Pics from Gen Con 2026 III

The "Blue Skies" artwork at the Indianapolis International Airport was far more dramatic in person than in the image above. The same is almost always true of cloud formations, rainbows, and other sky phenomena, but it could be that I just don't know how to capture such things in photos. (Also, "Blue Skies" changes depending on what's in the background, which you can easily see should you click on the prior link.)

That image made me think of the game Raindrops, a new design by Fernando Cunha that DV Games debuted at Gen Con 2026. In that game, which I initially covered at Spielwarenmesse 2026, you try to trace a colored path from the top of the board as if imitating water running down a window. You collect the tiles in that path, using them to fill up cards and complete objectives.

Another new DV Games title was Black Flag!, designer Emiliano Sciarra's latest take on his BANG! game system that debuted in 2002. Players are once again divided into teams in this 4-8 player game, with the Kingdom of Ibberia and Great Brittonia playing tug of war for a treasure chest while a pirate and 0-2 privateers try to keep the chest evenly between the sides.

Each player takes the role of a captain with a unique power, as well as a specific starting ship — but ships can be sunk, which means you'll have to take a new one with different abilities. Beyond that, if you're the admiral of your team, one of the lieutenants on your team will take your rank if their identity has been revealed.

On a related(?) topic, did you know that Black Flag is still touring fifty years after the band's debut?! Cheese and crackers, that's amazing. I recently introduced my son to Black Flag's music, along with songs by Dead Kennedys, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, and other bands from my youth. I hadn't thought about it earlier, but the Board Game Beat logo could use another vertical bar to emulate the one from Black Flag...

Michael Løhde Andersen and Christian Kudahl's Combo Creatures is another design I teased in a Spielwarenmesse 2026 report. This game system was launched with two titles: The Quick Ones and The Witty Ones.

Each box contains twelve creatures, and you use seven creatures in any game, so if you picked up both boxes — and a DV rep said that most people at Gen Con 2026 did just that — then you'd have more than 346,000 combinations available to you. Will you play even ten times? How about a hundred? The variety is nice and all, but it's a not a selling point I'd focus on.

Each turn you either draw two cards from the deck or face-up market, or play a card (by discarding cards equal to its coin cost), then carry out its ability. The game end is triggered when someone has eight cards in play, so you want to, ahem, combo creatures to get them into play as quickly as possible, with your score being the sum of coins on cards played and (possibly) 1 point per card in hand.

I covered Charlie McCarron's party game Mind Sweeper from Floodgate Games in a July 2026 post, but now you can see the components on the table, which gives a better idea of gameplay. [Disclosure: Floodgate Games has advertised on Board Game Beat]

Each round, a player has one minute to sweep components into an arrangement or "animate" the components via sweeping, while everyone else has infinite guesses to identify a secret word. If no one gets the word after 60 seconds, the sweeper reveals the card and the team has one guess from among the six options listed, but all six are related to one another, so you can still get it wrong at this point.

In February 2026, Seppy Yoon of Fight in a Box ran a crowdfunding campaign for Barkane, a co-design with Mark Eberhardt subtitled "The RPG You Play with Your Dog". Here's the ridiculous pitch for this treasure:

Your dog is a wizard — because all dogs are wizards! Don your hat and cloak, and join them for adventure. Open your eyes to the magic around you as you go on daily quests, observing the realm to power up your pup. Keep the journal of your epic adventures because your dog has no thumbs!

And yet that dog on the cover of Barkane is somehow holding a wand?! That devil dog must wield Satan's paw!

At Gen Con 2026, Adam Rehberg of Adam's Apple Games debuted The Bird, a co-operative party game in which players take turns being "The Handler", a volunteer at a bird sanctuary who wants to balance as many birds as possible on their hands. The other players will take turns placing birds on various parts of your hands as dictated by card draws, and you'll collectively decide when to bank points before all the birds crash onto the table.

Also, this woman has fabulous hair accessories. I've never seen someone use rings in this way, but I suppose you could have different braids to match different outfits. So many possibilities...

Only the protective barrier of that blue tape line kept this character from absconding with my soul.

Anyone know who this character is? I'm not up-to-date on...well, many things.