game.

Black Angel

Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, & Alain Orban, Pearl Games, 60-120 minutes, age 12+

Well, we’ve gone and done it. Humanity’s reckless ravaging of Earth has reached its inevitable conclusion: a spent planet and the end of human habitability. But before we go, the nations of the world have gotten together one last time to load our genetic heritage on an intergalactic frigate and send it on its way to Spes, the planet most likely to sustain life for a new human civilization. Who’s crewing the ship on this long journey? You are, of course, and you’re an AI.

Black Angel is semi-cooperative in the sense that if you and your opponents succumb to the aliens attacking your ship and never make it to new-Earth, things will go badly for you. But every player is competing to prove that he or she is the most worthy AI to head up operations on the new planet (the other AIs will be summarily shut down). There are a ton of interlocking mechanics here; you'll be going on missions, fending off attacking aliens, upgrading your technology, and grabbing end-game scoring opportunities.


The game bears some similarity to a game that two of the designers previously worked on, the well-loved medieval France sim Troyes. But man is Black Angel's theme cooler. The game was one of the most hyped-up of the con, and it's the one I'm most looking forward to exploring in the coming months.

Marvel Champions: The Card Game

Michael Boggs, Nate French, & Caleb Grace, Fantasy Flight Games, 1-4 players

When I first heard that Fantasy Flight Games was releasing a new Marvel living card game (a somewhat wallet-friendlier collectible card game), I was instantly bored. But when I heard it was going to be a cooperative game, I knew I had to get a demo in. Co-op CCG-type games are few and far between, and the ones that FFG has released in the past (Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game ) have been generally excellent and a nice change of pace from the countless two-player card battlers choking the market.

Marvel Champions seems to take inspiration from both of those earlier FFG games while injecting some Marvel thematic flair into the mix. The base game—which for the first time in an FFG LCG includes a complete set of cards—comes with five heroes (Spider-Man, Iron Man, She-Hulk, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel) and three villains (Rhino, Klaw, and Ultron). Scenarios pair a villain with a deck of scheme cards, and you and your friends can pick from among the heroes to try to save the world yet again. The villains use their turns to advance their evil schemes and attack the players; the players, of course, use their turns to thwart the schemes and fight back through the usual card-game combo-rific antics. Once per turn, players can flip their character card between hero and alter-ego sides to gain access to different abilities, a cool little thematic and mechanical flourish.

The game looks like it might be a bit lighter than some of the other FFG card games we're used to (understandable, given the broad appeal of the subject matter) but we're hoping it will still be a fun, continuously updated co-op (or solo) romp.

Bargain Quest

Jonathan Ying, Renegade Game Studios, 2-6 players, 30-60 minutes, age 8+

Several games over the past few years have given us a glimpse into the inner lives of RPG shopkeepers, a class of character generally relegated to NPC status. Bargain Quest puts you and your friends in the role of fantasy vendors competing to get the business of various adventurers. You’ll sell the adventurers cards representing weapons, armor, and magical items, with the first pick of customer going to whoever has the most attractive item in their store window.

The heroes then go off to battle monsters; you get a point if your gear has given your hero enough oomph to get the job done and another point if the hero actually survives the battle. If your customer should die in the dungeon… well, there’s always another sucker to take their place. You can bolster your shop with employees and buy upgrades that give you ongoing bonuses.


The game was originally self-published on Kickstarter in 2017, but it’s now reaching wider distribution through Renegade Games. A cute little game with a great theme.

Obscurio

L’Atelier, Libellud, 2-8 players, 40 minutes, age 10+

Many board games can be described as “X game meets Y game,” and that's only occasionally meant as an insult. Obscurio is basically Mysterium meets The Resistance, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Mysterium, itself a mix of Dixit and Clue, sees players cooperatively taking on the role of investigators trying to work out the “who,” “how,” and “where” of a murder. One player plays as a ghost, who tries to communicate to other players through the use of dreamy illustrated cards. Obscurio is kind of like that, but it adds a hidden traitor to the mix. The theme is also different here—you're a team trying to escape a sorcerer's library with the help of a magical grimoire.

One player essentially moderates the game as the Grimoire, and each round he or she tries to match two circular clue cards to a target card, using arrow tokens to point to particular features of the clue cards. Players discuss what they think the Grimoire is trying to tell them, and then everyone closes their eyes. The Grimoire player tells the traitor to open his or her eyes, whereupon they are presented with six target cards (the original target card the Grimoire was working with is not included) and can pick two cards to add to a pool of cards presented to the players in the next phase (the idea is to pick cards that are similar to the things everyone was discussing, so it muddies the waters for the group).

A group of six cards (the real target, the traitor's two picks, and a few random cards) is then presented to the players, who must vote on what they think the true target card is. The traitor can of course cause all kinds of clandestine havoc here. On top of all of that, the good guys will be constantly assailed by "traps" that make things even harder—for instance, a red filter might be placed over one of the clue cards, making it more difficult to see the colors underneath.


This is a genre mashup a ton of people will enjoy.

Detective Club

Oleksandr Nevskiy, Blue Orange Games, 4-8 players, 45 minutes, age 8+

If Obscurio is “Mysterium + The Resistance,” Detective Club is a bit like “Dixit + Spyfall.” Which is to say they’re similar games, but they’re different (and delightful) enough to include both on this list.

Each round, one player chooses two cards from his or her hand and comes up with a secret word that relates in some way to both cards. That player then writes down the secret word in little notebooks to hand out to the other players. The catch? One player—”the conspirator”—gets a blank notebook and doesn’t know the word. All players then play cards from their hands that also relate to the secret word. The conspirator must look at the cards other people are playing and try to play reasonably similar cards, and after everyone has played two cards, the secret word is revealed to everyone. All players must then justify why they picked the cards they did, with the conspirator again having to come up with some quick lies. Players then vote on who they think the conspirator is.


The idea is simple but effective, and it works so well because everyone has plausible deniability—I didn’t have any good cards for this clue! You just need to be able to sell a lie. I’m very excited to pick up a copy; it seems like a great party game that can be played by just about anyone.

Reavers of Midgard

J.B. Howell, Grey Fox Games, 2-4 players, 75-90 minutes

Reavers of Midgard is the sequel to 2015’s Champions of Midgard, a “hybrid” Viking game that combined Eurogamey resource management and worker placement with American-style dice-chucking combat. A lot of people loved Champions, but it leaned a bit too much on luck-driven dice-rolling for my taste; Reavers takes the same general idea but focuses more on heavy strategy, and it has my full attention.

Reavers is a game about Vikings doing Viking stuff through worker placement (put one of your people on a space, get what’s on that space). The game still uses custom engraved dice to drive much of its action, but here the dice act kind of like adjustable resources (though dice chucking is occasionally an option for those who want it). The worker placement spots give bonuses to the first person to take them, but they don’t lock all other players out, always a nice thing to see. Cool multi-use cards and upgradeable player boards round out the package.


There’s a lot of stuff to chew on and plenty of paths to victory, and I’m super-excited about digging into this one further.

Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale

Jordy Adan, Thunderworks Games, 1-100 players, 30-45 minutes, age 10+

“Roll and write” games—games where you roll dice and choose a result to mark down on a scoring sheet—have been all the rage the past few years, and the craze was still in full swing at this year’s Gen Con. We were initially attracted to Cartographers, which is technically a “flip a card and write” game, because it takes place in the universe of Roll Player, a fun puzzle game we’ve recommended in the past. But the new game also puts some cool twists on the formula.

In Cartographers, players take on the role of mapmakers marking down an uncharted land's features for their queen. Each turn, you flip over a card featuring various terrain types and Tetris-like shapes that everyone must draw on their sheet. For instance, one card might require you to draw water terrain and give you two shapes as options. Another card might give you one shape you must use, but with two terrain types as options. The game lifts the criminally underused variable scoring system of Isle of Skye to boost the game’s replayability, giving points out for completing different parameters (one round might score for water squares next to mountains, for example). The occasional "monster ambush" card forces everyone to pass their sheets to their neighbor, who can mark down point-gobbling monsters on the most important squares.


I initially thought that drawing the symbols for the different terrain types would be tedious, but it's not that bad. And at the end of the game, win or lose, you're left with a cool little map as a souvenir.

Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North

Joanna Kijanka and Ignacy Trzewiczek, Portal Games, 1-4 players, 45-90 minutes, age 10+

Imperial Settlers: Roll and Write

Ignacy Trzewiczek, Portal Games, 1-4 players, 30 minutes, age 10+

Prolific game designer Ignacy Trzewiczek has been iterating on his asymmetric card game Imperial Settlers for years now. The idea started life as the post-apocalyptic 51st State, which morphed into the civ-building game Imperial Settlers. He then took another whack at the idea with 51st State: Master Set, and now he’s back with two new games on the Imperial Settlers side. All this ground-retreading might be annoying if the games weren’t so good.

Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North is the main attraction here, and it carries along with it the addicting resource management, engine building, and combo-heavy gameplay of its parent game. But the new game makes some subtle tweaks that change the game's overall flow—and at least from our demo, they seem like good twists. For instance, instead of a production phase that showers you in resources each round, you must activate a "harvest" action on the game's new action wheel. Doing certain actions let you activate other free actions, like installing a new card into your kingdom for free. A new expedition board provides even more actions for you to choose from. Six preconstructed decks for three asymmetric factions come with the base game, ensuring a nice variety of gameplay styles. As in previous games, a dedicated solo mode is also available.


Imperial Settlers: Roll and Write is a small-box game that does exactly what it says on the tin—it brings Imperial Settlers into the massively popular world of roll-and-write games. Again, in a roll-and-write game, you roll some dice, and all players then draft those dice and mark down the results on a score sheet. Here, you're building a civilization by collecting resources and constructing buildings that give you ongoing bonuses. It's a fun little take on Imperial Settlers, and it comes with a robust solo mode that may actually end up being better and more interesting than the multiplayer game.

Imhotep: The Duel

Phil Walker-Harding, Kosmos, 2 players, 30 minutes, age 10+

We loved Imhotep when it was released in 2016, and we weren’t alone—the game received a Spiel des Jahres nomination, though it was ultimately beat out by Codenames (fair enough). You could of course play the game with two players, but as has become custom, every popular game needs a two-player-only revisit. Thankfully, Imhotep: The Duel isn’t a lazy cash-in; there’s some very good gameplay here.

Players take turns placing one of their four meeples on a central board with a 3x3 grid of squares on it. The spaces form rows and columns, and each row and column is connected to a boat with three tiles on it. When a row or column is filled with at least two meeples, a player can choose to “ship” it, meaning that the tiles go to players with meeples in the corresponding spaces in those rows or columns. The tiles go to players’ personal boards and are scored for things like set collection and end-game majorities.

Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein

You have to pay careful attention to what your opponent is doing, and you’re always trying to figure out what rows or columns he or she is going for in order to maximize your profits and minimize your opponent’s gains. The game overall gave me a similar back-and-forth feeling to what I get when I play 7 Wonders Duel , and if that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is.

Dan Blanchett, Plaid Hat Games, 2-4 players, 60-120 minutes, age 13+

I enjoy unique themes in board games—unique horror themes, doubly so. Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein has players doing things I've never done in a board game before. Namely, collecting body parts to construct a monstrous companion for Frankenstein's monster.

Players are renowned scientists who have agreed to take part in the grim project, and they'll do so by placing assistant meeples on spaces dotting a board representing Paris (yes, this is a worker placement game). Collecting the required tissue, muscle, bones, and blood to create your monster requires you to rob graves, sneak into morgues, and even murder unsuspecting civilians, and the quality of your harvested resources depends on where you got them—dig up a body and you're going to be dealing with some rotting specimens, while a quick alleyway murder will give you some seriously fresh meat to work with. These resources decompose from round to round, and the quicker you can use them to construct body parts, the more points you'll score.


Early reviews have expressed some concern about playtime, especially at higher player counts, so keep that in mind. But Abomination's strategy focus, story elements, and commitment to its macabre theme make for a game that's worth a close look.

Cloudspire

Josh J. Carlson, Adam Carlson, & Josh Wielgus, Chip Theory Games, 1-4 players, 90-180 minutes, age 13+

MOBA-style board games are nothing new, but Cloudspire is the first tabletop take on the genre to pique my interest. The new title from Chip Theory Games uses the company’s trademark neoprene game boards and hefty poker-style chips to create a modular game that can be played in player-vs-player, co-op, and solo modes.

All the major trappings of the genre are here—players each have a base; destroy your opponents' bases to win. You pilot a hero with special abilities, as well as "minions" who march semi-autonomously toward your enemy bases. Monsters found around the board give special rewards when defeated, especially when "last-hit" by your hero. Towers are here, too, only in Cloudspire, you construct the towers as you play the game. Heroes and minions are represented by chips, and their health, special abilities, and status effects are also tracked by chips that are stacked underneath the character. Combat is deterministic and based solely on stats (except for some balance-essential dice rolling for tower attacks).


The game seems to be a good implementation of MOBA mechanics, while still understanding what's needed to make a good strategy board game. PvP seems to be the focus here, but co-op and solo modes broaden the game's reach. I'm excited to dig into Cloudspire more soon.

Sierra West

Jonny Pac Cantin, Board&Dice, 1-4 players, 40-60 minutes, age 14+

I'll play just about any game set in the American Old West, and if that game is a heavy Eurogame? Boy howdy.

Sierra West is right up my alley, including elements of resource management, worker placement, deck building, and a modular setup. Players in Sierra West are expedition leaders forging their way to California through the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The game comes with four modules, each with its own deck of cards, components, and rules. In one, for instance, you're prospecting for gold; in another, you're hunting down bandits. Each scenario emphasizes a different aspect of gameplay.


The game's central mechanical gimmick—its cardplay—is sublime. Each round, players draw three cards from their deck and play them to a cutout section in their player board to create a mountain scene (see the image above). The cards have a variety of different symbols on them, and you'll create two paths of varying actions depending on how you arrange them. A meeple then moves along each path, activating the symbols as they are reached. This seemingly simple decision of how to arrange your cards can just about break your brain the first few times you do it, and it alone provides a ton of strategy to chew on.

The rest of the game includes pulling new cards to add to your deck from a big mountain of cards (the cards are actually arranged like a mountain) and moving your pieces along several tracks to score points. There's a ton to dig in to here, and pard, we're ready.

Era: Medieval Age

Matt Leacock, Eggertspiele, 1-4 players, 45-60 minutes, age 8+

The box for Era: Medieval Age is gargantuan, and it's not hard to see why—the game is filled to the brim with plastic pieces. That's not something you'll often hear said about a Eurogame—the home to all components wooden—but there's a reason for the miniature overload.

Era, designed by Pandemic creator Matt Leacock, is sort of like a tile-laying game, but instead of cardboard tiles, the pieces are plastic miniatures representing medieval buildings, farms, and walls; they have pegs on the bottom that slot into holes on your plastic player board. Each round, players secretly roll a pool of dice behind their player screens, with the option to reroll the dice Yahtzee-style. The symbols on the dice dictate what you get—resources like wood and stone to build, hammer symbols that let you carry out build actions, swords that let you extort resources from your opponents, etc. There's a variety of different buildings you can build, and each scores differently and give you ongoing bonuses depending on where you place them. Some buildings even give you new dice to add to your pool, but be careful—the dice are your workers, and you need to feed them.


There's something immensely satisfying about building things in board games, and that joy is compounded when the end result is a little 3D kingdom of your own.

Point Salad

Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, & Shawn Stankewich, Alderac Entertainment Group, 2-6 players, 15-30 minutes, age 14+

"Point salad" is a not-necessarily-derogatory term for a style of Eurogame in which pretty much every action gets you some amount of points. Why did it take so long for someone to publish a salad-themed game called Point Salad? No idea, but it's about time.

Interestingly, Point Salad isn't really a "point salad." Instead, it's a card drafting game where you construct your own scoring opportunities. The cards in the game are double-sided; on one side is a vegetable, on the other is an end-game scoring condition. On your turn, you take either two vegetable cards or one point card. You build up a tableau of cards throughout the game, and at the end of the game you score based on your point cards. You may have a card that gives you 5 points for every combination of cabbage and onion you have, but watch out—another point card you have may give you negative points for onions. There are tons of different scoring opportunities—the most of a certain vegetable, the fewest of a certain vegetable, varying points for different sets of cards—and every vegetable card counts toward every point card.


Point Salad is a simple, quick, fun game that can be taught to almost anyone.

Space Explorers

Yuri Zhuravljov, 25th Century Games, 2-4 players, 20-40 minutes, age 10+

Splendor has become the de facto benchmark for abstract engine building games, a game so massive in its reach that rules explanations are often peppered with lines like "it's kinda like Splendor." The unimaginatively titled Space Explorers is more than a little like Splendor—it's basically a slightly more complex Splendor set in space. That's not a bad thing, though, as the game has some cool ideas to add to the formula.

The gameplay here is familiar—you're spending resources to collect cards that give you more resources... to get you better cards, and so on. Cards represent specialists, and once you've collected 12—or once all available projects are taken (think nobles, in Splendor terms)—the game ends and the player with the most points wins. The resources in Space Explorers are not as plentiful as those in Splendor, and when you spend them, you actually give them to your neighbor. Thankfully, you can also spend cards to bring down the cost of cards—and every card of a certain color gives you further discounts on future cards of that color.


Cards also give you special abilities, but only when the card is the lowest in the stack; if you cover it up with a new card—which you'll likely have to do—you'll lose access to the ability. These and a few other small tweaks make the game feel much thinky-er than Splendor. About the only complaint that I can level about the game is that the retro-cool artwork, while excellent, is reused way too much across cards.

Listing image by Aaron Zimmerman