Gen Con 2015: Legendary Firefly, Ever-Growing X-Wing & The Return of Runebound

Gen Con 2015 is over, and Aldie has already started processing the 100+ game demonstration videos that we recorded in the BGG booth and elsewhere during the show. I'll start posting those in batches soon, but in the meantime let's do a quick rundown of some of the news and announcements that came to light during the show.

The biggest news of Gen Con 2015 was undoubtedly the purchase of Plaid Hat Games by F2Z Entertainment, owner of the brands Z-Man Games, Pretzel Games and Filosofia Éditions, but I already covered that, so let's move on to game news.

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Each year during Gen Con, Upper Deck Entertainment throws a party for all of its volunteers and whatever media people catch wind of it, and Jason Brenner typically announces something to look forward to at next Gen Con. Given that Upper Deck was releasing Legendary Encounters: Predator and its booth looked like this —

— it wasn't a surprise to find the movie Predator running on the bar's multiple TV screens. But after a while the movie stopped, and this image popped onto the screen instead:

People didn't notice at first, then they started pointing and whispering and "Really?"-ing, and finally Brenner took the microphone and announced that Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China was coming in 2016 and confessed to liking the film just a little bit and possibly having mild interest in seeing this release come to light.

That's the sum of information released

Brenner also announced a new title by Ryan Miller titled Pack of Lies, then he ended by mentioning that with Firefly: Shiny Dice already under the Upper Deck brand, it would be a shame to stop there, thus 2016 will also bring Legendary Encounters: Firefly.

There's a reason people shouldn't take pictures in bars

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KOSMOS showed up at Gen Con 2015 for the first time thanks to its North American Thames & Kosmos, and it showed off the forthcoming Spiel 2015 titles Tumult Royale and Steam Time — with demos of both recorded in the BGG booth — in addition to talking about Legends of Andor and its English-language expansions.

Prototype components, in case it wasn't clear

The big question that people have had about the Andor expansions New Heroes and The Star Shield is whether they'll be compatible with the Fantasy Flight version of the base game. Thames & Kosmos president Ted McGuire told me that since the FFG version of Andor was produced in Germany at the same location as the forthcoming base game and expansions (as well as all German editions of the game), everything should be 100% compatible. McGuire also noted that the Andor base game has been completely retranslated from scratch.

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As usual, Fantasy Flight Games CEO Christian T. Petersen held his annual InFlight report on Friday during Gen Con to discuss the company's efforts in the past year and reveal a few surprises coming in the next twelve months. This year he did a bit more than that since 2015 is FFG's twentieth anniversary, with a year-by-year history of the company that featured a representative release from the year in question, along with an unnumbered sales revenue graph. Did you know that FFG started as a publisher of European comics that had been translated into English? And now they're going to add beach balls to their product line?

Alpha and not omega of FFG's history

The biggest news from FFG was the announcement of a new edition of Runebound, something that fogged many glasses in the room. FFG's international marketing manager Anton Torres presented an overview of this game in the BGG booth, anticipating the objections that players might have to this new version and trying to make a case for it. I'll publish this demo video as soon as it's available. For now, an image from the FFG display booths:

The announcement of Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game mirrors the history of FFG itself since the original Warhammer Quest debuted in 1995. We also recorded a demo of this game.

Star Wars: Imperial Assault continues to the next movie in the original Star Wars trilogy with the Return to Hoth expansion due out in late 2015. Other smaller expansions will round out Imperial Assault with all the characters that you might ever want to use.

Most of the other announcements related to existing product lines in the FFG catalog, so I'll let those pics stand on their own:

Okay, Fury of Dracula is a standalone game

In yet another sign that nearly everything will return to market if you wait long enough, FFG announced a new edition of the Eon Games title Hoax, which was first released in 1981.

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As always, the four days of Gen Con flew by more quickly than you'd expect, leaving you not enough time to do all that you might want to do. In the end, whatever your hopes and expectations, you pack up what you need and head home...