More than just about any other medium, I have found over the years that it is exceedingly difficult to keep up with tabletop games, be they board games, TCGs, or RPGs. There are so many titles coming out from all over the globe so often and with so little overall marketing – a BoardGameGeek page and static website doesn't really cut it in 2024 – that anything short of someone shaking me down and yelling in my face about a game rarely moves the needle.
But having attended Gen Con 2024 earlier this month and having seen and played a whole bevy of different games, now I have the honor and privilege of being the one to shake you down and yell in your face. Proverbially speaking, of course. Not everything I tried during the event is worthy of a place amongst the best board games, but a handful might be. Here are 5 tabletop games, ranging from card to board to role-playing, that I haven't stopped thinking about since the convention.
Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition from publisher Bezier Games is one of the few games I knew going into Gen Con 2024 that I wanted to track down and play. As it turns out, it's also one of the few games that I spent my own money on at the convention, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
While the original Rebel Princess included all of the same trick-taking mechanics (you're looking to avoid marriage proposals from princes as, you guessed it, rebel princesses) the Deluxe Edition really ups the quality of every other aspect of the game while also providing a few choice tweaks and expansions to the preexisting rules. Individual princess tokens are now chunkier and have some heft to them while rules are actually written out instead of requiring reference material. It's the best version of Rebel Princess yet, and it's hard to imagine a better possible version.
If you're reading this, I likely don't have to tell you that it's the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons this year and Wizards of the Coast is going all out with a new updated version of the D&D Fifth Edition core rulebooks – starting with the Player's Handbook, which also happened to go on limited sale at Gen Con 2024 with a lucky few being able to purchase it ahead of its September street date.
While not officially an entirely new edition of the popular tabletop role-playing game, it effectively functions as one and is sure to shake the scene up in a big way. Even if I weren't personally interested (and I very much am) it would be hard to deny that D&D was the talk of the town in Indianapolis.
I would be lying to you if I said that I thought Oh My Pigeons, a card game with some light rules about trying to gather enough pigeons before other players, was on my radar before Gen Con. I would also be lying to you if I said it didn't immediately shoot to the top of my wishlist the moment I played it. Because I did, and it did.
While turns generally revolve around trying to play cards to get enough pigeons to win by grabbing from the public flock or others, the real fun comes when you roll a specific die result and try to flick said die – as an abstraction of pigeon poop – at your opponents in order to knock their own pigeons off their board. From my experience, Oh My Pigeons makes for a rowdy, but straightforward good time.
Last year at Gen Con, Freelancers from Plaid Hat Games was easily my personal game of the show. The wild rulebook system with accompanying voiced narrative and wide variety of possible scenarios and outcomes straight out of a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a wicked sense of humor really spoke to me then, and the spacefaring followup in the same vein called Wandering Galaxy really speaks to me now. It has the same vibe as Freelancers but leans on sources like franchises with "star" in the name and Firefly, to name a few.
Out of all the possible games, my group of friends heading to Gen Con would absolutely not shut up about Altered, a trading card game looking to solve a number of classic TCG conundrums. And now that I've played it, well, I can see why. Not only is it a nonviolent game (the goal is to win a race) but the rarity system allows for genuinely unique cards as well as digital ownership thanks to assigning each individual card its own QR code. And if you own it digitally, you can order more prints, but you can only play competitively with cards you digitally own. This divorces the ownership of the card from the play of the card, meaning you can easily and happily play with as many paper cards as you want, meaning there's nothing stopping you from making decks to play for fun with as many people as you want.
While it remains to be seen if this will truly work as advertised, I'm excited for Altered to fully launch in September as I've never seen anything quite like it. And this is how effusive I am after one of the designers absolutely trounced me at the convention.
Want other recommendations? Don't miss the best card games, or the best tabletop RPGs according to our experts.
