by Armchair Dragoons PAO, 24 June 2026
Despite the protestations of the Fanbois of August, the adage still applies: you go to GenCon to shop and you go to Origins to play.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t play games at GenCon, or that you can’t shop at Origins. That’s just the encapsulating the dominant mindset of the attendees between the two. Besides, only one of them has the CABS Library, and given how huge that is, it’s pretty much the trump card in the argument. This year, CABS brought over 2100 games to the convention, and that somehow still wasn’t quite everything.
Gameplay at Origins is largely divided into a couple of categories
- Vendor-sponsored play areas: publishers run the events, usually at space where they can also immediately sell you their games. There were some of those this year in the main gaming hall, with Catalyst, Warlord, Eagle-Gryphon, and others, but most of those photos are going to be included with our exhibit hall galleries
- Organized play areas: clubs or other groups (like us!) that put together a set schedule of events in an area staffed and run by that team. Some of the others include the Red Shirts, SGG, Rogue Judges,
North Coast GamersNational Community of Gamers, and whatever organizational name the train gamers have these days. This also covers a huge percentage of the RPG events, as many of those are organized and run by event teams. - Scheduled events: random individual GM submits an event and is assigned a date/time and a table and shows up to teach and/or play the game and then moves off the table for whoever is up next. There’s a lot of these but they’re harder to find than those organized by clubs and teams.
- Open gaming: here’s a bunch of tables and you just grab one to play on with your friends, but there’s no reservations or time limits or event listings or anything else.
There’s a few other weird ones that overlap some of these categories, like extended play at a publisher’s booth in the exhibit hall, or random games in the hallways, but for the most part this covers about 95% of what’s out there. And there’s a LOT out there.
Among the organized and sponsored events in the main gaming hall, you had everything from out-of-the-box stock Eurogames to time-sinks like Twilight Imperium that never come out back home. There were multi-table extended Star Trek games, and custom-built character games like Smurf Wars or mashups that mixed things like Mario Kart with Gaslands. Please don’t ask us what all these are; we were moving way too fast for that but did try to get boxes in the pictures wherever possible.
Official Events
Some of these were in dedicated spaces like the Rogue Judges room, or R. Talsorian’s area along the concourse. Most of them were in the main gaming hall.
most images can click to enlarge
The Wider Angle
Some wider shots of the main gaming area, including the crowd lining up to go into the exhibit hall one morning
This is the latest article in our series of articles covering Origins 2026 and you can find a carousel linking all of them across the bottom
More Official Events
We broke this into a couple of galleries for easier navigation.
There’s more gameplay coming, including the open gaming area, and RPGs, plus the Wargame HQ!
Photos mostly from Corinne Mahaffey, plus Brant Guillory, Wes Crawford, Kai Jensen, Todd Surgoine, Doug Bleyaert, Jason Matthews, Marc Gacy, David Thompson, Doug Fitch, Ryan Heilman, and/or Larry Pinkerton
All of the Origins 2026 Articles
Origins Details ~ Wargame HQ Events ~ War College Events ~ Wargaming at Origins ~ Exhibitor Spotlights ~ Origins History ~ Q&A ~ Final Countdown
Opening Day ~ The Game Hall ~ More Gameplay ~ Above the Convention ~ Minis Wargaming ~ Wargame HQ Partners ~ Wargame HQ Spotlights
Exhibit Hall ~ Cosplay ~ Everything Else ~ AAR ~ Forum Thread
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
