RichieCon 2026 has come and gone for 2026! RichieCon 2026 is nominally a convention of “Richie’s friends” (thus the name), but it’s really just an excuse to play some games over two to three days!

I call RichieCon 2026 a cooperative convention! Not because “we only play cooperative games”, but for different reasons! To be fair, my collection (which serves as the basis for the convention) is almost all cooperative games, so we tend to encourage cooperative games … but as with any true cooperation, people must be able to opt out and play anything (cooperatively or competitively) they want, or it’s not really cooperation! (Forced cooperation is just coercion).

… including older competitive games like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek: Catan! And yes, I saw Battlestar Galactica (the old Parker Brothers game, not the Fantasy Flight game) being played!

No, RichieCon 2026 is a cooperative convention because everyone helps out! No one gets paid anything; everyone just helps out! And that’s one reason we don’t charge anything for RichieCon, people just help out. It would be disingenuous of me to have an entry fee when so many people help with so much for free!

Early Planning

As we learned over 12 years (this is the 11th RichieCon; we missed one year because of CoVID), planning has to begin at least 6 months in advance! Charlie and Allison makes summer plans around RichieCon, so we need to make sure we get the ball rolling! In January 2026, I sent out a “Save The Day” for July 25-July 26th weekend! Why not exact? As we know from last year (see the Saga of RichieCon 2025), we can only reserve the Rec Center at most 3 months in advance! On the off chance the swim team takes it before we do, we need some flexibility! So we tell people our intentions, but don’t make any definite plans until we have pre-approved the Rec Center!

Sigh, there had to be at least a little drama here. After pre-reserving the Rec Center 3 months in advance (to the day), I hadn’t heard anything from the HOA, so I literally had to drive to PHX to pin the plans down. Everyone at the HOA was nice enough, and it all worked out, but it wouldn’t be a RichieCon without a little drama.

The Weeks Before

One of the things we learned from RichieCon 2025: coolers for drinks really make things easier! By putting the sodas and waters in coolers, we free up the refrigerator for other things AND we keep the drinks a lot colder! One problem we noticed was that putting drinks in the fridge the morning of RichieCon gave us warm drinks! Warm soda!! Eewwwwwww …

So, this year, I asked for Coolers from my friends. This is where the cooperation started: I got about 6 coolers for sodas! Thank you friends!

(The only worry with coolers is if they leak, they may damage the floors. If you have towels underneath, it’s not an issue).

Also huge props to Max for making the token this year! Everyone who comes to RichieCon gets a token to show they are supposed to be there! Max and I meet a few times early on to get the token going!

Boxing: The Boxing Game! A Cooperative Dexterity Game!

This is where the cooperation really starts! My friends come by the Wednesday before RichieCon, and we play “Boxing: the Boxing game” which is a cooperative dexterity game about putting boxes in other boxes! This is the funny name we call our activity of putting lots of board games in bigger boxes.

Over the course of the night, me and my friends play this cooperative dexterity game to get ready! It’s surprising how cooperative this endeavour is! Some people move boxes, some people (usually me) directs boxes, some people label boxes, and it’s a surprising how smoothly this goes!

My Wednesday night friends really helped out! These games in boxes form the basis of the collection of games at RichieCon.

We also tried a few new things out.

One new thing: we added rubber bands to all the boxes (see above)! This worked pretty well; a lot of the boxes sort of “fall apart” because the contents spill out as they are moved and put in boxes sideways and crossways! The rubber bands helped keep the games together. We’ll use rubber bands again.

Another new thing is the Game Towers.

Game Towers

I had received 3 Game Towers as a gift this year; and I expected these to help out!

These Game Towers worked absolutely great! People told me that they really thought it was easier to get the games out from these towers! We “only” had three towers, so we still have resort to boxes for the rest of the games.

More cooperation here: my friend Mike was pivotal to helping me get these up to the Rec Center Friday night, Charlie and Sam helped me fill them, and then my friend Jon helped me bring them back to my house!

Sound Mitigation

One of the biggest complaints about the Rec Center is that it can get noisy if there are a lot of people in there! The surfaces in the Rec Center are all HARD surfaces that reflect sound! The walls are brick, the floor is (faux) hard wood, and the windows are glass!

We bought a few more utility carpets (pretty cheap at CostCo) to help with the floor.

We also added twice as many comforters on the walls! These comforters, although they add some fun “theme” to the con, are all about Sound Mitigation! These hard walls, covered by cloth comforters are nowhere near as reflective!

This year we had 8 comforters on the walls (twice as many as last year!) And you know what? These wall comforters made all the difference in the world! This is the first RichieCon at the Rec Center where I felt like “Hey! The noise isn’t a problem!”

I can’t thank Jeff and Becca enough for setting these up! Jeff brought all this equipment down from PHX and then set it up for almost 1.5 hours on Friday night! It was a lot of work for them, but it ABSOLUTELY made all the difference!

We will absolutely ask Jeff and Becca to help with this next year! Thank you! Their cooperation and volunteering made all the difference in the world to the 50+ people who showed up at RichieCon 2026 this year!

Friday: “The Secret RichieCon House!”

Although RichieCon 2026 didn’t “officially” start until Saturday, there were a number of out-of-towners who played games at the “Secret RichieCon House”! See above!!

The “Secret RichieCon House” is really just a place for out-of-towners to land and play games! It’s really nice to have an “unofficial” place to go! If you come from out-of-town to RichieCon, you probably want to spend more than just 2 days playing games!

I am always nervous about inviting too many people over to the “Secret RichieCon House” because the AirBNB people can get mad if you have too many people over! We actually had the AirBNB people get mad at us one year… so I ask only out-of-towners to go over.

Luckily, Kurt managed the “Secret RichieCon House” this year so I didn’t have to (I did manage it for 2 years and realized it was waaaay too much work on top of everything I do). Thanks to the Kurt for cooperating with me and managing that!

Saturday! The Con Begins!

The first “official” game of RichieCon 2026 was Companion Quest! See our review here! And you know what? I think Companion Quest maaaay have been the game of the Con! I saw Companion Quest played more times than anything else!

Although, I think that A Place for All My Books (see above) may have a contender for game of the Con! At one point, I saw TWO copies of the game (see above) being played right next to each other! See above!

The biggest surprise of the Con was probably Illiterati! I saw a big group of 5 playing it (see above)! I loved Illiterati (see review here), and it even made my Top 10 Cooperative Games of 2023, but the game didn’t really hit most game circles! I was glad to see it played!

Splendor Marvel was the SECOND game of the con! See the Gallery section at the end for more pictures!

Saturday Interlude: A/C Issues

At one point, late Saturday afternoon, there was a power blip. The A/C turned off and it wasn’t coming back on! The blower was blowing, but it wasn’t cold air. You have to understand, Tucson at 4pm in July is VERY hot (110 outside?), so the A/C is pivotal.

After we realized the A/C was down, people tended to drift out.

By 8pm, I think everyone was just about done; it was just too hot.

This was quite stressful! Was the A/C completely broken? Would we have to cancel RichieCon 2026 on Sunday? We had a backup plan of the “Secret RichieCon House” … but … what would happen?

Sunday: The A/C Still works!

After an email to maintenance the day before, we tested the A/C Sunday morning! It worked! The A/C guy (who arrived later that morning) told us that the compressor “protects itself” during power events, and would eventually reset itself. And that’s what happened to us! In a strange coincidence, this EXACT thing happened over at the “Secret RichieCon House” the day before! All they had to do was wait 4 hours and everything was fine! Man, this was a hot RichieCon!

The first official game of the Second day of RichieCon 2026 was Horrified: Dungeons and Dragons! Even though I died once before my turn ever reached me, it was still a hoot!

Sunday had about half as many people, but it was still fun!

Normally we run until 2pm or so, but our game of Kinfire Council + Winds of Change (on our Top 10 Cooperative Games To Play At A Convention) ran over, so we didn’t start cleaning up until 2:30! Cleaning was a long and arduous process! SO MANY PEOPLE helped clean up! I don’t have a lot of pictures, but people helped empty coolers, move games, moves the Games Towers, clean up, mop, do garbage cans, take down comforters … so much clean-up happened in a 1.5 hour period! Many hands make light work!

There was so much cooperation, I can’t even name everyone who helped. It was basically just about everyone who was there on Sunday. Thank you to everyone who helped out!

The last thing we have to do is send a picture to the HOA people to show we cleaned up after ourselves! See above!

Conclusion

Another RichieCon has come and gone! Except for the blip late Saturday with the A/C, it went surprisingly well.

So many people helped: Max made the RichieCon 2026 token, Will made his famous Chocolate Chip cookies, Jeff brought the sound mitigation equipment! And so many more people helped! I know there were people who helped that I didn’t see! But I know we couldn’t have done this without everyone!!

This was a cooperative convention!

See Gallery below for more pictures!

Gallery