Hi! I'll be traveling with friends this year as a celebration for one specific friend, and his wish was to go to gencon. He is super excited as are my other friends.

Here's the thing, I don't really like board games that much. I'm never opposed to try a new game, they just rarely hit for me. And I have yet to find any consistency in what I do/don't like. I've always been around friends who've enjoyed board games, so I've got some pretty good exposure to some more popular games of the last couple decades, to name a few:

Catan (kinda fun)

Carcassonne (hate it)

Pandemic (was interesting before 2020 lol)

Splendor (Big fan)

Code Names (had good games, had bad games, really depends on who I'm playing with)

Dominion (liked it up until my friends got really invested and started wrecking me with combos I'd never thought of)

Azul (Tbh, I don't think I fully understood this game)

Ticket to Ride (actually quite like this game)

I've had some good time playing the games, but overall I really just play because my friends are.

I know there are also RPGs, but I feel like I need a few plays to understand a system before I can really enjoy it, currently have 2 ongoing campaigns in 5e and P2e, and quite like both of those.

I'll mostly be following them around, I know we're doing the game library thing, so I think that will be pretty fun. And a couple of us I think are playtesting Starfinder or something like that. I'm also planning to get a bunch of general tickets so I can pop into things with openings if they look interesting. Overall the list of events is just insanely overwhelming and I just can't research every single game and system, so really any advice on how the con works or what I should/should not go to would be super helpful!

Sorry for the rant, but I'm just really worried about not being able to take advantage of things I might like because there's just SO much there and it's hard to cut through everything.