UK Games Expo 2019

 

Here are just a few of my highlights from this years UK Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham...

I went for all 3 days this year. For accommodation we did the same as last year and filled a large local AirB&B house with friendly gamers from Sheffield.

 

I took quite a lot of "old" games to sell at the Bring and Buy sale this year, so most of Friday morning was spent queuing to put stuff in, then queuing to get in to have a look around, then queuing to pay. It was crazily busy, but it was worth it... I managed to get cheap copies of City of Iron II, Lancaster, Guilds of London and Shadows over Normandie... which are all games I was on the look out for.

 

The rest of the weekend entailed a lot of wandering around the trade halls looking at stuff, demoing games, meeting up with friends in the open gaming area to play games... then going back to the house in the evenings to play more games. A great time was had.

 

Architects of the West Kingdom - really nice worker placement euro style boardgame.

10mm scale mdf sci-fi scenery from TTCombat suitable for Dropzone Commander...

What a great idea! - Ready to play miniatures from Flatpack Forces...
They do army packs specifically for Dragon Rampant... plus they are working on other ranges too

Jupiter Rescue - (not one of the better games I played over the weekend)

Century: A New World - The latest boardgame in the "Century" series..
I really enjoyed this nice worker placement style game.

Porta Nigra

Just about to demo "Space Gate Odyssey"

A display of some of the upcoming Fantasy terrain that will be available via Kickstarter from Battle Systems later on this month. The buildings were indeed fantastic! - I will be following with interest when more information is released.

Ticket to Ride London was released at the Expo this year - a few of us Sheffield Boardgamers had a game on the oversized demo copy.

My haul of games from this year... the top two were new, and the bottom four were all bargains from the bring and buy sale.

UK Games Expo 2018...

This is the sixth time I've been to the UK games expo. It really is one of the highlights of my year. The first time I went by myself. This time I went with a large group of Sheffield boardgamers. A group of us stayed together in a large house 10 minutes drive away from the NEC. Visiting the games show during the day times, and returning to the house to play games in the evenings.

 

Every year the Expo has expanded, last year it seemed a bit crazy, but this year they opened up a lot more space, and it felt just right. They took up 2 large halls in the NEC plus they had more space in two of the hotels near by.

Here are just a few photos of some of this years best bits for me...

 

 

Looking down on Hall 1 from Hall 2

 

The boardgames mansion!

Gaslands at the mansion...

Previews of the miniatures for Martin Wallace's new game WILDLANDS from OSPREY GAMES

Martin Wallace giving a demo of Wildlands

Playing through a scenario from the JOAN OF ARC game I backed on kickstarter

Some lovely miniatures from the Burrows and Badgers skirmish game...

No idea what this was... looks crazy!

Playing through a demo of WILDLANDS... can't wait to get this when it comes out in October!

Lords of Xidit at the mansion

The guys from GASLANDS demoing their game

Playing a demo of Stefan Feld's MERLIN game

Playing ETHNOS in the open gaming area...

I came home with copies of ETHNOS, STEAMROLLERS, ZANY PENGUINS, JACKYL & HIGH.... plus a signed copy of the fighting fantasy book "Deathtrap Dungeon" by Ian Livingstone...and some Reaper miniatures for Frostgrave. I met Martin Wallace and got him to sign a bunch of my rulebooks of his games... played loads of games, met some really nice people and had an all-round  fantastic time.

The mansion is already booked again for next year.

UK GAMES EXPO 2017

 I've just got back from this years UK Games Expo....It is officially on Fri-Sun, but I went for two days this time, travelling down early on Saturday morning and leaving in the afternoon on Sunday. My friend Aneurin from the Sheffield boardgames club drove down and we shared a hotel room.

   Aneurin was in an all day tournament playing Imperial Assaul skirmish... so we got in to the tournament hall about 8am, found a quiet table and played a game of the escape room style game "UNLOCK" - which we managed to complete with a bit of a struggle... was good fun! I left Aneurin with his Imperial Assault mates and I went to join the, by now, very long que of gamer folks waiting for the doors to open at 9.30am...

I spent most of the day wandering around the trade hall, looking at stuff and demoing games... I managed to get my FROSTGRAVE rulebook signed by the author on the Osprey Games stall, which was cool - he was a very friendly chap...

Highlights of the day were:

 * Getting to play games of COSTA RICA and FIGHT FOR OLYMPUS on the Mayfair Games stall. COSTA RICA was very good, and especially interesting as I recognised it as a game I had played a paper prototype of in the playtest zone a couple of years earlier, and it has now been published.

* Being taught to play COUSINS' WAR by the designer on the Surprised Stare stall... An excellent and very strategic small box game for 2 players  about the War of the Roses, Some multi-use cards, a few cubes and a few dice, lead to a very strong, tense game. I snapped up a copy.

I picked up some games in the bring and buy sale that I thought would interest my family: MAUNA KEA (like Escape from Atlantis... but with a volcano!) and ATTILA (small box quick strategic abstract game)... and new I bought KINGDOMINO - which seems to have been a hit with everyone that played it, and a couple of expansions for IMPERIAL SETTLERS.

Some nice Frostgrave Scenery

Dropzone Commander battle grounds...

General business in the trade hall...

I bumped into Paul and Kathy from Sheffield who'd just met up with a friend of theirs - and we all played a demo of a daft game called LAZER RYDERS... it was silly but fun!

Playing a demo of Lazer Ryderz

When the trade hall was shutting I wandered over to the Hilton Hotel where the open gaming spaces were for the evening, to find that half the space had been taken up by a big wedding party... space was very limited, but I met up with some more Sheffield folks and after some negotiations we managed to secure a table and settle in for some game playing into the night...best for me I think was MAGIC MAZE - crazy co-operative game of fantasy characters lost in a shopping centre! We made it back to the hotel around midnight in the end...

Open gaming with some of the Sheffield boardgames crew.... (Dread Curse)

  Day two - Sunday morning started with veggie breakfast at Weatherspoons in the N.E.C. followed by a very close game of COUSINS' WAR at a café table....

  We were near the front of the queue for when the doors opened, so we made a determined dash for the Mayfair stall to get at a go at playing the prototype version of the unreleased CAVE vs CAVE 2 player CAVERNA game by Uwe Rosenburg. I really enjoyed it - I'll definitely get a copy when it comes out.

Prototype version of Cave vs Cave (2 player Caverna)

 

Me.

Some very nice laser cut scenery from TTCombat

  A game that was creating quite a buzz at the Expo was SUB TERRA. We went over to their area and got in on a demo game. The game is a co-operative escape from a cavern as a team before bad stuff happens kind of thing.. kind of like Forbidden Desert, only not as good. The guy who was supposed to be explaining the rules (unlike the very professional people on the Mayfair and Kosmos stalls) did not do a very good job - He neglected to tell us some rules, and he must have got some things wrong, otherwise it seemed a very easy cavern to escape from. The artwork looked nice, the gameplay was "meh"...

Demo game of SubTerra

Currently I am very interested in 2 player strategy games. KOSMOS games do a strong line in these, a nice lady at their stand played a game of KAHUNA with me. I liked it, an abstract area control game... I already have EIGHT MINUTE EMPIRE though, and that scratches the same itch as this.

Demo game of KAHUNA on the Kosmos stand (I lost)

 

A handful of Sheffield BoardGamers that were still there on Sunday afternoon...

   This year the expo was huge. Saturday was very busy indeed. Sunday was a more relaxed affair. There was a very fun and friendly and inclusive atmosphere for the whole thing, and there was a huge range of folks there, from little kids to casual gamers, to hardcore euro fiends... I really enjoyed it, I would have liked to have gone for three days, but the prices for hotel rooms are prohibitive, and next year (I've looked) they've hiked the prices up even more. We're going to have to come up with a plan B for accommodation. I will be there though. See you at UK GAMES EXPO 2018!

Mansions of Madness - First impressions...

 I got to play the boardgame MANSIONS OF MADNESS by Fantasy Flight games for the first time on Sunday evening. I really enjoyed it. There were four of us there - Aneurin, Kes, Neil and myself. It was Aneurin's game, and he was the "keeper" - running the adventure and controlling the monsters etc... 

I have played two of Fantasy Flights other Lovecraftian themed games previously:

 

ARKHAM HORROR - which is a very long game, has a huge variety of expansions - and ultimately I found to be quite tedious.

 

ELDER SIGN is a much better game than Arkham - essentially it is a dice rolling game, you have to roll the correct sets of symbols to complete tasks to stop the big bad beasties from taking over the world. I got ELDER SIGN OMENS for Carolyn's Android device - and sold my copy of the boardgame immediately - the game works much better as a solo game app - and is much more thematic too.

 

The artwork on all 3 of these games is very nice indeed - and a big chunk of it is the same in all 3 games - artwork is expensive, so I can see why Fantasy Flight did that.

 

There is new Fantasy Flight boardgame with a Lovecraftian theme called ELDRITCH HORROR which folks are saying replaces Arkham as a better game... I haven't played it, and I'm not really tempted by it now that I've played MANSIONS OF MADNESS....

Right from the start of the game, as a player you are immersed in the creepy horror theme of the game. In the scenario we played, the three investigators were searching a sinister mansion in a race against time, looking for clues as to the whereabouts of a missing lady... we found a dead body, which one of us was mysteriously compelled to eat a part of... a running flaming zombie..which we had to fight, and that left parts of the building on fire... there were axe wielding maniacs who were trying to take samples of our hair for some unknown black magic ritual... one of us was killed by a maniac - and two of us went completely insane! - In the end things were looking pretty bad for us - but in the last turn Kes managed to pull off a crazy last minute dice roll using his special ability, and he killed the main maniac guy. The decisions you make in the game create a horror story which you really feel you are part of. The mechanics of the game are pretty easy to pick up - and I really love the little puzzles you have to do to open doors and re-wire circuits to try and get the lights to come on in darkened rooms. It's not good to be in the dark. Not in a house like this......

Aneurin was really lucky to get his copy of Mansions of Madness for half the retail price off ebay...It is quite a pricey game brand new - but there's a load of quality components, and the figures that come with the game are great. He's suggested we try and play once a month - sounds good to me - this is by far the best horror themed boardgame I've played to date - Can't wait for the next game!!

 

 

Kes pulls off his crazy dice roll!!