GenCon 2015 – Costumes, Miniatures and Custom Terrain
Now that I’ve covered the phenomenon of crowdfunding and the changes to the tabletop game marketplace evidenced at GenCon 2015, I’d like to move on to the eye candy.
There were a tremendous number of great costumes this year. There were also quite a lot of impressive miniatures and pieces of terrain. I snapped some pictures of everyone’s wonderful hand-made art over the weekend as I wandered the convention. Here are a couple of my favorites.
Miniatures
There were lots of jaw-dropping paint jobs. The painting contest cabinet, in particular, was breathtaking.
Posted in convention and tagged GenCon2015 by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
GenCon 2015 – So Many New Games
Kickstarter’s enormous utility has transformed the marketplace for tabletop games, causing an explosion of new games at GenCon
My number one impression from GenCon 2015 was, “Wow, look at all of these games I’ve never heard of!” In all my years of going to GenCon, generally only a handful of publishers were demonstrating wholly new products. This year I saw an unprecedented flood of new games. It seemed like every game I had ever heard of had a new card game, a new board game, and a new miniatures battle game based upon it. And there were dozens of entirely new games. Unsuprisingly, many of the banners said Kickstarter somewhere on them.
Yes, this is a game where players play to assemble a deck of cards and then use those cards to play a game where they build an in-game wooden deck. I know I may sound angry about this, but I also admire the courage it takes to spend money and make a game based on a pun. Bonus points for the clear graphic design – I got the joke right away.
To me all the new games demonstrate the transformative power of Kickstarter on the tabletop game market. Tabletop players are a lucrative demographic for crowdfunding solutions like Kickstarter – they have disposable income and are comfortable spending money on the internet. It’s also fun to see corporate juggernauts like Hasbro get cut off at the pass, economically speaking.
With all of that said, I’ll cede the stage to the slideshow. Further thoughts on the show can be read below and in upcoming posts about GenCon 2015. (more…)
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