There is a dangerous moment that happens after GenCon.
You’ve made it home. You’ve unpacked your clothes. You’ve dumped all the dirty laundry into a pile. You’ve recovered from spending several days walking what feels like 47 miles a day through the Indiana Convention Center.
And then you start unpacking the LOOT.
The GenCon LOOT.
That’s when you discover exactly how successful all those game publishers were at separating you from your money.
And I regret nothing.
After dreaming about going to GenCon since I was a kid reading ads for it in the back of Dragon Magazine, I finally got to spend several days wandering through the biggest tabletop gaming convention I’ve ever experienced. I played games, met people, visited publishers I’ve loved for decades, discovered new games, collected swag, bought dice and books and accessories, and generally behaved like someone who had been turned loose in the world’s largest gaming store.
When I got home, I decided to spread everything out on the table.
This is the result.
And looking at this picture now, what strikes me isn’t how much stuff I bought. It’s how many stories are sitting on that table.
Obviously, There Was Going to Be DCC
Anyone who knows my taste in roleplaying games shouldn’t be surprised by the amount of Goodman Games material in this picture.
There is Dungeon Crawl Classics. There is Mutant Crawl Classics. There is Xcrawl Classics. There are Dungeon Denizens. There are dice. There is a gorgeous wooden DCC box.
Basically, I appear to have spent part of GenCon attempting to establish a small Goodman Games distribution center in my house.
And I’m perfectly okay with that.
One of the things I love about the whole Dungeon Crawl Classics family is that the books themselves feel like gaming artifacts. The artwork is wild. The adventures are weird. The monsters are weird. The dice are weird. Everything about DCC seems designed to remind you of the slightly dangerous feeling tabletop gaming had when I first discovered it in the 1980s.
GenCon only made me want to dig deeper into it.
And after playing Mutant Crawl Classics at the convention—where I got to play Goomy Bür, my gelatinous, pseudopod-growing, granite-armored polar-bear Manimal—there was absolutely no chance I was leaving Indianapolis without adding some MCC material to the collection.
I Had to Bring Dahlia Home
One of my favorite purchases has a direct connection to one of the games we played at the convention: Dahlia’s Diversions for Peculiar Parties from Steve Jackson Games.
On Day Two, Jenn and I played Overdue, one of the eight small roleplaying games included in the collection. Overdue casts the players as apprentices working for an interdimensional magical library, tracking down books that powerful—and apparently irresponsible—wizards have failed to return.
I played a cloud-like creature specializing in vapors, gases, air, and permeable substances. Jenn played a mote of light whose magical specialty was making things grow.
It was delightfully strange.
So, naturally, I wanted the collection.
And that’s one of the things I particularly like about this GenCon haul. I didn’t just come home with games I bought because someone told me they were good. In several cases, I came home with games that had already become part of my GenCon experience.
Every time I see Dahlia’s Diversions on the shelf, I’m going to remember sitting around that table playing a cloud-being who practiced foam magic.
That’s a pretty good souvenir.
And Then There’s Munchkin…
There are some games in this picture that go back much further for me.
Munchkin is sitting there, of course, because apparently I didn’t already own enough Steve Jackson Games products. But also because it’s the new 2nd Edition that Jenn and I got to play at the con.
My history with Steve Jackson Games goes all the way back to high school: Car Wars, OGRE, GEV, Illuminati, and GURPS. These weren’t just games I discovered recently. They’re tangled up with my memories of being a teenage gamer.
So getting to visit Steve Jackson Games at GenCon was one of those wonderful moments where the gamer I am now got to shake hands with the gamer I was forty years ago.
And somehow that resulted in me buying more games. It always does.
Funny how that works.
Martian Chess
One of the smaller boxes in the pile is Martian Chess from Looney Labs, and this one was actually a bit of a reunion for me.
I first discovered Martian Chess a few years ago after watching a demo of it online. I was intrigued enough to pick up a copy, played it several times, and really enjoyed it.
And then somehow I lost the game.
Not lost at the game. I mean I literally lost the game. Somewhere along the way, my copy disappeared.
So I was genuinely happy when I spotted Martian Chess again at GenCon. It was one of those immediate, “Oh! I remember this!” moments. I grabbed another copy so I could finally start playing it again.
If you’ve never played it, Martian Chess looks vaguely like chess, but there’s a wonderfully bizarre rule at its heart: pieces don’t belong to a player because of their color. They belong to whoever controls the section of the board they’re currently occupying.
Move one of your pieces into your opponent’s territory and it becomes theirs.
That one rule completely changes the way you think about the board. You’re not just thinking about where your pieces can move or what they can capture—you have to think about whether crossing that boundary is worth permanently giving your opponent control of the piece you moved.
It’s such a wonderfully alien idea for a chess-like game, and it’s exactly the kind of clever, simple mechanic I love. Better yet, a game only takes about 10–20 minutes, so it’s perfect when you want to play something but don’t necessarily want to commit the entire evening to it.
This time, though, I’m going to try a little harder not to lose my copy.
The Stuff That Isn’t a Game
And then there is everything else.
Dice. Because, as the guy who sold me this dice set told me: The proper number of dice for a gamer is whatever you currently have… plus one more set.
Miniatures.
A wooden DCC dice box.
Gaming accessories.
My GenCon 2026 potions shirt.
My GenCon badge, gradually transformed over the weekend by ribbons from the different booths and games we visited.
Those things may actually end up being some of my favorite souvenirs.
Because twenty years from now, I might not remember exactly which booth gave me which ribbon. But I suspect I’ll be able to pull that badge out of a drawer and immediately remember what it felt like to walk into GenCon for the first time after dreaming about it since the 1980s.
And that’s really what this table represents.
It’s not a pile of stuff. It’s the physical evidence of one hell of a weekend.