Gen Con
tabletop game convention in North America
Gen Con is the largest tabletop game convention in North America by both attendance and number of events. It features traditional pen-and-paper, board, and card games, including role-playing games, miniatures wargames, live action role-playing games, collectible card games, and strategy games. Gen Con also features computer games. Attendees engage in a variety of tournament and interactive game sessions. In 2019, Gen Con had nearly 70,000 unique attendees.
Established in 1968 as the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention by Gary Gygax, who later co-created Dungeons & Dragons, Gen Con was first held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The convention was moved to various locations in Wisconsin from 1972 to 1984 before becoming fixed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1985, where it remained until moving to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 2003. Other Gen Con conventions have been held sporadically in locations around the United States, as well as internationally.
In 1976, Gen Con became the property of TSR, Inc., the gaming company co-founded by Gary Gygax. In 1997, TSR (and Gen Con) were acquired by Wizards of the Coast, which was subsequently acquired by Hasbro.
“Gen Con” enters the record as tabletop game convention in North America. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what tabletop, game and convention can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Gen Con” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, tabletop, game and convention provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q550430. VIAF identifies the subject as 136272717. The Library of Congress control number is n2009003359. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1968, 1972 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gen Con” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.