Preview of the 2016 Previews: Origins, Gen Con, Dice Con and Spiel

Preview of the 2016 Previews: Origins, Gen Con, Dice Con and Spiel
From gallery of W Eric Martin
With May more than halfway over, here's a look ahead at the summer and autumn convention schedule to let you know when to expect convention previews that highlight the new games that will be shown, sold or demoed at each of these shows. In chronological order:

BGG.CON Spring, May 27-30, 2016: Surprise! I'm not posting a preview for this con, partly because I don't know what to expect (having missed the first such convention in 2015) and partly because I'm planning to hang out and actually play games instead of doing news stuff, although inevitably I'll still spend some time talking with publishers about upcoming titles. After all, we have just over a month before...

Origins Game Fair, June 15-19, 2016: I've already contacted several dozen game publishers about this convention to both assemble an Origins 2016 Preview — which will go live Monday, May 30 — and schedule livestream game demos. Yes, BGG will be at Origins for all five days of Origins, and the current plan is to livestream from 10:00 to 16:00 each day. This will be an interesting experiment since at Gen Con and Spiel we have no time to spare and typically rush through a new game on camera every few minutes. Given the smaller number of new releases at Origins, I expect we'll include more prototypes than usual and have time to engage in designer and publisher chit-chat. Different!

Gen Con, August 4-7, 2016: As we've done the past couple of years, BGG will livestream game demonstrations from Indianapolis over the four days of Gen Con, and the Gen Con 2016 Preview goes live Monday, June 20 — the day after Origins ends. I just hope that the Gen Con organizers turn on the air conditioning on Wednesday. Set-up was brutal in 2015!

Dice Con, August 27-28, 2016: Most of you have probably not heard of Dice Con, but this event launched in Beijing in 2015 to bring media attention to board and card game publishers in China, while also welcoming other publishers to China and encouraging designers to present new works to publishers for licensing. I met with the Dice Con organizers in Beijing in May 2016, and since I'm largely unaware of the Chinese game market and want to learn more, I offered to pull together a Dice Con 2016 Preview to both educate myself and encourage Chinese producers to put their information on BGG. I plan to publish this convention preview on Monday, July 25, 2016.

Spiel, October 13-16, 2016: BGG will livestream game demos from Essen, Germany once again, and the monstrous Spiel 2016 Preview — which I started before Spiel 2015 opened — goes live Monday, August 8, the day after Gen Con ends. That preview boasted nearly eight hundred titles in 2015, and I'm sure that it'll surpass that total in 2016 given the ever-increasing number of publishers who show up at Spiel from around the world.

•••

If you're a designer or publisher who plans to present new games at one or more of these shows, feel free to email me the information now to ensure that you're included in the convention previews later. My email address is in the BGG News header at the top of this page, and you can learn how to submit game listings to the BGG database here. Please send a separate email for each convention and include the name of the con — e.g., "New titles for Gen Con 2016" — in the header. I'll also poke publishers with info requests, but feel free to act now! Avoid the rush!

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