Think Like A Game Designer - Game Design Inspiration from Gen Con

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

I just got back from a whirlwind convention tour, speaking on multiple panels and showing off the early prototype of The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ at San Diego Comic-Con and Gen Con.You can see a full playthrough of the game here. If you want to be one of the first to get the game, there’s less than one week left to back it on Gamefound! You can also read a deep dive into the mechanics in my design diary updates on Gamefound.The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™We launched Ascension at Gen Con 16 years ago, and it was such a joy to come back, interact with fans, show off the game, and even hang out with Tom Bombadil! But Gen Con is also one of the few times each year that I set aside to play new games and see what mechanics are out there. I wanted to write a quick review of the games I played and break down the interesting mechanics behind each one. These games aren’t necessarily new this year at Gen Con, but they were new to me, and some of them are quite innovative. Spoiler alert: I saved a sleeper hit for last!Wingspan Pockethttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/473508/wingspan-pocketThis new entry from Elizabeth Hargrave is my new go-to version of Wingspan. We talked about Wingspan on the last podcast episode I recorded with Elizabeth, and the game has been a massive hit, spawning numerous expansions and variants. But Wingspan Pocket does what few games have done well: it translates the emotional core of a medium-to-heavy game into a bite-sized version.Wingspan Pocket uses the backs of cards to represent the food types and resources needed to play your birds, while tucked cards represent bonus points. A simple reserve-row and active-row system lets you acquire birds, resources, and eggs before building an active row of up to six birds, triggering the engine-building abilities that make the game what it is.Each turn presents a meaningful but simple choice: draft two resources or birds, play a bird by paying its cost, or lay up to three eggs, followed by triggering any active bird powers. Once someone plays their sixth bird, the game ends at the conclusion of the round after all players have had an equal number of turns. You earn victory points for birds played, cards tucked beneath birds, and optional goal cards. There’s also a solo mode that I haven’t tried yet.In the spirit of games like San Juan and Monopoly Deal, this is a hit for players looking for smaller, portable games that pack the strategic and emotional punch of their larger counterparts. It’s an excellent example of a designer who truly understands the core tension of her game and can present it in a much more compact package.Think Like A Game Designer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Winterhaven Woodshttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/339302/winterhaven-woodsThis game has a beautiful minimalist forest theme and a simple draft-and-play mechanic similar to games like Sushi Go! and my own game Dungeon Draft. The theme and mechanics, however, are a bit of a mismatch for me.You draft predators, herbivores, and trees, then place them in one of your three woodland spaces or out in the open meadow. The scoring system for these different animals and plants, however, felt a bit convoluted. For example, wolves can hunt animals in your meadow or in other players’ meadows. They must hunt in sets of three, they can only hunt unprotected animals, and there’s a timing system based on the moon phase shown on the cards that determines which player hunts first.It’s a medium-weight scoring system layered on top of a lightweight theme and drafting mechanism. The game is decent, but I felt the scoring complexity didn’t earn its keep relative to the gameplay value. For a lightweight drafting game, I’d rather play Sushi Go!; for something heavier, 7 Wonders or Dungeon Draft pack more bang for the buck (no pun intended in a game about hunting).Time Breakerhttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220234/time-breakerThis Looney Labs game fulfills the promise of being simple and cute while staying true to the company’s brand (congratulations to the Looneys on celebrating 30 years of publishing!).You play as time cops hunting a time bandit on a randomized board made up of different time tiles, each of which allows you to “jump” to another tile. On your turn, you either move through one of these portals or play a card from your hand to move yourself or the time bandit. If you’re in the same space as the time bandit, you arrest him and he moves with you until another player arrests him or a card causes him to change locations.My only complaint is that the board contains a lot of numbers, with each tile listing a “Travel From Time,” “Current Time,” and “Travel To Time,” making the paths a bit difficult to follow. Other than that, it’s a simple, cute, lightweight game.Chrononauts is another time-themed game from Looney Labs that I highly recommend. You set up the board using the current timeline of historical events and receive a secret objective from an alternate future that requires changing history to match your timeline. You create paradoxes and play alternate-history cards until one player wins, or until too many paradoxes are created and everyone loses. If you haven’t played Chrononauts, you should.Playthingshttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/449930/playthingsI technically didn’t play this one myself, but I watched it being played, and it may have been the most innovative game I saw at Gen Con.Players alternate taking on the role of the “Night Terror,” hiding the toys of the other players while everyone else closes their eyes. The unique mechanic is that players physically sense what happens as the Night Terror drops toys and bells onto the playmat, with different senses activated depending on the situation (for example, placing fingers underneath the mat as toys are dropped).I have no idea whether the game is actually good, but I love seeing this kind of innovation and clever use of different senses to bring a game to life!Tag Teamhttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/434906/tag-teamMany designers I know are trying to capture the mechanics of autobattlers (popular digital games such as Teamfight Tactics) in a tabletop format. Autobattlers are defined by a drafting phase followed by automatic combat resolution. Tag Team combines this idea with deckbuilding in a way that feels interesting and unique.You pick two fighters to form your starting deck and determine the order of the cards. During combat, the cards flip in that predefined order against your opponent to resolve the round. Then you draft another card from your reserve and add it to your deck, but you can’t reorder it. Only by inserting the new card into a specific position can you shift the battle in your favor, taking into account what you just learned about your opponent’s deck.The variety created by the “pick two” team-building system leads to interesting combinations, and the restrictions on deck order make every decision meaningful. I’ll need to play this game more to see how well it holds up over repeated plays, but after just one game it accomplished what every game should: it made me want to play again.Nocturianhttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/264925/nocturionThis was the sleeper hit for me. I had never heard of the game or the company behind it, but the layout and presentation immediately caught my eye.Nocturian is a worker-placement game in which each round begins with a die roll. The available dice determine which action spaces can be selected that round, dramatically shifting the strategy from turn to turn. There’s also an innovative timing mechanism, with a tracker in the center of the board that advances by different amounts depending on which resources players choose to collect. As the tracker moves, it both replenishes depleted resources and changes which side of the board offers double resources that turn. Once the tracker completes a certain number of laps around the board (depending on player count), the game ends.The game offers a relatively familiar system of gathering resources and spending them on quests and abilities that earn victory points, but everything comes together in a satisfying package that plays in under an hour. Nocturian is a great example of a game that introduces a few fresh ideas (dice-driven worker placement and an innovative timing mechanism) while otherwise executing the fundamentals extremely well.This was the only game I absolutely had to play a second time at Gen Con, and one of only two (Wingspan Pocket was the other) that will stay in my collection for a long time! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective,

whether it's inside the gaming realm, or beyond. I have something I am so excited to finally announce. If you are serious about designing games, not just thinking about games, not just listening to the podcast and dreaming about games, but actually finishing your own designs, then I have created something for you.

It is the brand new, Think Like a Game Designer, Design Lab. It is a step-by-step system that I have created and tested with dozens of other creators and other aspiring designers that includes over 60 less, to take you from generating ideas to building prototypes to finding playtesters, refining your core design loop all the way through publishing, running a crowd fund, and even getting hired in the industry. You'll also get access to my private design discord filled with me, members of the Stoneblade team, and other creators all actively building games.

Plus, I've got some incredible bonuses for people who join right now and for longtime fans of the podcast. If you're ready to stop pretending and start actually designing games with intention, check out the Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab at justingarydesigns.com. Today's episode is going to be a little different. It is a Gen Con wrap-up. I just got back from a massive whirlwind tour of multiple conventions, speaking on panels at San Diego Comic-Con, and GenCon, and getting to show off our newest game,

The Lord of the Rain's Ascension. As I'm recording this, we have a lot. less than six days left in the campaign. It is our biggest campaign ever. If you are at all interested in seeing one of the coolest projects I've ever gotten to work on, you can go to Gamefound right now. Search for the Lord of the Rames ascension. We'll include that in the show notes, players got to play the game. We even have a live full play-through demo and game that we recorded at JenCon. That I will also link to. It's a really cool moment for me in my career. If you love this podcast and the work that I have been doing, a great way to support me and to see the work in action

is to go check out that crowd fund and share it and back it. We will have more details about it coming in the future when it gets to retail. But for now, this is a huge, exciting moment and getting to see fans interact with games is my favorite part of my job. There's a part of the creative process that is great when you first have an idea and you have this concept that you want to read to life. And then there's a lot of hard work. If you but listening to this episode, you understand the number of iterations, the number of mistakes, the number of challenges that you work through to get a project out the door is massive. But then when I go to an event like Jen Con and I see how the games interact with fans,

I see what the response is, not just to the Lord of Rings ascension here, but this was 16 years of ascension games. People were playing Gundam Assemble, which is another game I've worked on this coming out in October, that we were, Oshu Push, the TCG, I did it was Japan, and made it. People were playing a ton of, and Shards and Infinity still getting a ton of play. a lot of excitement that's eight years and we have a 10th anniversary campaign. We're planning for that coming up. So really incredible. Great to get to interact with so many of my friends and industry folk that I love at the show as well as making some new friends who are going to become guests on this

podcast in the near future who have made some massive games that you've definitely heard of. I will save those as spoilers. But one of the things I also wanted to talk about is some of the mechanics and games that I saw at GenCon and break down some of those ideas and how they might inspired. One of the things I do at the show is just walk around the floor, see what games pop, see what games are exciting, see what games people are talking about, and then try to play a few of them. One of the challenges of working in games professionally is a lot less of my time was actually spent playing games I'm not working on than I would like. And so I always reserve time at Gencom for that. So I just wanted to highlight a few of those here, both to give credit to designers out there that are

doing great work and also to piece apart the different mechanics and ideas for ways that you could potentially do things on your designs. So the first thing I want to talk about is Wingspan Pocket, designed by Elizabeth Hargrave, who is a former guest on this podcast. I will be having as a guest again to talk about this specific product, as well as some other issues. The idea of taking the game wingspan, which is a massive global hit,

really innovative for taking this idea of birdwatching and bringing it into the tabletop games base, kind of an engine builder system, which I enjoyed playing, but to be honest, I don't play very often because it's got, a lot of components. It's a medium weight game, a decent amount to process as you work through it. But Wingspan Pocket honestly solves all of those problems for me. It streamlines the game so that the resource cards and the bird cards are the same. The backs of the cards represent the resources.

The front represents the birds. You have some of those available in your reserve. And then you can acquire more from a centralized pool that is face-down cards representing the resources and then the face-up version in front of them representing the birds. And you can build your engine. by preparing the birds and putting them in front of you, and then that creates trigger effects where each bird does its effect, and the combos between those are interesting, which is to me always the heart of wingspan

and every engine builder, and they were able to, Elizabeth was able to put that into a game that is really playable in 30 minutes or less and has a lot of that fun, and I can actually travel with. As a digital nomad, games that are bite size

are small enough for me to travel with are rare. If you've seen games like San Juan, which did this for Puerto Rue, Rico, a monopoly deal, which is for Monopoly, really finding ways to take the heart of a game and translate it into a smaller card game. I think it's an incredibly difficult challenge, and it was executed super well with Wingsman Pocket. Another game I wanted to highlight is a game that I've never heard of before, and I don't think it's actually one of the more popular hot games, but I think is actually great. It's called Nocturion, and it is a worker placement game, and I've been working

on my own worker placement game for a while, so it particularly interested in these mechanics. And it came out originally in 2019. This is the second edition. But it basically does the, there are two major mechanics that I really like. One is a worker placement game is pretty standard. You take turns placing your workers around the board, collecting resources,

converting those resources into effective outputs that then earn new points. But this one, you roll dice at the beginning of the round, and then your worker placement order, you draft those dice, and then which spots in the board are available is dictated by the dice. So your choices get more constrained, in an interesting way, and the board is fully randomized when it's opened up, so every game is different. And then there's this really innovative timing mechanism. There's a tracker in the

center of the board that as you place your workers, the tracker moves forward depending upon which resource you chose to collect. So you can actually accelerate or decelerate the game as it goes. And then depending upon where the tracker is, tells you which side of the board is worth double resources that turn, which side of the board refills its resources. And then as the tracker circles around, that dictates the game clock. There's a fix number of rounds based on the number of players. There were so many interesting decisions

to make here, and as you use your resources to complete quests or recruit monsters that gave you special powers, the game evolved in a really nice way. It's the only game I actually played twice at the show, which is a high praise in terms of the time that I will spend

at a show working on any one thing, but it's a really great, satisfying, medium-weight worker placement game. On the lighter side, I really enjoyed this game called Play Things, which I also had not seen before. It had come out just this year, and it is a clever physical deduction game, I would guess. Players are all playing as children, and one person takes turn as the night terror who hides toys on a map. And the rest of the players have to have their eyes closed while the toys are being hidden.

And they're clues based on you can put your hands in certain locations, and they're dropping pieces around the board, and there are bells that get dropped to make you listen. And so this activation of sensors that are not normally used in a game for this kind of deduction semi-cooperative game was really clever. I don't know how long, how many plays this game would support, how deep the game is overall, but I love seeing this innovation. And I do a lot of my development work digitally and playtesting remotely. So building games, these physical components where this is so relevant,

It's not something I get to work on a ton, but I found it super clever and really enjoyed it. Another game that really got my attention, which had a new expansion releasing this year. My original came out last year is Tag Team. Tag Team takes the kind of deck building game in auto-battler formats and combines them together. So in essence, you pick two fighters that form your starting deck. You organize your starting deck in whatever way you want. Your opponent does the same. Then you flip over those cards in order, and you get to resolve the fight based on what the

cards are, right, dealing damage, triggering powers, etc. And then you draft new cards from your combined deck, your side deck, and you get to add one of those cards into your fighting deck, your deck builder. But you can't change the order of the cards are already there. So you only get to put the new card in whatever slot you want. And so knowing what your opponent has, there's this really interesting back and forth of where do you put it in, how do you change the order, seeing the different combinations and permutations that are possible with whichever two fighters you've picked in the order that you're drafting the cards. And, just that simple automatic resolution that you can just watch it happen and have the excitement there,

I thought was really cool. And it's a nice way of building the kind of auto-battler format, which is a very popular digital game format from games like Team Fight Tactics, into a deck-building game, a variant I thought was also very clever. And then I mostly just want to talk about games that are positive, but I will speak to one that I think didn't land for me because I think it's a interesting case. The game is called Winter Haven Woods. It launched in 2022. I believe they also had a new expansion here that people were playing. And it's a drafting game also, which again, I love drafting. So you pick, you start with a fixed hand of cards, you draft a card past the left, and then later past the right. Then you, from there, you play out your woodland creatures. So you

have forests and herbivores like deer and rabbits and squirrels. And then you have hunters like owls and wolves. And then based on how you play those and how you order them on you score. And the art is what drew me this game. It's a beautiful white winter background with this kind of very approachable art that really got me excited. And the drafting mechanic is so simple. If you played games like Shushi Go, it's a fantastic example of this kind of game. But my concern with it was that the scoring mechanisms were very complicated. They had different rules for how each They scored. Deer could only hide in pairs of two in World War certain points and wolves could only hunt in packs of three and they had to feed on certain things in certain times. And there's nothing wrong with that kind of mechanic and having a medium complexity scoring system for a drafting game. But the theme and the visuals really made me want something simple closer to Sushi go, as opposed to something more complex. This is I would consider the scoring system to be more complex than something like Seven Wonders or if you're familiar. with my game, Dungeon Draft, which is very much a fantasy scene drafting game,

it was maybe a little bit less complicated than the other draft, but didn't deliver the bang for the buck that I would be hoping for in that kind of game. So it's just a really interesting example of how there can be a great visuals, there can be a great mechanics, but if you don't power them well, it can cause a break. And again, the game has been very successful, so this is not a knock on it. I wanted to not just highlight the games that really stood out for me as incredible positives, but also the areas where there's negatives and there's room for improvement, because this is a lot of how we learn, right, finding the different things that are out there.

There's no substitute for one, of course, making your own games and trying things out and seeing them fail, but also just playing a lot of different games, seeing what mechanics are out there, seeing what works and what resonates for you personally, because developing your personal taste for games and your personal taste for what works and what doesn't and where areas can be approved is one of the best areas to gain inspiration for your future design. So just a quick little wrap up from Jen Con. again, thanks to everybody that came by and said hi, everybody that I got to meet, everybody that played my games, everybody that's now setting up some really cool business deals and really cool

future podcast episodes that will all be coming out. Over the coming months and years, it's just a renewal for me and a real blessing. And I also want to just give thanks to everybody in this community. I got so many people that came up to me and talked to me about the podcast and how much it meant to them and people whose designs had been helped and inspired by this. And that's why I do what I do here. And so thank you all for listening. I hope to be able to see you at future shows or during the next podcast engaging in our comments section. So thank you all. Thank you for making this show possible through your pledges, podcast reviews, and enthusiasm on social media. Without your help, this show would not have been possible, and it's incredible

how our community has grown. If you'd like to support the show and get access to more exclusive content from me and my guests, I recommend checking out justin-garrydesigns.com, where I've got weekly articles on game design and creativity, along with show notes, lessons from the podcast, and more exclusive insights to help you with your creative projects.