Gameholecon 2026

In October, I went to Gameholecon in Madison, Wisconsin, with my kid, Klund, and his kids.  We'd skipped a year while Klund was moving out east.  And the year before, I only managed to catch a day because my wife had a heart attack, so I sent Aeryn on ahead.  But one of Klund's kids lives in Chicago now, so he had a place to stay and an easy drive, if not an easy flight.

On the way to the convention, Aeryn and I stopped at the gaming store in Osseo, Wisconsin, where we were finding some brunch.  Not at the gaming store, that's Boards and Bricks.  Huge selection.  We ate at the Norske Nook.  Although I was way too full that early for pie and didn't want to haul any with me.

Aeryn picked up a copy of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes.  They have the base Cascadia and the roll and write versions.  This one adds a layer of complexity by going UP as well as out.  So you end up overlaying some of your own tiles and matching biomes and critters matters, as well as multipliers for how high sets are.  Here we are at a brewery near the Air B&B waiting for the Klunds to get in from Chicago.  We played again later with the Klunds.  You really have to change your thinking around from the initial version.

We also got in rounds of:

• Flip 7 - push your luck style
• Spokes - I have a lot of cycling games now.  This one is amusing as it's mostly an optimize your route via drafting variation.
• Coloretto - make sets of matched chameleons.  I've played this quite a few times before.  The rest of my family really likes it.  I was trying to read what game this was from my list and couldn't tell if it was Color Ho, Colureho...Aeryn was able to read my scribbling.

I was going to take my bicycle, but the weather threatened cold and wet, so I left it behind.  But I got in some good walking every day so that all that sitting didn't entirely derail my health.  Very cool Halloween decorations near the Air B&B.

The actual Con.  There was a big Dungeon Crawler Carl presence this year due to the games / role playing games.  The posters were amusing.

Thunder Road: Vendetta.  You're trying to survive a straight track where the rocks and oil and mines and sides and other cars are trying to stop you.  You play with a small, medium, and large car, so you have some flexibility.  Cars frequently run into each other creating a lot of interaction.  One player in this game reached the end of the road almost immediately, which removes the first tile and everyone on it.  I think about 2/3 the cards disappeared at that point.  I had one car further up and it managed to literally coast in for a win because my first two cars had died.  The left over actions allow your remaining car to move a square.  Bit of irony.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal.  I see why people like it.  Handling the heat and the corners is exciting.  But it is SO much like Flamme Rouge, and I like that theme better.  The difference between optimizing your deck in Heat and knowing the composition of your deck and the likelihood you've already used up a card in Flamme is a subtle difference.

Rebel Princess.  It's a trick taking game with individual differences and some changing goals.  I won this one, but it wasn't a hard win given at least one of the players really didn't understand trick taking in general.  It's almost like having someone else playing for you in that situation unless the other players are really good at trick taking too.

Lemmings in Space! 25 years old.  I played with the creator.  This was an amusing game.  Not a lot of strategy.  Your lemmings WANT to die, so you're skimming stars to get radiation sickness, visiting planets and hoping to find a new disease, and optimizing your ship profile so you're the ship all the other ships attack.  All while studiously avoiding anything that makes your crew reproduce faster.  As my last game of the day, a fun way to end things before bed.

Tenpenny Parks with Innovation Expansion  The expansion is new this year.  Aeryn and I have played this game with the creator - and again this year - and own a copy.  Aeryn's even hosted it at Con of the North.  This is an enjoyable game with a good theme.  You can lean into the money win (which I usually do), and in the past you could sort of corner that tactic, but the new addition does add some new ways to make money to make that a strategy others can cope with.

Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game.  My third time playing this one, Aeryn's first.  The last two times I played it was a free for all with four players.  This time it was 1-1.  Our host didn't know the rules well enough and I forgot how the push worked, so I played my first round wrong and it showed.  My character was supposed to shove and bounce the other fighters around and mostly I just wandered up to their face and then hit them.  The second round I went looking for a correction, and I didn't win that time either, but it was a point of difference instead of almost a full health bar difference.  The chaining mechanism for attacks in this one is fun once you understand it.

Popes and Plagues.  I backed a reprint and own it, but hadn't played with anyone, so I was excited the designer was going to be there to teach the game.  He gave an amusing overview.  You're basically trying to build your population up until the plague and inquisition kick in and then it's race to be the last one standing.  The depopulating is spread around pretty well with minor diseases, war, etc., so you're not really getting a huge population bump before a plague ship shows up.

A guillotine over near the game library.

Faster Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!  Not a game.  We skipped the True Dungeon this year as it's getting a little spendy for noobs (and we're still noobs after all these years; we don't collect and trade and sell dungeon tokens), so I proposed we catch this event.  I've backed their RPG books and a game and watched their series on line.  The basic idea is that the group is level 1 characters and by the end of the session they encounter a challenge that's likely....definitely...going to kill them.  There's a lot of humor built in.  I wasn't sure who the adventurers would be, but they were some of the Con presenters.  For instance, the guy with the white hair, Ed Greenwood of AD&D fame.  He's famous for the Forgotten Realms setting.  For not having done it before, they were hilarious.  The guy on the left channeled a female orc fighter with a bent for officious paperwork.  The interactions made it great.

Back to the Air B&B.  We spent most of a day gaming at the house, although Aeryn and I hopped down to the Con for a game I'd wanted to play.

This isn't it.  This is Klund's copy of Wyatt Earp.  Again, a bit of a trick taking game.  But you can sneak in as the second on someone's set and you're trying to up the bounty of the set / outlaw you're most likely to take.  So even a huge set might have a middling bounty.

We snuck out for Talisman with someone involved in the redesign.  I've played this on the iPad in the past.  It's a pretty basic game where you're trying to up your stats to get an advantage over the monsters on the cards and working your way toward the center.  In this incarnation you could play as a team/cooperatively, which was much more fun because some of your decisions could be based on their usefulness to someone else in the group and rather than having to grind forever to defeat the center monster, players could try to optimize a single player.  It doesn't have a good way to "throw away" a spell, however.  Which has always been the case.  So I got a little spell blocked with one I don't think I'd have ever used (and didn't).

Aeryn and I went to Oishi Ramen for dinner.  We used to love Morris Ramen....everyone loved Morris Ramen...but it's gone as of 2024.  Ironically, Mickey's Dairy Bar was gone when we went out to breakfast this year.  It's been bought by some locals, but they plan to re-envision it, and that doesn't sound good.  I didn't catch that it was closed via the map, so we ended up staring at a closed restaurant and wandered up the street for pastries and coffee.

This is the design on the Fantasy Factory beer from Karben4 in Madison.  I absolutely love the can, and it's an IPA that goes well with ramen.

A Gameholecon tradition the last few times, Power Grid.  You wouldn't think a game about efficiently powering up your cities and managing the kind of power plant and resources would be much fun, but the jockeying for resources to power your plants, different kinds of resources, scarcity of resources, and bidding on more powerful plants that escalates significantly toward the end makes it a great game.  I won this one.  Managed to position myself well enough to generally get my coal on the cheap and squirrel away a crazy amount of cash despite hanging a little bit behind until the last two rounds.

Finally, we played Anomia. I'm not keen on a speed mechanic, but it was amusing.  Cards flip and if any two match in front of all the players, those players have to give a unique (not used before, even between games) instance of that category.  For example, lake.  In the moment, it can be much harder than expected.  And when a player takes the cards for the match, it can suddenly reveal other cards that match triggering a cascade.  Reminds me I should find Aeryn a copy for the holidays.

Great event.  I did skip out on a Circus Maximus big board game to play at the Air B&B one day, but that was probably a good trade.  I called it early, so the ticket was easy for someone else to pick up.  I was dubious about going back as it's a little more expensive than when we started, and the game selections aren't always great if you're not a priority ticket, but I had a great time this year.