Gen Con Poaches The Dice Tower’s Camilla Cleghorn to Run Its Events Program as Convention Outgrows Its Own Venue
Gen Con has hired Camilla Cleghorn, a longtime on-camera presenter for The Dice Tower and a key organizer behind its Dice Tower East convention, as its new head of events, putting her in charge of planning and running the thousands of events that make up tabletop’s largest annual gathering. The hire lands less than a week after this year’s Gen Con closed with a record 74,000 attendees, extending a growth streak that’s run from 70,000 in 2023 to nearly 72,000 in 2025.
Gen Con has now sold out before its doors even opened for three consecutive years, and it’s pushing up against the hard physical limits of the Indiana Convention Center. The show is set for a major expansion tied to its 60th anniversary next year: an additional 143,500 square feet of floor space, roughly two and a half football fields, plus 800 new hotel rooms coming online with a new Signia by Hilton property. Cleghorn told BoardGameWire the real challenge isn’t finding room for more attendees, it’s making sure communication and support systems scale at the same pace as the convention’s footprint.
Cleghorn’s departure from The Dice Tower carries its own weight in the hobby. She’s spent years as a visible face for the channel’s 360,000-plus YouTube subscribers, reviewing games and helping build Dice Tower East into its own successful regional show, alongside running the outlet’s annual crowdfunding campaigns. She called leaving “bittersweet” in a Facebook post to fans, thanking Dice Tower founder Tom Vasel and the team for opportunities she said she never imagined having. Vasel, for his part, kept his on-air reaction light, joking about Gen Con’s “thievery” in a recent Dice Tower News episode before wishing her well and confirming she’d still make occasional appearances on the channel around her new job.
The move also means Gen Con’s longtime director of events, Derek Guder, is shifting into what Cleghorn described as an “adjacent role” at the company, with the two continuing to work together through the transition.
She posted to Facebook, “I’m incredibly grateful to have been a part of The Dice Tower’s journey over the last several years, and I’ll always be thankful to Tom, the DT team, and all of you for giving me opportunities I never imagined I’d have.”
She then spoke with BoardGameWire, “One of the things I value most about my time with The Dice Tower is that I’ve had the opportunity to experience the hobby from a lot of different perspectives: publishers, designers, content creators, convention attendees, and the people working behind the scenes to make events happen.
“It’s taught me that each group has different needs, but ultimately they all want a great experience and clear communication.”
Cleghorn also said, “The timing also felt right for me personally and professionally. I’m incredibly proud of my time with The Dice Tower and everything I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of there, and I’m excited to take what I’ve learned into this next chapter.”
Tom Vasel seemed to minimize the impact to his channel saying, “You’ll still see here occasionally here on The Dice Tower but she’ll be really busy working for Gen Con.”
Pulling a well-known reviewer and convention organizer out of independent media and into a leadership seat at the industry’s biggest show is a meaningful signal about how tightly board game media and the convention circuit have become intertwined. Cleghorn’s background gives her a rare vantage point spanning publishers, designers, content creators, and the attendees actually filling the halls, exactly the kind of cross-perspective Gen Con will need if it’s serious about scaling past a venue it’s already outgrown.
Does hiring straight out of board game media signal Gen Con finally taking creator and community input seriously at a leadership level, or is this simply the safest, lowest-risk hire available for a show that can’t afford to stumble during its biggest expansion yet?
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