In action, it looks and sounds completely bonkers. If they’re right, both players score a point. It’s a cacophony of people saying “dude.” When two players both think they’ve gotten a match, they call “sweet” and lay down their cards. Players all go at the same time, reciting the words on the card that they’ve drawn from their deck and trying to match that card to someone else’s across the table. There’s “dewd,” “dude?” and “doode,” just to name a few. On the side that faces each player, however, it’s written a whole bunch of different ways. This Target-exclusive party game from North Star Games comes with 72 cards with “dude” written on both sides. The game on everyone’s lips at this year’s Gen Con, both literally and figuratively, was called Dude. The retail price is $50 and, given the amount of cardboard in the box, that’s an extraordinary value.ĭude and More Dude, from North Star Games.

You can find it in stores and online soon. Princess Jing sits two players, and scales well for both young and old. The hook is that one of your pieces on the board is a mirror, allowing you to see behind the screens to find the other player’s pawns. Imagine the classic game Stratego where, instead of moving soldiers around the board, you’re a young woman trying to sneak out of her parents’ castle. The most eye-popping game on the floor this year was a thematic hidden movement game called Princess Jing. My trip was all about great games that were available for fans to take home. With the rise of Kickstarter as a venue to fund and sell pre-orders for tabletop games, the last few years at Gen Con have seemed more about hyping future games than selling what’s on hand. Unlike in years past, most of them were actually for sale. This year, it seemed like every booth had a game that I’d never seen before. Literally hundreds of developers and publishers are on hand from all over the world, each one looking to draw the discerning eye of more than 60,000 attendees. What I love most about Gen Con, the United States’ largest tabletop gaming convention, is the vendor floor.

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