I just got back from GenCon yesterday, and it was (as usual) a whirlwind of new games and people and experiences. I helped demo and sell games at the Adams Apple Games booth, and also ran some Chess Cubes events in the evenings.

But so many conventions have already passed without mentioning them (or anything) here on my blog that I wanted to just write a quick overview.

I had a table earlier this year at 2DCon Unplugged, where I played and demoed Chess Cubes for the first time outside of playtesting events. It’s a smaller con, but we had a good reception, and I collected a bunch of names for the mailing list. (You can join the list at chesscubes.com.)

Then in May was MinneBar, our annual tech bar camp here in MN, and for the Nth year in a row, I organized a GameDev Microtalks 2026 session, where I gave a 7-minute overview of all the games I’ve been making with the Bubble Tiles math playset. I also had Chess Cubes in the arcade area, and spent a lot of time teaching Chess Cube Chess and talking about manufacturing techniques and 3D printing.

I gave a talk at the annual AGPI convention titled “Exploring Recursive Puzzle Games”. It was a talk I’ve long wanted to give, about how Abstract Strategy games and Action Puzzle games have puzzles that feed their game states into the next puzzle. I’ll embed the slides for this below.

Only a week after AGPI was the Puzzle Parley, where I cut my first wooden jigsaw puzzle (in a workshop), and got to hear all about that narrow slice of puzzle design/creation. I really enjoyed it, and have fantasies about cutting wooden jigsaw puzzles now, although it’s one of so many endeavors I don’t really have time to pursue.

Coming up is 2D Con prime, and I’ll have a table with Chess Cubes there again. It feels like a miss that I still don’t have them for sale (or even pre-order), but there are still quite a few open questions. I’ll leave you with this teaser image I’ve just created for my application to exhibit at next year’s TTGX convention.