Gen Con 2026: The Biggest Tabletop Event of the Year Is One Month Away

Board Game Conference Floor

Gen Con opens in Indianapolis on July 30 — one month from today — and for four days the Indiana Convention Center becomes the closest thing tabletop gaming has to a world capital. Last year drew a record 72,000 attendees. This year’s lineup gives them good reason to return. What Gen Con Is Gen Con … Read more

The Best Free Browser Games to Play Right Now (2026)

laptop on a table with games on the screen

The best browser games of 2026 share one feature that no console title can match: you can be playing within ten seconds of deciding you want to. No downloads, no accounts in most cases, no hardware requirements beyond a modern browser. Whether you have five minutes or five hours, something on this list will fit. … Read more

Smoothie Wars Board Game Review

Smoothie

Smoothie Wars sets players up as rival smoothie entrepreneurs competing on a tropical island across a simulated week of business. The premise sounds light, but the economic structure underneath it is genuine. For the right group, it works considerably better than the cheerful packaging suggests. The game was designed by UK entrepreneur Dr Thom Van … Read more

What Does It Actually Take to Make a Board Game? Four Designers Discuss

Panelists discussing board game design

At CONvergence 2025, the Talking Cardboard channel hosted a 45-minute panel with four working tabletop game designers: Jeremy and his collaborators from Sophisticated Cardboard, the studio behind horror game Stifling Dark; Liz, a designer and former public school teacher whose games include Night Witches and Queen of Spies; Adam, a former Fantasy Flight and Asmodee … Read more

Nintendo Switch 2: Essential Tips For New Users

Switch 2 on a table

The Nintendo Switch 2 has more built into it than the menus suggest at first glance. Taking 20 minutes to go through System Settings properly will surface several features you would otherwise stumble across months later. Here are the ones worth finding early. Protect your battery from day one Nintendo has built in a setting … Read more

Pokémon GO Turns 10: How Is It Holding Up in 2026?

hand holding a smartphone playing Pokemon GO

Pokémon GO launched on July 6, 2016. In the summer that followed, people walked into traffic, trespassed on private property, and organized mass gatherings in public parks in the middle of the night. It was the first time augmented reality gaming had broken through to a general audience, and the scale of the cultural moment … Read more

The Best Apps for Board Gamers

smart phone on a table with board game apps

The best board game apps share one quality: they disappear once you are using them properly. A good companion app reduces setup time, handles fiddly scorekeeping, or adds something genuinely impossible with physical components alone — and then gets out of the way so the game stays on the table rather than on a screen. … Read more

The Best Card Games for Long Flights and Train Rides

passenger holding cards

Long-haul travel produces a specific kind of dead time that a phone screen does not always fill well — turbulence makes scrolling tedious, battery life is finite, and a shared activity beats parallel scrolling when you are traveling with someone else. Card games solve this better than almost anything else: no batteries, no setup beyond … Read more

Daggerheart Review: Critical Role’s Own RPG System

Daggerheart Dice

Daggerheart, the original tabletop RPG from Critical Role’s publishing arm Darrington Press, released on May 20, 2025 and immediately sold out worldwide. Business Insider reported the launch sold out in under a week, with the company’s chief operating officer noting that a year’s expected supply lasted just two weeks. More than a year later, the … Read more

The Best Co-op Video Games for Couples Who Don’t Want to Compete Against Each Other

The game controllers side by side

The standard couples gaming problem is well known among people who actually try it: one partner already plays games, the other does not, and most “co-op” games turn out to require one player to carry most of the difficulty while the other watches, frustrated, until the controller quietly goes back in the drawer. Genuinely cooperative … Read more