Gen Con 2021 I: Hachette Boardgames, and 25th Century Games

I've already posted a broad overview of Gen Con 2021 that tries to give a perspective on the show as a whole and some of what we can expect from the game industry in the coming year. Now it's time to dive into game- and publisher-specific coverage thanks to dozens of pages of notes and even more images.

Let's start the journey as all journeys begin: filling the suitcase.

Packed and ready to go to

Okay, I don't have much to say about this other than that preparation for Gen Con 2021 felt far more like my preparations for NY Toy Fair than for any Gen Con of years past. BGG didn't have a booth at the show, so all of us attending lacked a home base and we were left to whatever we had scheduled individually — which for me meant 32 publisher meetings over four days to check out what was new, what they have coming, and how things stand for them given all that's going on in the world.

Birds at the airport?! Good thing I packed appropriately. Sic 'em, Katniss!

• The first stop Thursday morning was the press room to pick up my press badge, and while there a PR representative rolled in the first cart of games picked up from exhibitors for display in the press room.

I shot a few pics before it was time to head into the exhibit hall, starting with Horrified: American Monsters from Ravensburger since this title was debuting at the show and had not previously been made public. (In fact, Ravensburger had a limited supply of this title, and as far as I could tell it was selling copies only to those who had preordered the game ahead of time.)

Board Game: Horrified: American Monsters

Bonus seventh cryptid in the background

I love the look of the game board in The Belgian Beers Race from Michaël Boutriaux, BYR Games, and Grand Gamers Guild, mostly because when shot at this level of detail, the board looks like an abstract art print from the 1950s. As for what the game is about, um, beers and racing, I assume. Look at this image!

• My first publisher meeting of the show was in the Hachette Boardgames booth, this being the game-based branch of Hachette Book Group, which is the largest publishing company in France. Asmodee may not have made it to Gen Con 2021, but the French contingent of the game industry was still present thanks to Hachette, which since February 2019 has acquired Gigamic, Sorry We Are French, Le Scorpion Masqué, and Blackrock Games, which distributes titles for several dozen game publishers, in addition to founding two internal studios: Funnyfox and Studio H.

Hachette debuted three titles at Gen Con 2021: the second edition of IKI from Koota Yamada and SWAF, and Studio H's Oltréé (Antoine Bauza and John Grümph) and the English version of Suspects (Sebastien Duverger Nedellec, Paul Halter, and Guillaume Montiage). The 2020 releases Dinner in Paris and Nidavellir were also available for purchase.

In a comment that was echoed by many other publishers over the course of the show, Hachette's Adrien Crochette said that advance copies of these games had been brought in for sale at Gen Con 2021 (and that arrival had been uncertain until immediately before the show opened), but the general release of these games in the U.S. had been pushed back from September to "ideally by the end of the year". The games were still in China at that point, and movement was predicted but not guaranteed, given all the uncertainty about what it would cost to ship them, whether containers would even be available, what the delay might be when the games arrive at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port, and so on.

Asked what we might see from Hachette in the future, given that Blackrock Games on its own has a 400-product catalogue and handles roughly 90 new releases each year, Crochette said that the current goal is to choose 8-10 games per year from this catalog and the other companies it owns, then import and promote this limited selection in the United States. After all, despite the size of Hachette Book Group, the Hachette games division in the U.S. currently consists solely of Crochette.

One other new item Hachette had on hand was Gigamic's and Nouri Khalifa's Quantik, which had debuted in Europe in 2019 and which is part of Gigamic's "classic" line along with Quarto, Quixo, and Quoridor. Regarding this last title, which debuted in 1997, Crochette said that Hachette is awaiting a massive restocking of Quoridor as TikTok has recorded more than (checks stats again) 62 million views of Quoridor-related videos and sales of the game pick up at online sites a few hours each new video drops.

If you have been playing games for a while or like to scan thrift store shelves, you might think that everyone knows about Quoridor — but the video and sales evidence shows otherwise. Similarly, while talking about this trend later with a Ravensburger representative, he mentioned that at a previous Gen Con, they had put Labyrinth on a demo table, which baffled a German executive who was visiting given that Labyrinth is more than thirty years old and has sold more than 20 million copies. Doesn't everyone know this game?!

No, they do not. Ravensburger demoed the game repeatedly throughout the day and sold many copies in the process. Sales of 20 million copies sounds impressive, but the world has more than 7 billion people in it, so in all likelihood less than 1% of the world's population is familiar with Labyrinth — which means plenty of room for sales growth remains.

One of Hachette's future releases in the U.S. is In the Palm of Your Hand from designer Timothée Decroix and publisher La Boîte de Jeu, with this being a party game for 2-8 players in which you attempt to convey a specific memory depicted on a card — in the image and video below, that would be a person on a rocking chair on a front porch — by miming the image with various components in the open hand of a player while that player has their eyes closed. The other players in the game don't see your card — only the miming — and they then contribute cards to a pool from which the active player must try to identify the correct image.

The secret image, followed below by a tactile description of that image

At Gen Con 2021, @HachetteGames demoed In the Palm of Your Hand from La Boîte de Jeu, a party game in which you try to convey an image by "drawing" it in another player's hands w/ the included game components. Everyone else tries to get that player to choose the wrong card. —WEM pic.twitter.com/74zUSclsgq
— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) September 25, 2021

• 25th Century Games had a range of titles in stock, both old and new, such as On the Rocks, a drafting game from designers Christina and Michael Pittre and co-publisher PenTree Games in which you try to assemble the right ingredients in your various glasses to complete drink orders.

Company owner Chad Elkins said that copies of the game were already gone from the warehouse, with everything in distribution other than what was for sale at the show. This might sound like a good thing, but Elkins says that combination of a small print run and a quick sellout is a mixed blessing since you have no idea what demand might really be. Should you invest in a second printing immediately? Especially since production and shipping issues might delay arrival of those games until after the initial buzz fades?

Elkins noted that Tutankhamun and Space Explorers were also out of stock at the warehouse level, but he plans to Kickstart Yuri Zhuravljov's Space Explorers: Age of Ambition in 2022 for release in 2023, with a reprint of the base game taking place at the same time. This expansion includes seven modules for use with the base game, with at most three modules being added to any one game.

Also on the display tables at Gen Con 2021 was the second edition of Danny Devine's tile-laying game Kōhaku, co-published with Gold Seal Games. Players take turns drafting a koi tile and a feature tile from a shared display, placing those tiles in their personal grid in a checkerboard fashion. Feature tiles score based on what's adjacent to them or what's present in the entire grid.

The initial release of Kōhaku featured acrylic tiles, whereas this new release has ye olde cardboard tiles to keep the price reasonable. Aside from copies flown in for Gen Con 2021, the general release of Kōhaku will take place in Q1 2022.

A surprise release at Gen Con 2021 was Holly Jolly, a 2-4 player card game from Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle that gives 25CG a second Christmas title in its line-up following 2018's Christmas Lights: A Card Game. Each turn in the game, you add one of the three light or tinsel cards to the tree, changing the collective value of the lights or tinsel (depending on what you add), with you then taking an ornament or present card to match this total value, with these latter cards scoring in various game-y ways.

Elkins isn't sure whether the main shipment of Holly Jolly will arrive in time for holiday sales in 2021. If not, he'll make the game available for purchase on the 25CG website, then release the game into retail in Q4 2022. Given the shipping issues now, long-range plans aren't a bad thing for publishers to consider as long as they can afford to sit on inventory.

Other titles coming from 25th Century Games:

• Three Sisters is a roll-and-write design that designers Pinchback and Riddle Kickstarted through their Motor City Gameworks brand, with 25CG having come on board later to co-publish and distribute. This title should hit retail outlets in Q1 2022.

• The tile-placement, garden-building game Gartenbau from David Abelson and Alex Johns should hit Kickstarter in October 2021 for a 2022 release.

• David Conklin's Blazon will launch on Kickstarter after that, with this being a game about medieval shield-making with art by Ian O'Toole.

• O'Toole is also handling art duties on 25th Century Games' new version of Reiner Knizia's classic auction game Ra.

• Green Team Wins will be a 2022 release from Nathan Thornton, co-designer of Medium, in which you try to answer questions in the same way that everyone else does.

Each game, you use 15 question cards. Reveal a card, then have everyone answer it simultaneously. Whichever answer is the most popular one constitutes the "correct" answer, and everyone who gave that answer is part of the green team — at least for this turn. You score 1 point whenever you join the green team, and you score 2 points each time you're already on the green team and give the correct answer. The player count is open so long as you can manage to track who's answered what!

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Hoo boy, have I covered only two publishers so far?! Let's see whether I can cover ground more quickly in future posts so that I'm not doing this until SPIEL '21 opens in mid-October...