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by "L'état, c'est moi."

March 13-15, 2026 marked the 12th annual Terminal City Tabletop Convention (TCTC).

Did you know that March 2026 was proclaimed Community Game Month by King Charles?
The convention made it's debut in the west building of the Vancouver Convention Centre. It's (still) Western Canada's largest game convention.

The west building is newer, having been completed in 2009. It was used as the press HQ for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

My former investment advisor has an architecture degree, and back when the new convention centre building was being built he explained to me over drinks one evening that large capital projects have two architects. One is the principal architect that makes the building look the way it does. Think of the iconic look the Sydney Opera House, or the Guggenheim museums. The second architect is the one that deals with all the human factors. Bathrooms. Plumbing. HVAC. Etc. Not glamorous, but necessary.

Apparently when the convention centre ran into the seemingly inevitable cost overruns, to save money they let the second architect go. This leads to the fascinating trivia tidbit that while there is plumbing and bathrooms for people coming to the venue, there are virtually no cloakrooms, lounges for staff/volunteers to stash their stuff, nor formal commissary catering spaces.

Architectural sidebar unlocked. On to the con!

This year tickets available were on the order of 3000, and the con also was a full day Friday whereas before it started Friday afternoon, a full day Saturday, and closed at 6pm on Sunday.

The space was, as one might expect in a 12 million square foot facility, wide, deep, and with really high ceilings. There were curtain walls put up to segregate areas such as the bag check, the RPG zone (much more on that!), and the main stage.

For Christmas I had bought patron passes for the entire family, namely my brilliant talented and fabulous wife, and my smart pretty and cool kid home for a gap before grad school. My friend Melissa came up from the Seattle area and stayed at ours for the duration. In addition about a dozen folks I often have the pleasure of gaming with, including two from my regular Thursday Night Crew, a friend from Whitehorse, and of course all the new friends we made at the con.

With the expanded venue space, they had more scheduled events to select from, including about 50% more RPG sessions than last year. Another perk this year was that you could pick up your ticket early on Thursday afternoon and if you had pre-registered lots for sale in the used marketplace drop them off at the same time. If you didn't have used games to drop off, you could also do advanced pick up in person at local favourite game shop, Rain City Games.

My schedule last year had me in all seven time slots available for RPG sessions, i.e. the entire con. This year there were two added time slots, but I chose to cut down to five slots. That wound up being a better balance. This year I only played, next year I'll very likely run a few things again.

Welcome to the RPG zone

The RPG area is run by an amazing set of volunteers. In addition to having about a lot of regular sessions this year, they also had a laundry list of volunteer GMs on deck to run "RPGs on demand". If you were at loose ends you could show up and say "I'd love to play some Dungeons & Dragons" or "I've heard of Daggerheart, I'd like to try it!", and voila, they would set you up. This turned out to be a very popular offering, especially for those with RPG curious kids. Overall, there were about 50% more table hours of RPGs than in 2025.

Friday the 13th

So, what Roger do this year?

I arrived at opening and had nothing booked, and simply enjoyed some ambiance. I visited all the vendor booths, talked to lots of folks, saw the demo tables where designers and publishers were previewing some games. More on the vendors at the end.

One that caught my eye was Bananarchy, going to crowdfunding in May, which is a small party game for 3-8 players where you are picking, plucking, stealing, and bamboozling bananas, and there are action and reaction cards. I didn't get a chance to sit down and play, but as it was quiet I had a long chat with the designer and it looks like just the thing to have in your repertoire for social gaming. Everytime I walked by folks seems to be having a good time, and Nathan was committed to his banana costume.

One of my friends was an admissions desk volunteer, and when she was free a bunch of us went over to the bistro area and had lunch over a game of...

Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure
Clank, for the uninitiated, is a deck building game with a fixed map showing a home area, an above ground area, and the deeps where the dragon lives. In the deeps are artifacts. You and your intrepid companions are trying to get in and steal an artifact and make it back alive, or at least to the surface.

I'd long heard of this game before I actually played it, ironically at a prior TCTC! My two fellow players had never played so I was able to make a couple of converts.

My favourite version of Clank is Clank!: Catacombs, which I like because you are constructing the dungeon as you go.

Sadly the library copy was missing a couple starter cards and all the lock pick tokens, but I was a good gaming citizen and reported it to the library volunteers.

ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game
Shannon ran an amazing Alien session last year, so this year I had to come back for more mayhem.

Echo Drift is her own design, and the tl;dr is that we were a crew of space truckers when we get yanked out of our cryo tubes due to a distress signal...

No spoilers but when we were handed the set of pregen character sheets the first one I saw was "profession: KID", and so I asked "You mean I can play a kid?" and that was that. Meet Razz, the 12 year old Asian girl with a short bob that loves clambering through the duct works on the cargo vessel. Razz survived, as did the pilot and the mechanic. Razz's mom and the doc though...

Feed the Kraken
My wife and I had signed up for a late evening game of Feed the Kraken. Here, we're a ship's crew made up of sailors, pirates, and a cultist. We're all trying to get the ship to where our faction wants it to go to.

It's a social deduction game, which is a genre I like. If you've ever played Secret Hitler, Feed the Kraken has about the same level of complexity.

There were six of us, and I was one of three sailors who wanted to go east. We also had two pirates who wanted to go west, and the cultist wanted us to go to the kraken in the middle. Each turn the captain would pick a lieutenant and a navigator and assuming there's no mutiny, the captain and lieutenant each put a direction card into the captain's log, the navigator shakes it up and chooses which card gets played, and then the captain reveals it and the ship moves.

Then the accusations begin. Shenanigans ensue, and we repeat this cycle. Our lone cultist had the opportunity to recruit someone and that was me. Later in the game, one of the pirates (who knew who the other pirate was) had me flogged, which forced me to randomly reveal one of the two factions I wasn't, and it came up pirate! My secret as a cultist was safe!

While the sailors and pirates win by getting the ship to the sailor and pirate havens respectively, the cultist wins is the ship get to the kraken, or, important here, is thrown overboard by the captain into the waiting tentacles outside the havens.

I was captain, the ship moved into the tentacles, and I tossed the cultist overboard for the win!

The game is very thematically on point. I only semi-regret not backing the Kickstarter back in the day because a con is the only time and place I'd get to play this.

It was a great way to end the day, and we went home to get some much needed sleep ahead of the busiest day of the con.

That's the east convention centre at Canada Place, where TCTC 2025 was.
Saturday March 14th

Saturday was my RPG day all day.

Candela Obscura
I had heard/read about this RPG, and I was very curious and the best place to try a new to you RPG is where there are no stakes! And hey, Shannon, who runs a mean table, was hosting, so what could possibly go wrong?

Candela Obscura is a gothic horror game, and as players you're part of an order that's devoted to "pursue strange occurrences and encounter dangerous magicks, fighting back against a mysterious source of corruption and bleed."

The session was fabulous. We managed to resolve the situation at Mr. Brightly's House of Healing, and escape with our lives.

The system is interesting and relatively light, but it definitely has some quirks. It's d6 based and you generally roll xd6, where x is your stat. 1-3 is a fail, 4-5 succeed with consequences, and 6 is just a success. It's possible to roll extra dice, but if you have zero in your stat, you roll 2d6 and take the lowest (aka rolling with disadvantage). Weirdly, I felt that it was better to roll with disadvantage than rolling a single d6 - and that's nothing to do with actual real world probability, and everything with rolling a fail on a single die is sad, but rolling a fail on one of two dice is "just bad luck". It's entirely in my head and that feeling probably came from rolling boxcars on my first roll of the game on a 0 stat!

Loved the session, would play again, but Candela Obscura is not on my buy list.

Daggerheart

Horror seemed to have been an undercurrent in my subconscious because I signed up for this session called The Cabin in the Woods, where there have been some strange goings on near Halley's Mill.

This was a 3rd level character adventure, and Marcus was a fun GM. Most of the other players were quite experienced with Daggerheart, and this was my first time playing this system.

About my personal preferences... I started playing RPGs a very long time ago (I'm old, ok?) and I've done my time with various editions of the ampersand systems and Pathfinder, and wanted to check Daggerheart out to see if it provided the same vibe without the relentless crunch.

There are a couple things I really loved about my brief exposure here. The hope & fear system is really intuitive once you get rolling, and 2d12 vs. a target is much better than a standard d20 in my opinion. I really enjoyed the dynamic where the GM could interrupt us and take over the narrative, and I also liked how the ebb and flow between the GM and the players depends on how the players roll.

I also really liked the damage threshold system. I know it can feel like an extra step in the combat damage resolution, but it felt right.

However, there's a fair amount of cascading actions that can happen on a turn that require a lot of steps. Playing with stronger characters and experienced players definitely showed me how you can cascade actions and do a lot of stuff in a single round. While I'd play Daggerheart again, it is crunchier than my current tastes run.

Our mission was go go two days upriver to Halley's Mill, find out what was going on, and if we could find some interesting samples for our patron along the way, all the better.

We chose to investigate what looked like a plume of smoke around a keep on the way, only to discover it was a swarm of fiant mosquitos. We managed to escape, and collect some specimens.

I don't want to spoil the adventure, so I'll just say that the horror undercurrent was spot on. The adventure was fun, I loved the role play at the table, and the big boss monster was really tough!

Mothership
My evening session was my current favourite RPG, Mothership. I've run it a number of times, but I never get to play so I was really looking forward to it. Carson, pictured here, ran Vibechete from the brilliant Hull Breach Volume 01 supplement. He said it's one of his favourite modules, and he ran an absolutely brilliant table.

It's the 50th anniversary the accident that closed the orbital Hodder Forest Reserve. A favourite rave spot for plutocrat scions and trust fund drifters. What better way to celebrate than to break in? And what could possibly go wrong...

My table was all into the vibe being offered up to us, and there was a lot of humour to go with the stress and panic rolls. The antagonist is terrifying, and our escape scene was cinematic.

The Mothership catch phrase is "solve, save, survive, pick two". We solved the mystery and survived. Too bad about the other young rich scions we were with.

Carson is also the author of his own Mothership module Emergence, and he was kind enough to sign my copy.

Sunday the 15th

Sunday's the short day, with the games ending at 6pm. My friend John and I agreed to meet up at 10 for some games before our respective 2:30 RPG sessions.

Roll Player
I'd seen this game before, and the back of the box intrigued me, and since the library had it, we decided to try it out!

It's a pretty clever dice allocation game, and the premise is that you're trying to build up the best adventurer you can.

I lost quite handily, and we of course made some mistakes along the way as you do. We'd definitely play again though!

Sea Salt & Paper
This is one of my favourite small card games, and it's good at all player counts. Highly recommended.

Masters of Maple Syrup
John had never played this, so I taught it, he really liked it, I gave him the copy I had, and everyone's a winner!

Tips for running an RPG at a Con w/ your RPG Room Managers
This was an an interactive session hosted by Matthew Seagle and Christoph Sapinsky to talk about how to run an RPG session for a con, which is a different beast from your regular weekly game night session or ongoing campaign.

I like attending these kinds of sessions because despite being an old hand at running and playing games, I always pick up something new and also always get reminded of things that work.

For context, at this con, an RPG slot will be a one shot adventure for about 3-4 hours, and the GM is expected to have everything needed for players to sit and start play including dice, pre-generated characters, even pencils and paper.

I took notes (because I'm geeky like that) and here are some of the points...

Before the session, in your description:
- tell players the plan. "In this session, you will be hunting a dragon"
- describe the system. Don't just say "it's D&D, everyone knows D&D". You need to tell potential players which of the umpteen flavours of D&D you'll be running. Assuming you're running D&D and not something else that might be new or obscure.

Set up conflict. Maybe your adventure is about a magic sword. Player 1 might be "I deserve this sword", player 2 might be "this sword should be in a museum", and player 3 might be "actually, I have this sword right now, and nobody else knows that."

Build in breaks. Start your ending early. Maybe you need to cut stuff on the fly. Improv will be needed.

At a con, it's potentially going to be a table of strangers. So remember as a GM that...
- everyone deserves a moment to shine
- use players to advance the game agenda
- every game is a conversation
- "be the host", you're director, performer, sage on the stage
- players will surprise you

And perhaps the best advice of all:

Memorable moments beat perfect plots.

True words. Other advice included giving each character an epilogue. Matthew shared his experience once of running out of time in a session, and that the dragon simply ate everyone. So he went around the table and said "ok, what does your character do in their final moment?" ... "Fantastic! Munch munch munch munch..." ... "and what does your character do?" ... munch munch munch...

I'd certainly remember that!

In the Q&A session that followed, no notes, Christoph and Matthew talked about how TCTC has been working on expanding the RPG hobby, and one challenge has been the age brackets for games. When a GM sets up their session they can say "this is for all ages, this is 16+, this is definitely adults only..." A challenge has been getting the kids involved.

This year they had a lot of on-demand sessions, and they had a lot up uptake from adults showing up with kids in tow and that it worked super well, and they plan to do more. As I noted above, the RPG hours were up about 50% from last year.

That makes my inner 12 year old very happy.

A peek inside the RPG zone

ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game
The final session of the con for me was another Shannon special. My friend Jayden on Thursday had bumped into my with some folks at loose ends and I suggested they check out Daggerheart on demand. They had such a great time, and when I told him about Alien he was really intrigued. He showed up at the appropriate time and there was a no show, so... he got to play!

And it was epic. We were stuck at the bottom of the ocean at an old soon to be decommissioned oil drilling rig on a dead planet. If you've seen Leviathan, Underwater, Deep Sea, The Abyss, et. al. you kind of know the story already.

And Jayden played his character to perfection. It was so fun to watch.

With ten minutes left on the con clock, we got to our final scene and ... some of us made it out alive.

Miscellaneous Notes

The Bistro: The menu was the same as I remember last year, but the quality was much improved, which was good. The hot dog I had was exactly as advertised, and the Cubano sandwich was good. Chips were great. Prices were con prices. 🤷‍♂️

There is a Vancouver Convention Centre policy that states no outside food or drink is permitted. This is pretty standard with any venue that has the ability to provide in house catering services. And the event organizers are then in the difficult position of having to enforce that policy at the door. I empathize, I really do.

There is a certain level of condonation though. People coming to events, whether for entertainment or professional reasons, come in with a coffee in hand. I don't know if it happened to everyone else or even anyone else, but I got the joy of having to toss a coffee I had with me Saturday evening.

I totally get that was 100% on me. But damnit it felt petty. Come at me if you must, but I was in a bad headspace from a recent death in the family and I just got super frustrated about it. That was probably the low point of what was on the whole an otherwise therapeutic weekend for me. And had I been in a better headspace and not running late for my session, I'd have totally just poured into my water bottle and tucked it into the bag I had with me. Next year, thermos.

The used marketplace: This year I actually got my act together and pre-registered games for sale for the first time! I had five lots altogether.

When you pre-register you fill in a Google form with a description of the item, and the prices you want to set for the day(s) you will have them available at the con.

There are also these little slips you fill in to attach to your game lots. I made an in retrospect dumb assumption that by filling in the form it would generate those slips, so I showed up at the Thursday drop off without them. The very kind volunteer in charge of the used game sale area got me some, and while I thanked them profusely in the moment, I wanted to give a shout out here as well.

The final cash out from the vendor market is at 5pm on Sunday, and my one piece of constructive feedback is that the final RPG session conflicts with this. I chose to cash out before that session because you need your ID with you and there isn't currently an option to let a third party collect any leftover games or proceeds on your behalf.

I don't know how many people that potentially affects, so I don't know if it's a problem that needs a formal fix.

I've been actively shrinking my board game collection (cf. Shrinking a Game Collection - aka The Shelf of Shame vs. The Box of Freedom) and I met my goal with the three lots that sold so just donated the two that hadn't. I didn't want them back on the shelf anyway!

Vendor Hall: I had a nice haul from the vendor hall this year! I didn't buy anything from the used game market, but I did buy a bunch of other cool stuff, including but not limited to...

Mothership modules and The Quiet Year from the Compose Dream Games booth, who are also in the process of running their Canada Roles Awards.

This beauty

crocheted by Aaron from @aarongurmi

The limited edition artist series dice tray from Crits & Bones. I also picked up the dice tray he had in the silent auction. The art was done by Luphalia.


And I could spend an hour recapping all the visits and conversations with all the other vendors. Honestly. So many great folks making great things. Check out the full list here.

I bought lovely crochet work from another booth that also had amazing dragons. I'm sorry I forgot your name!
Adventure Dice always sees me add to my dice hoard.
KamCon, you're on my list; hopefully next year? (thanks for the free d20).
UBC Critical Play Lab, I didn't even know about you and I'm glad that I do now! You also had awesome swag!

The Staff & Volunteers: This con is really well run, and the fact it's grown so fast and so seamlessly is absolutely thanks to the organizers. The overall positive vibe is also due to amazing folks who kindly volunteer.

Thank you so much for making this con fantastic. All of you!

See you in 2027.

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