Origins Game Fair 2026 opens in a couple of days on June 17...so let's instead look ahead to Gen Con 2026. Why? Tradition, I suppose, as I typically feel like I'm through with a convention once it arrives since I'm almost always looking ahead to what comes next.
▪️ At Gen Con 2026, Underdog Games will debut Dino Racer, a 2-6 player card game by Marceline Leiman in which you bet on which dinos will perform best in three races. Who knew that betting was invented prior to the arrival of human beings? If you try hard enough, every game can be a learning game!
Each round, the announcer reveals one more race card than the number of players, moving each dino one space toward the finish line. As soon as all dinos reach a checkpoint card, flip that card, then carry out its action, adding uncertainty to the fixed nature of the race deck, which features more T-Rex cards than Raptors, more Raptors then Steggys, etc. Each player then drafts one of the revealed cards, with the unchosen card advancing its dino one more space.
When a dino reaches the finish line, the first, second, and third places pay out, with players scoring points based on how many of those cards they selected during the race. After three races, whoever has the most points wins. Good for you, you lucky lungfish!
▪️ Six-Sided Seas is the debut design from Kroze Kresky, who previously developed The Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game for publisher Solis Game Studio.
In the game, two captains face off, using dice as pirates on their ship to carry out various actions. At the start of each turn, roll dice one by one until you decide to stop or have a sum higher than your "coin limit"; in the latter case, you can place dice on the evade action, but do nothing else. (If you hit your coin limit exactly, you receive a bonus die or boost your coin limit.)
If you don't bust, assign dice to spaces on your ship to carry out actions immediately or partially fill spaces to work toward larger effects. You can boost your coin limit, save a die for a future turn, double the effect of an action, or fire at or ram the opponent's ship — reducing their hit points (HPs) unless they can evade.
Additionally, with a three-number straight, you can claim an island, gaining a power for as long as you hold it, allowing you to manipulate dice, split a die value across two dice, or gain more coins when you plunder.
To win, boost your coin limit to 21, reduce all opponents to 0 HPs, or control four islands at the start of your turn. With two copies of the game, you can play with up to four players, with eliminated players becoming ghosts who can return to life should they eliminate someone else.
▪️ In 2025, publisher Dice Throne introduced Slam Throne, a Pog-style game in which you use a plastic "slammer" to try to flip over and remove your opponent's tokens. At Gen Con 2026, Dice Throne will release Slam Throne: Con Edition 2026, with each package containing a random slammer and twenty random tokens.
At that show Dice Throne will also release Dice Throne: Vanguard, a standalone set of four heroes that was crowdfunded in October 2025 and that can be combined with other Dice Throne sets. (Whenever I write about Dice Throne — or Ashes or Exceed or other two-player battle games with asymmetric characters — I think "I should really try that", then I remember that I have zero regular players who would deep dive the game system and shelve that thought once again.)
▪️ Allplay has picked up Phantom Ink — a design by Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman — from the original publisher, Flanagan's Resonym, and will release a new edition at Gen Con 2026.
Phantom Ink is played in teams, with each team trying to identify a secret word or phrase. Each turn, the guessers on a team give their spirit guide two question cards, then the spirit chooses one of them and starts writing an answer letter by letter. The guessers can stop the spirit whenever they want, with them ideally understanding the answer from only a few letters while the opposing team — which doesn't see the question — trying to suss out information and fit that together with what they do.
For background on the game, you can read Max Seidman's designer diary from 2022.
