Origins Game Fair hit an attendance record this year, with over 15,000 attendees gathering at the Greater Columbus Convention Center to see the latest in role-playing games, card games, and every other game of the non-video variety. Over 200 game creators, publishers, and shops — some big, many small — had their games on display in the Exhibitor’s Hall.

   So what did Origins 2015 show us about the coming year? What trends and changes are coming to a tabletop near you?

   Despite tabletop gaming’s notoriety for being just as geared toward the white male 18-to-30 crowd as its electronic counterpart, a glance around the Exhibitor’s Hall on Saturday showed a diverse crowd. In particular, there was a notable showing of women and girls, and not just those hovering disinterestedly around the boyfriends who had talked them into coming. Perhaps the efforts of game publishers like Wizards of the Coast and Privateer Press to embrace and encourage diversity in their rule books have succeeded in making the gaming community as a whole feel more accepting. Or perhaps the larger cultural embrace of the female side of geek culture has led to more women taking an interest in tabletop games. Whatever the reason, that addition to the audience was clear just from looking at the attendees.

   Miniatures continue to be popular, though one aspect of them is becoming a thing of the past: metal. Reaper Miniatures, which makes figurines for players to paint up as their own role-playing game characters, showed off their Bones line, for which many of their classic metal figurines have been rereleased in plastic. These figurines cost less than half as much as their metal counterparts, and the material allows them to make new larger monsters that couldn’t have been produced before. This trend has also spread to Warhammer, and many newer miniatures wargames on display at the show skipped metal entirely and went straight to plastic. This leaves Cincinnati-based icon Ral Partha, who were demoing a new game of their own over the weekend, as one of the few companies still producing metal minis.

   But while Ral Partha is bucking that trend, they’ve embraced another one. Like many new games on display, theirs was funded through a Kickstarter campaign. The crowdsourcing platform has been a boon to small creators looking to raise money to publish new games. Another Ohio company looking to Kickstarter for support is Columbus’s own Sea Dog Game Studios. After a successful campaign to fund a second edition of their Sailpower tabletop game, they’re returning for Twenty Yard Shamble, a board game in which players bet on zombie racing. SDGS had a pre-production version of the game to show off to attendees, and they ran demos through the weekend. They plan to launch their funding campaign soon.

   Though players are becoming more diverse and technology is changing the way companies design, produce, and fund games, many things have stayed the same. Anime-based games still dominate the collectible card game world. Fantasy settings still dominate role-playing games, though Paizo’s Pathfinder had a bigger showing than the classic Dungeons & Dragons. And people still love to dress up as wizards and vampires for a good old-fashioned LARP.