Gaming Events: Events & Updates
Patch notes, new Cookie releases, banner reviews, codes, limited-time rewards.
September 2026
1 post
August 2026
15 posts
Pokemon Worlds 2026 Results: Every Champion
The badges sold out through a lottery, and then more than 50,000 people showed up anyway. Takuma Yamazaki won the VGC world title on his first Worlds appearance after 15 years of trying, Andrew Hedrick decked out his opponent to take the TCG crown, and Ed Sheeran walked out unannounced to close the show. Buried under the results is a bigger story: this was the last time Pokemon UNITE will ever be a World Championship division.
gamescom Award 2026 Winners: All 19 Categories
The gamescom award is the one part of the show that produces a result you can check rather than a trailer you have to wait on. Nineteen categories were handed out on Friday, August 28 at the gamescom studio stage: CD PROJEKT RED and SEGA took three each, Capcom and Ubisoft two each, and the most-nominated game of the whole show converted exactly one of its five shots. Here is every winner, the nomination-to-win math, the seven criteria the jury scores, and the entry fee nobody puts in the headline.
Tokyo Game Show 2026 Tickets: Prices, Days and Perks
TGS hits its 30th anniversary this year and stretches to its longest-ever five days — two business days, three public days, and a ticket list that runs from free to 3,300,000 yen. Every published price, what each pass actually buys, the entry-order rule that decides your morning, and the one line on the official site that decides whether the trip works at all: no same-day tickets are sold at Makuhari Messe.
PAX West 2026: Badge Prices, Hours and the 6 PM Rule
PAX West 2026 is open for 50 hours across four days, and the Expo Hall accounts for 32 of them. The other 18 are panels, tabletop, tournaments, concerts and freeplay — which is why the cheapest single-day badge is also the best value per hour of show floor. Prices, hours, the two-building split, the TCG Zone line-up, and the rules that get props confiscated.
How to Watch gamescom 2026: Stream Times and Channels
The Saturday tickets, the Wildcard and the on-site ONL seats are sold out — but the broadcast side of gamescom 2026 costs nothing and now has real times attached. Opening Night Live streams August 25 at 8:00 p.m. CEST with a 7:30 pre-show, Xbox is running two live broadcasts, the Future Games Show is back three times over, and Games Done Quick has published its full three-day run schedule — including a blindfolded Ocarina of Time and a Silksong Any%.
Pokemon Worlds 2026: The $60 Badge You Had to Win a Lottery to Buy
The Pokemon Company bolted its first-ever fan convention onto the World Championships this year, and then sold the badges by drawing names out of a hat. Both interest lists have closed. Here is what a pass actually cost, which one gets you into Chase Center on Championship Sunday, why the VGC world title is no longer decided on a mainline Pokemon game, and the surprisingly deep pile of things you can watch and claim for nothing.
gamescom 2026: Saturday Day Tickets Are Gone — Here Is What You Can Still Buy
The show Koelnmesse bills as the world largest games event opens on August 26, and two of its five days are already closed to new public buyers: all three Saturday day-ticket tiers and the Wednesday Wildcard are sold out. Here are the real prices, the hours that decide your day, the German age-rating wristband rule that gates the 16+ and 18+ booths, and the 10.50 euro ticket still on sale for four of the five days.
MagicCon Atlanta 2026: Worlds 32, Badges, Deadlines
The last MagicCon of 2026 is the one the whole competitive year lands on: World Championship 32, a $1,000,000 prize pool, and three rounds of Booster Draft in a set that reaches retail the same morning the doors open. Badge tiers, show hours, application deadlines you can still hit, and an honest list of what Wizards has not published yet.
Gen Con 2026: What Actually Happened — A World Debut, an 18+ D&D Setting, and a Flooded Hall
Gen Con hung its sold-out signs the morning before Trade Day opened. Four days later it had given a card game its world debut a year ahead of release, watched D&D shrink-wrap a setting, seen a twenty-six-year-old grail game rebuilt in Middle-earth, and taken a tornado warning that put water through the ceiling of the hall holding most of its card games.
StarCraft Tabletop Miniatures at Gen Con 2026: 640 Free Demo Seats and a Release Date Nobody Agrees On
Archon Studio booked 40 hours of free demo table at Gen Con 2026 for its Blizzard-licensed StarCraft miniatures game — 640 seats, no charge, Hall B. The event database says something surprising about how those seats moved. Here is that data, the real contents of both starter boxes, the rules Archon has actually published, and the four different dates attached to this game shipping.
Pick Up Your Gen Con Badge a Day Early. Seriously.
I lost roughly four hours of Gen Con 2025 standing in a badge line on opening day. In 2026 I arrived a day early and collected it before the show started. Here is the mechanics of why that works: Will Call versus mailed badges, why Wednesday pickup exists, and what else the extra day gets you.
I Learned Six Trading Card Games in One Weekend at Gen Con 2026
Six publishers, one badge, four days, and a stranger with no idea how any of it worked. Pokemon charged $4 for the teach and $26 for the sequel thirty minutes later. Bandai charged nothing and handed me a deck and a promo. WeirdCo sold out a free table for a game that does not hit shelves until November. This is not a ranking. It is what each publisher was willing to spend to get one more person to the table.
Four Days Was Not Enough: Leaving Gen Con Early
I left Gen Con 2026 on Saturday morning for family reasons, with a four-day badge in my pocket and a day and a half of convention still running behind me. Two and a half days held six card games, a painting table and a Commander event — which is exactly why I would buy the four-day badge again without thinking twice.
Gen Con 2026 Beyond the Tables: Cardhalla, a Ballpark, and 1,000 Drones
Gen Con 2026 ran 27,467 ticketed events. The ones worth writing about were the ones with no game on the table: a card city built to be demolished for charity, 2,000 people on a baseball field, a 1927 movie palace turned into six floors of D&D, and 1,000 drones over downtown Indianapolis.
Gen Con 2025 to 2026: Which Bets Paid Off, and Why 89 Free Demos Are the Real Story
Twelve months ago the Gundam Card Game was twenty days old and Riftbound had nothing to sell. Both came back to Indianapolis in 2026 with real product and real floor space. Then you open the event catalog and find that 89 of their 111 combined sessions were free lessons, and the picture changes.
July 2026
5 posts
Gen Con Day Two: Paint, Then Mobile Suits
My Friday at Gen Con 2026 was two free hour-long lessons four hours apart: a Warhammer painting session at 11 and a Gundam Card Game tutorial at 3. Both sold out. Both seated more people than the listing allowed. And while the second one ran, 506 people were paying $42 on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium to play the same game for a World Championships invite. That split screen is the whole story of a card game turning one.
Gen Con Day One: A Pokemon Double-Header
My Gen Con 2026 started with two Pokemon tickets an hour apart in Hall B: a $4, thirty-minute Learn to Play at six, and a $26, ninety-minute, sold-out Build & Battle at seven. A half-hour teach feeding a sealed event sixty minutes later is not a coincidence of scheduling. It is an onboarding funnel, and The Pokemon Company ran it 168 times.
Gen Con: What to Know Before You Go (2026 Numbers, Evergreen Advice)
Badges, the event catalog, the wish list, the two-hour cart, and generic tickets — plus a category-by-category count of what actually sold out at Gen Con 2026, pulled from the public event database. Written to still be useful next year.
The Most Hyped Things at Gen Con 2026 (Written Before the Doors Open)
Magic has 541 scheduled events at Gen Con 2026. The five things people are actually excited about have 41, 39, 39, one booth and one keynote between them. A preview written from the catalog and the publishers' own pre-show pages — before anybody has walked the floor.
Gen Con 2025 in Review: 72,000 People, a Gundam Launch, and a Tariff Hangover
A year later the number everyone quotes from Gen Con 2025 is 72,000. The number that actually explains the show is 575. Here is what happened across the four days — Bandai launching the Gundam Card Game and running its first North American tournament, Riot showing Riftbound with nothing to sell, Lorcana buying the co-sponsor slot, Starfinder 2E hitting shelves, and publishers doing the arithmetic on tariffs.
