Pics from Gen Con 2026 V

Another day, another sampling of my travels through the Indiana Convention Center during Gen Con 2026:

At Gen Con 2025, U.S. publisher Keymaster Games was demoing Reiner Knizia's Hanami — a new edition of his 1998 game Samurai — to coincide with an ongoing crowdfunding campaign, and at Gen Con 2026 Keymaster was showing off the finished product, with the version depicted above being the deluxe edition with clacky wooden tiles that sells for nearly twice as much as the cardboard-filled standard edition.

If you're not familiar with the game, players take turns placing one of the five tiles behind their screen onto an empty space, then drawing a new tile. Whenever one of the tokens on the game board is surrounded, whoever has the most strength in that token in their surrounding tiles claims that token. At game's end, you need to have a majority in at least one of the three tokens in order to be eligible for victory.

Staying in Japan, we come to Kanō, a design from Pablo Jiménez and Angel Pintero that publisher Matagot sold at Gen Con 2026 ahead of the game's retail release. Summing up, that's a game set in Japan from Spanish designers and a French publisher sold in the U.S.

Kanō is a take-and-make design in which each turn you manipulate one or more of the paint pots in the shared 4x4 grid, then take pots of the same color in a line, then "drop" them on your personal board Tetris-style, with the pots falling to the lowest rows possible. You want to arrange pots in patterns (which are shown on the left of the image above in the middle) to transform them into paintings, which are worth points. Each player has secret masterworks they can create and score, but if you have more than four pots open, some of them dry up.

In May 2026, Plaid Hat Games teased The Monolith, a 3-4 player game from Phil Gross that the publisher describes as "a game of war unending, a test of smart maneuvering, vicious combat, and unstoppable powers with which to upgrade shamans — and just as important is boasting of the wanton slaughter you have committed for the glory of the laughing stone!"

During Gen Con 2026, Plaid Hat showed off the game components, including the wee plastic hearts you can collect. The publisher plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign on 18 August 2026, with a 1-2 player expansion being available, along with the usual crowdfunding hoo-ha.

As was probably made clear in my February 2026 profile of designer Raf Peeters, I'm a fan of the logic puzzles from Smart Toys and Games, so it was nice to see this booth quite busy with customers young and old upon each pass through the exhibitor hall — a booth that seems noticeably larger than its 2025 booth, although I might be misremembering it.

Speaking of logic puzzles, in February 2026 I wrote up Rush Hour Duel after seeing it at Toy Fair NY 2026, but World's Smallest Rush Hour was new to me when I passed by the Ravensburger booth.

When I looked for more info on this 2.5"x2.5" version of Rush Hour on the Ravensburger website, I didn't find it there. Turns out that Ravensburger, which owns the ThinkFun brand, is not the manufacturer of this item. Taht would be Super Impulse USA, which has an entire line of licensed "World's Smallest" products, including World's Smallest Catan, World's Smallest Kerplunk, World's Smallest Pop It (only ten bubbles!), and World's Smallest Throw Throw Burrito, the components of which you'd probably lose under the couch immediately.

Pegasus Spiele North America had a fantastic solution for game presentation in its booth, with plastic shields on top of laid-out game components. Employees could easily demonstrate a game, identifying the game components and running interested parties through the essence of gameplay, while being able to remove the shield should someone want to look at bits more closely, see the rules, touch stuff, etc.

I recall seeing game displays like this in the retail store of Japanese publisher Sugorokuya back in 2015 and am surprised that I haven't seen other publishers use this same approach earlier. Maybe I've just not run across them, but this presentation seems ideal for presenting the game cleanly amidst a crowd of thousands.