SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE quests are common in the worlds of dungeon-crawling elves and wise wizards. But even the most steadfast of hobbits would be intimidated by the challenge I set for myself each year: to find the best new games at Gen Con.
Let Frodo and his pals just try, as I did, to play all of the new games launched at this year’s four-day event, which attracted more than 72,000 attendees to Indianapolis last weekend. In between ricocheting from vendor to vendor and from demo table to demo table in the dealer hall and play area, I found pickup side games in the hallways and tried more review copies from their home/shire. And yet I couldn’t get to even a decent fraction of the estimated 400 new games launched this year.
My quest still yielded more than a dozen new games that I can recommend. And most would fit as comfortably on a vacation veranda as they would in a sweaty teen basement. These are games that can be learned quickly, don’t have piles of components, and are unlikely to scare off your friends and relatives who haven’t ventured beyond Scrabble and Uno.
And so, here are my favorite non-intimidating games of Gen Con ’25.
High Tide (Underdog Games)
With its pastel colors and shell-decorated pieces, High Tide is a chill, two-player game ideally suited for the beach house. It’s a stacking game where you simply top neighboring shell tiles with your own to end the game with the most of your shell type visible from above. I still haven’t won a game of this, but I’ll keep trying.
Blind Jack (Blue Orange Games)
Up for a trivia game? Enjoy blackjack? Blind Jack combines the two. Each player tries to get closest to 21 without going over. Instead of playing cards, though, you are each given a trivia question that has an answer between zero and 10. Even after guessing, the answer isn’t revealed to you. You just keep the card with the answer hidden. In subsequent rounds, you need to decide if you are going to take a hit, answer another question, or hold. Half the fun is the reveal, when players see how close—or not—their answers were to the facts and how close to 21 they got.
Burst (Lost Boy Entertainment)
An even simpler card game, Burst has a similar blackjack-ish idea. Only here, you have two goals: Get the highest three-card total in your hand while also avoiding playing a card that makes the discard row go above that pesky 21 total. It’s a fast moving game that can handle up to six players.
Outfox the Fox (Smirk and Dagger)
One player each round is the titular fox, who looks at a card revealing the ranked top five answers in a survey (i.e., Favorite Film of the 1980s, according to Rotten Tomatoes). The fox then writes each supplied answer on a dry erase board, secretly adding one that wasn’t on the list. After debating and discussing among themselves, the rest of the players have to place the answers in the correct ranked order and identify which one was created by the fox. In a game I played, I managed to fool the group by slipping The Breakfast Club into the supplied list. (But tried not to be smug about it.)
Tacta (The Op Games)
A big table and a sharp eye are all you need with Tacta, a game that starts with one card on the table and then grows and grows as players position their color-coded cards in such a way as to cover the dots on their opponents’ cards. A card played can only touch one other card, and the edge of the table is the boundary, so a bit of strategy and spatial relations savvy is a plus.
Up or Down? (Capstone Games)
Direction matters, too, in this clever game where you draft cards to build a trio of elevator shafts. Play a 42 on a 45, and now every card after has to be lower. Play a 45 on a 42, and every subsequent card has to be higher. Beware, though: Get stuck with the wrong cards near the end of the game and you may have to scrap a high-scoring column.
Dice Words (Thames & Kosmos)
If you like Scrabble but want something with a bit more time pressure (and without a board to lug around), Dice Words is well worth a play. Each player rolls their own set of seven dice and tries to spell the longest word they can. Scores are multiplied if players match any of a quartet of ice cube letters, also randomly rolled.
River Trek (Wattsalpaog)
The games mentioned so far don’t offer much in the way of theming. But part of the fun of many games is the world it creates. In River Trek, your mission is to get your boats up a river using a turn process similar to the classic game Mancala (which you, your kids, or your grandkids likely played in school). The difference here is that you can land on other players’ pieces, and when you move, you take the whole stack, dropping them on spaces as you go. Those spaces can earn victory points or other actions, so care has to be taken not to overly reward other players whose pieces are in the stack. Drop a piece on a river crossing, however, and that piece is washed downstream. Smartly designed in a small box, River Trek manages to be both cute and competitive.
Beasts (Pandasaurus Games)
Variations on trick-taking games seem to be everywhere at Gen Con this year. If you aren’t familiar with the term, think Hearts, Whist, or Oh, Hell—games where a card is played and others have to follow suit. In this creative twist, players are actually working together, each adding cards to three piles that form a three-digit number. If there’s a 1, a 2, and a 3 on the board, you can play all cards from a suit, but each card you play has to increase the triple-digit number. What’s the deal with the title? When a beast card comes out, a suit may be blocked, creating a greater challenge.
Killer Next Door (Hunt a Killer)
If you don’t mind a darker theme, try this vicious little card game. I’m usually not a fan of deduction games—ones where you need to discern who is a culprit, spy, or whatever—but I enjoyed the simplicity and easy rules of this one. Here, one player is randomly and secretly the killer. Every round, cards with “gift,” “grunge,” or “death” are dealt and each player has to distribute them to an array of neighbors while keeping one for themself. The baddie’s goal is to get kill cards or a set of three grunge cards to a trio of these unlucky locals before the rest collectively decide on an accurate accusation. (And, yes, they caught me. I’m a very bad liar.)
A Place for All My Books (Smirk and Dagger)
A much gentler theme permeates this Gen Con sold-out hit. As the title suggests, each player is an avid reader attempting to amass and organize their book collections in their multiroom houses. They do that by choosing actions, meeting goals, and venturing out of their home to visit a village where more books can be acquired. But energy is limited (we all know how that is, right?). If there’s such a thing as a cozy game, this is it. And one that I heard more than one Gen Con attendee say made them feel seen.
Duel for Cardia (Hans im Glück/Asmodee North America)
The theme is lightly placed on this two-player card battle, but none of the backstory matters. Each player starts with the same set of cards, shuffles them, and starts with a five-card hand. One card is chosen by each and they face off. The higher number gets a signet ring, but the opponent gets to use the action on the card. Signets can switch hands, card numbers can be boosted, reduced, or neutered, and the result is a fun battle to see who can score five of the cardboard jewelry—and hang onto it until the end of a turn.
Cosmolancer (Avalon Hill/Mattel)
If you are up for kicking things up a notch or two, consider this, my favorite new game of this year’s Gen Con. Don’t be put off by its seemingly random name or the confused cover (whales and spaceships, maybe?); this is a smart strategy game with two basic choices every turn. You can flip a tile and add it to a space on the 5 x 6 grid or place one of your multipliers on a space. When the grid is filled, each of the players adds their points accumulated in each column and row. The goal is to have the highest point total after three rounds, but you have to be careful: Multiplying a good row for you could be a greater windfall for your opponents. And blocking a row may cause trouble for you later. Most of the tiles have either positive or negative points on them, but there are others, including one that will wipe out all points in its row and column, adding even more fun tension.
Star Wars: Battle of Hoth (Asmodee North America)
So far, I’ve dodged franchise games and games based on popular intellectual properties. Those can be a big draw or a detriment. (One company faced protest this year over the release of a new Harry Potter-themed game, given J.K. Rowling’s financial and very vocal anti-trans rights views). Either way, I generally avoid games that just layer popular characters onto an existing product. I’m making an exception, though, for this Star Wars variation on the classic war game Memoir ’44. Like its predecessor, this is a one-against-one skirmish game. Each military unit on the ice-planet board has a range and power, but on a turn, players can only activate those they’ve pre-selected using available cards. Memoir ’44 and its many expansions took players into very specific WWII scenarios. This version allows gamers access to a great game without having to play the Axis or Allies. Sometimes, fantasy is more fun than reality.
