Gencon 2026 Recap: Board and Card Games

 

I rarely play card or board games but I played a little of both at Gencon at the behest of friends who brought them. Here's what I thought of both.

 

TIME BARONS

  

Time Barons is a fast moving 2 or 4 player engine building competitive card game. You get a little hand  of cards and some meeples to build your civilization and wreck the other guy's setup. The objective is total extermination of the enemy population. Time Barons are genocidal assholes and your civilization isn't safe until all your rivals are dead.

 

The basic rules are simple but each card introduces a special mechanic that can chain together to produce more complex strategies. Civilizations are path dependent and the initial draw can set you on a route to building up a strong economy, reaching for higher tech levels or rushing down the enemy with a horde of barbarians. You've got four levels of technology and a bunch of randomness within those levels. Each playthrough feels different and while the game is unbalanced it's also short enough that the bullshit overpowered combination end things in time for a rematch. High level cards give you game breaking powers but low level cards remain useful by giving you bread and butter abilities like gaining followers or dealing damage. The art and mechanics tie the game system together with the theme.

 

 

We played several rounds of the two player game and a couple rounds of the four player team battle variant, but didn't touch the expansion cards.  The four player game does introduce some rules ambiguity but doesn't lengthen the game much. Your team loses if one member is eliminated and the second anyone shows weakness they get tag teamed by both foes.

 

The game is easy to learn, has enough depth to be worth learning, has enough randomness that the most skilled player doesn't always win, and rewards improvisation over high level strategic planning. I'm sure I'd get bored of it if I played it enough, but for a few games in between activities it was great.   

  

FALLOUT: THE BOARD GAME 

 

The FFG Fallout board game is the opposite of Time Barons. Time Barons is made by an indie game developer, Fallout is based on a million dollar IP. Barons is minimalist, Fallout is maximalist. Barons is charming, Fallout is slick. Time Barons is over fast, Fallout takes an afternoon.

 

The Fallout board game is one of those role playing board games where you get a character sheet with stats, a map to move around on, equipment cards, a battle system, etc. It's a big box with big expansions. We played the Fallout 2 scenario. The game was slow to start due to the sprawling world and the limited number of options starting characters get. Every card had multiple paragraphs of text and sent us sifting through the deck for other linked cards. The skill and battle systems were slick, with most encounters decided in a single roll unless the players used skills or items to reroll dice. I played as the Wastelander. I wandered around trading and completing all the mission objectives that required money while the other players put in the hard work of killing an endless stream of raiders, bugs and Enclave soldiers. The procedural map generation rules made some locations feel disconnected or repetitive but there were a few story dungeons that were fun to explore.

 

For better and worse the game often felt like the old 2D Fallouts. Armor and a ranged weapon granted near invincibility while anyone stuck fighting in melee died fast. Pushing across the wasteland revealing map squares and getting swarmed with the same random encounters over and over again and selling all the garbage you gathered at the end felt like the video game. It was more fun than I thought it would be at the beginning, but after playing for several hours I wished we had spent that time playing a Fallout RPG instead. I'm still glad we got to try it.