Day Two!
There is a version of service that asks very little of you and gives quite a lot back. You show up, you pay attention, you try to be useful to whoever walks through the door. That was most of my day, and I mean that as a genuine compliment to how the day went.
Day two of Gen Con 2026 started with volunteer shifts in the BoardGameGeek Hot Games Rooms. The name refers to the most talked-about new releases of the convention, the games people have been waiting to get their hands on. The name also, as it happens, described the rooms themselves with some accuracy. They were warm. Not unpleasantly so, not memorably so, just consistently, honestly warm in the way that any room becomes when it is full of people who are genuinely glad to be somewhere.
My role was to welcome people as they came in, check them in, answer questions about the games on display, and point folks toward something worth playing. It is a small thing to do. It is also, I think, an underrated thing to do. There is real value in being the person who helps someone feel less lost. A convention like Gen Con can be enormous and a little disorienting, especially if you wandered into a room without quite knowing what you were looking for. Helping someone identify what they actually want to play and then watching them sit down and start learning it is a satisfying loop. Philosophy would call it something like being in right relation to the people around you. I would call it a good morning.
After the shifts ended, I had time to breathe. I walked around, talked with other attendees and crew, and did the quieter thing that conventions are also good for, which is simply being present in a space where everyone has chosen to be. That shared choice does something to the atmosphere of a place. It is not nothing.
Today was also, and I want to say this plainly, an Exhibit Hall-free day. The Exhibit Hall at Gen Con is an experience unto itself: enormous, loud in the best way, packed with every game and publisher and accessory you could want, and genuinely exhausting to be inside for any extended stretch of time. Today we skipped it entirely. I am at peace with this. More than peace. I was grateful.
Once Lanie and Julie finished their own shifts, the three of us settled at a table along with Jon and had dinner. After dinner we played games. This is, after all, what we are here for. Fresh Market went to the table first. It is the kind of game that rewards you just enough to make you feel genuinely smart right up until someone else at the table quietly makes everything you built irrelevant. This happened. It was satisfying in the way that good competition usually is, even when you are the one being made irrelevant.
Misfit Heroes followed and brought a different energy with it. Everyone at the table was operating at a slight angle to everyone else, doing their own thing, and somehow the whole thing cohered into a game where nobody was quite sure who was ahead until it became suddenly and completely obvious, at the very end. That quality in a game, that ability to create shared suspense without manufacturing it, is harder to design than it looks.
Go Go Go-Kart was exactly what it sounds like and exactly what the moment called for. Fast, light, and fun in a way that does not ask anything complicated of you. You are in essence wagering over the course of three races who will win each. You are betting on the Taco, Cat, Pizza Goat or Cheese driven cart to win. Sometimes a game is just a good time and that is reason enough to play it.
Quixx Duel was played between me and Jon specifically, one on one. A proper contest. I will say that it is a good game and that Jon is a legitimate opponent and I will leave the particulars of the outcome where they belong, which is unspoken. Who am I kidding, we had a hideous tie. Somehow that was fitting in the end.
Games wound down around ten o'clock. Lanie had a late shift to get ready for and needed to help close down the room for the night, so that was the natural end of the evening. There is something I appreciate about a night that ends for a reason rather than just trailing off. It felt complete.
By that point Julie had claimed a corner of the room as her own. She had settled into it with the full commitment of a person who has been on their feet all day and has decided, somewhere around hour twelve, that this corner is good enough and she is staying. She looked, and I say this with real affection, somewhat homeless. Not distressed. Not unhappy. Just thoroughly done and occupying a corner with a quiet dignity that I respected deeply.
I walked her back to the room. That was day two. It was a good one.
By Norman, BigGame, BGG Tabletop. Photography. Philosophy. The spaces where they all live.
