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I have been going to Gen Con now for nearly a decade, and one of the highlights of every trip for me is a tour of the wargaming hall.
Months before Gen Con starts, individual game masters and small clubs submit events to Gen Con LLC. Later, attendees make a mad dash to purchase tickets to those events and participate in games they might otherwise never get to play. The small amount of money earned at each session helps the makers fund their hobby, and sometimes even their trip out to Indianapolis.
The reason these games are such a big draw is because each of them is a one-of-a-kind set, handmade by skilled hobbyists and artists. They're simply magnificent.
For four days last week I did laps through the open play hall, talking with those artists and the game masters. Consider this photo essay a catalog of gaming experiences available for your next trip to Gen Con.
For more from the floor of Gen Con, see our StoryStream.
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Pat Louis is a hobby gamer, and has a talent for creating amazingly detailed terrain. This is his adaptation of Academy Games' 1775: Rebellion.
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Louis says Academy approached him to make a version of 1775 after seeing his work on another one of their titles at last year's Gen Con, 1812: The Invasion of Canada.
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The hardest part, Louis said, was planning out how to abstract out all the different states and territories. He ended up using different colors of flocking with borders of lichen.
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This 1944 Alsace terrain was created to be played with rules from John Bobek's book The Games of War: A Treasury of Rules for Battles with Toy Soldiers, Ships and Planes.
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Yeah, it's literally plastic army men, but the bombed-out buildings really sell it.
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Aerodrome is one I simply must sign up for one of these days. It's played with fairly large, perhaps 5 inch-long, model planes, and works with World War I and World War II aircraft.
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Each one is suspended on a riser that allows them to adjust their altitude above the game map.
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Players control their planes with beautiful, handmade wooden instrument panels. Old rifle shells are used for pegs.
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Battletech always has a huge presence at Gen Con. Every year CamoSpecs puts together an amazing diorama, and this year was no exception.
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Indianapolis-based Flames of War community Able Kompanie has been running their Battle of Stalingrad game for more than five years.
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The game board is so massive, and so precious to the group, one volunteer pulls an 11-hour shift overnight just to keep an eye on it.
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The wheat fields? Yeah... that's a doormat cut to size.
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Father Aaron Jenkins was back with his handmade Game of Thrones board game, based on the version sold by Fantasy Flight Games. You can read more about it in our interview from last year's Gen Con.
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The wildest game I found on the floor was called GI Joe: Cobra Assault. It's a homebrew reskin of Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Imperial Assault, but created using a beautiful collection of vintage 1980s Joes.
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The doors were bulkheads from the USS Flag aircraft carrier.
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Infinity had a big presence on the gaming floor this year. What attracted me to it was the terrain. There were dense jungles, as well as this ice planet.
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While slightly more obscure than Flames of War, Jagdpanzer armies made a good showing. This game was set up for play later that afternoon.
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The Jagdpanzer battlefield featured a single central road with a line of refugees fleeing from the front.
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The gaming hall is open 24 hours a day during Gen Con. It was 2 a.m. Friday when I found myself wandering the hall looking for a game. That's when I stumbled upon this Lord of the Rings miniatures set laid out and ready to play the next day.
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It's possible this is the Games Workshop version of the miniatures wargame, but no one was around for me to ask.
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The Miniature Building Authority always has a great-looking table on the vendor floor. But this year they brought a new venture to the play hall. It's called Modern Conflict.
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Game master Robert Layson was on hand to give me a guided tour of the scenario they had set up. It's a four-way battle between American and UN forces, as well as two Muslim forces including a dictator and a group of insurgents.
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Mordheim, an older but very popular system, was being played at one table. The system is receiving a lot of attention lately for its popular Steam version, now in Early Access.
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There's rarely a more beautiful collection of miniatures than those spread across a table to play Napoleonics. This set was engaged in battle using a system of rules called Napoleon's Battles, first published in 1989 by Avalon Hill.
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It sure did take up a lot of room, but the dozen players gathered around a massive game of Sailpower by Sea Dog Game Studios sure was having a great time.
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Silent Death is another older game still being played avidly at Gen Con. And who can blame them, when they've got a collection of ships that looks this gorgeous?
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The SWMGamers.com community was on hand all weekend, running everything from this attack on the second Death Star to the battle of Hoth.
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Several games of Warhammer 40,000 were being played on the show floor. This was one of the largest, by far. Not a lot of terrain, but honestly there doesn't seem to be room for it. My question is, how did forces this large manage to get this close to each other in the first place?
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Warbirds in Miniature is an air combat system that also features rules for Korean War-era jets.
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Gimbals on the risers let players bank their planes on the table. For the ground, they were using vinyl mats scavenged from old copies of Battle Masters.
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Finally, there was a fan-made version of Zombicide that looked amazing.
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Each individual zombie on the board looked completely different.
