Gen Con 2025. We already told you about the really good stuff. What about the other good stuff? Or the weird stuff? Or…well, just random stuff?

That’s what our Non-Award Awards are for. We always see too much at these giant gaming conventions, so we had to make a home for everything else we want to share with you that doesn’t fit into a “Best of” podcast episode.

Like cats. So many cats.

The “one that caught everyone’s eye” award: Raas: A Dance of Love

By our unofficial count, there were over 3.8 million board games at Gen Con, and you know, not all of them look exciting. Cards, cubes, cardboard...everything's so stationary.

Enter Raas: A Dance of Love. Arcane Wonder’s strategy game about assembling an Indian dance troupe stopped us in our tracks, dropped our jaws, and made us do other clichey things. It’s a looker -- a board game equivalent of The Matrix’s woman in red. 

Raas’s bright pastels radiated off the table. The mass of equally colorful dice got us instantly curious. But the moment we knew we had to wait for the playable demo was when game designer Mihir Shah spun the middle of seven interconnected wheels, making the whole board dance in delight for all spectators. Just watch:

Perhaps gilby1613’s comment on our Instagram post said it best: “[I don’t know] what I’m looking at, but I need it.” Well gilby1613, you’re looking at a great game of dice-drafting and score-comboing; it's not just a superficial thing between us and Raas.

We should see it available widely in early 2026.

The most meta-y meta: The Game Makers

So you’re a board gamer. You love board games. How about a board game about making board games? How about making actual well-known, real-life, roughly 400 licenced board games that you may already know and love?

In The Game Makers, you play a manufacturer trying to most efficiently make board games that synergize (scoring-wise) with others you’ve produced. So what kinds of mechanics does a game-making game use?

Rondels? Check. You move three cute little forklifts around the circle to take actions that are more powerful (but take longer to return) the farther out you place them. Tile-laying? Check. You can place little cardboard tiles into an area to get ongoing discounts and one-time bonuses. Worker-placement? Check. You’ve got your forklifts and factory worker meeples to place to power up your main actions or help you gain bonus resources. Dice-rolling? Check. Roll dice to see where your marketing team invests money for final scoring. Cool plastic buildings? Multi-use components? Check. You can use any of the previous components to pay for the games (cards) that you’re trying to make.

Stick your products onto your shelf for the ultimate shelfie and have them score in even more meta ways. Real-life set-collecting games like Stone Age score by…set collection. War games (Kemet) score if you have more of them than your neighbors. Engine-builders (Wingspan) help you build your engine, naturally.

And if you have a tie at the end? Scan your shelfie board with The Game Makers digital app to see an overlay of your collection's BoardGameGeek rankings -- whoever has the highest ranked game breaks the tie! Coming to Kickstarter soon.

The puking-emoji award: people

To be fair, this isn’t a Gen Con problem. It’s not even a convention problem (though there’s a reason people call post-show illnesses “con crud”). It’s just a people problem.

This year, before we even got to the super-busy days of Gen Con (the weekend), we were already getting the smells while walking around the show floor -- that thick, suffocating, sweaty mustiness that makes you feel like you’re breathing old mud. We know that for medical reasons, sometimes it can’t be helped. But let’s be real: sometimes it definitely can be helped.

Not helping our general sense of feeling ick-free is witnessing so many do the bare minimum (or absolutely nothing at all) in that short time period between doing their bathroom duties then returning to the public, touching those game pieces we all must handle during demos.

C’mon, everyone. If you can afford a $10 convention hot dog, then you can afford some deodorant. And the convention bathroom hand soap and water are totally complimentary! Take advantage. Please.

The theme we saw everywhere: cozy

So many games on the show floor proclaimed their coziness right on the box! On signs! In their art! In your heart.

Brew us up some tea and knit us a scarf: We’re here for the cozy. Smirk & Dagger's A Place for All My Books has you arranging tomes in your little apartment before you build enough social battery to venture out to town to get some "neat stuff" (and more books). Build a serene koi pond in Koi. Play a cute little critter collector gathering tiny treasures in Trinket Trove (with exceedingly cozy art by Sandara Tang). Walk along beaches collecting shells in Sanibel. Fill your flower shop with different bouquets and score with cute cat tokens in Floristry. It almost feels like all these games are wrapping their soft cardboard arms around us.

Speaking of cats….

The new zombie/Cthulhu: cats

Everywhere we looked around Gen Con’s exhibitor hall: cats, cats, and more cats. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for Shoe’s allergies), not the fluffy IRL versions but ones adorning the titles, boxes, or components of so many games. We didn’t play most of them, so we’ll have to let this photo collage do all the talking. (And there's no way we caught them all, too.)

Most brain-melting award: almost anything by Board&Dice these days

Publisher Board&Dice isn’t in the business of making baby games. These people want to pulverize your noggins for hours at a time and make you go back for more. To be fair, they make great games in the lighter categories, but they even classify their heavyweight Nucleum as “medium complexity” (“strategic fun for casual gamers” on their website). So that tells you a bit about where their heads are at when it comes to grading their games' complexity.

At Gen Con, Board&Dice was showing off Tianxia and Thebai. We hope to review these more thoroughly in upcoming episodes of The Going Analog Podcast. But just know that we walked away from quick explanations for both games with our eyes bugged out and the same thought: Even our heavy-game-experienced minds are gonna go to mush with these two.

Bring it.

Most edible (looking) and possibly cutest game: Moon Bunny

Hot Banana Games may end up getting a lifetime achievement award for this category. Their Steam Up: A Feast of Dim Sum practically marketed itself with its delicious deluxe components alone. Next up is Moon Bunny, a runner-up for the above “one that caught everyone’s eye” award.

C’mon…squishy mooncakes pieces?? Sure, they’re way small compared to the real deal, but the real deal is dense and oily and not properly sized for board gaming. These tiny bite-sized upgraded tokens for the Collector’s Edition of Moon Bunny look so delectable, however, that we’re sure Hot Banana lawyers are going to want plenty of warnings in the box when it ships this fall.

Best guerilla marketing: Kaliope’s Quest

We saw these Magic: The Gathering-style cards scattered around Gen Con, seeking potential heroes (aka, kidney donors). According to this post, progress is being made -- we just hope this quest has a happy ending.

Please note: We don’t know Kaliope and have zero association with all of this, so don’t come at us if you get scammed out of a kidney because of our signal-boosting. But we’ll assume the best and root for Kaliope to win this one.

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