Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne offers up more thoughts on Gen Con 2024.
After a week has passed since the record breaking Gen Con 20204 (see "
Gen Con 2024 Breaks 2023 Attendance Record"), I have a few more thoughts about the show (see ”
Thoughts on GenCon 2024”):
Heroscape. The crowd for
Heroscape at the show was massive. The number of pictures showing attendees crowding the Renegade Game Studios booth and carrying
Heroscape boxed sets indicate a strong demand for the game, and I imagine it will sell strongly upon its widespread release later this month. As I have noted before, I am less certain as to how long that initial wave of interest will last (see “
Miniatures Week—A Week Later”).
A major selling point of the original
Heroscape was all the painted miniatures a customer got with the set. I remember comparatively few customers playing the game, but seeing them carrying around boxes full of the figures and terrain. Given the deluxe painted sets are only available directly from Renegade, which retailers can order from the studio, I'm uncertain as to how long interest in the game will last.
Disney Lorcana. After being the next big thing at last year’s Gen Con with people getting an exemption from Gen Con rules for sleeping in the hallway (see "
A Disney Line for the Ages and Other GenCon Musings"), I've heard next to nothing about sales or activity surrounding
Disney Lorcana at Gen Con this year. Not even buzz about the Flotsam and Jetsam or Scrooge McDuck promotional cards, which are currently selling for between $5 to $25, a far cry from the hundreds of dollars of last year and people gaming the Ravensburger system to score more promo cards.
Shimmering Skies released to hobby game stores last week and sales have been a fraction of what the first two sets were.
Alien 2E RPG. Free League Publishing announced a second edition of its
Aliens RPG, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, because, it seems, nobody can publish anything anymore without using Kickstarter first (see "
’Alien RPG 2E’ Heads to Kickstarter"). This will not make huge waves in the industry but I wanted to note it because it falls into the category of, much like
Heroscape, "Everything Old Is New Again." Long time hobby gamers may remember a company called Leading Edge Games which produced insanely complicated RPGs (not
Space Opera complicated, but close). Much like Palladium and Chaosium, all of their RPGs used the same core rule system, titled
Phoenix Command.
Where am I going with this? Well, there were also an early adopter of licensing media properties for their rules systems and two properties the company licensed were
The Lawnmower Man (Yes, if you search really hard, you can find a
Lawnmower Man RPG and miniatures) and… Aliens. The company released a RPG, a nicely designed board game and miniatures, mint sets of which now command five times their original price on the secondary market. Evil Genius Games has worked to tap into this market with its modules based on older media properties like
Escape from New York and
Highlander, with only some success.
COVID-19. It’s still out there folks, and it is still not a joke. The U.S. sees about 1,000 people a month dying from the disease and thousands more catching it. I've seen a number of people reporting testing positive for the disease after Gen Con. Anytime you get that large a group of people together in an enclosed area you are, unfortunately, going to see a spike in levels of infection. We can probably expect to see outbreaks of COVID for quite some time.
Comments? What was cool at Gen Con that you saw? Send them to
castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
