UK Games Expo 2018 Review
It came, it saw, it conquered our wallets. The UK Games Expo was once again a sprawling field of games that has inflated to such an extent that the walls of hall 1 at the Birmingham NEC could no longer contain it all! The trade area has burst into hall 2, and the hordes of enthusiastic gamers had no problem providing sufficient numbers to fill even this new outgrowth. Data suggests the number of visitors have grown by some 30%. We will see in a weeks time whether that has finally eclipsed Origins to make it the 3rd largest gaming convention worldwide.
A Small Moan
There was one part of the weekend that undermined my experience, and that was how the press were treated. In previous expos, a press badge has enabled press to get into the hall first, to ensure we can at least demo the new games so that we can provide coverage. Frankly, this was already scraping the bottom of the barrel. Ideally we would have half an hour at the start of each day to be able to chat to publishers/conduct interviews ahead of the hordes descending. This year we weren’t even given priority in the queue, and what really annoyed me, they hadn’t even bothered to tell us they were changing the system. So I turned up on Friday morning just ahead of the opening time to find a big queue already formed. Had the UK Games Expo had the decency to inform everyone of the changes, I could have at least arrived earlier.
Although that’s not really good enough either. When I am press I am working. Yes, it’s playing games, but it’s making notes and taking pictures and talking to people. It is getting the word out about games, something publishers find immensely valuable but apparently the UKGE organisers don’t care to do anything to support those activities. Sorry, that’s not entirely true. They held a two hour press preview on the Thursday night… which they obviously charge publishers to attend. Call me a cynic but it all smacks of an organisation driving up the value of their pay-to-access preview by artificially making it harder for the press to do a good job during the rest of the weekend. Are publishers happy about this? I wouldn’t be. And it is well below the standards set by other conventions around the world.
Now, of course, this is not an issue for most of you reading this and the press badge is a free badge! I can’t complain about that. But because the press preview is now on the Thursday and I had to take an extra half day off work to attend that, which seems to benefit the UKGE considerably more than it benefits me (there is no space or time to demo anything, just a look and see event), I feel like I’ve already paid above and beyond the ticket price as is.
My Convention
OK! No more moaning. I, once again, had a lovely time at the expo. As always, this was down to the people I got to spend time with, friendly faces that I rarely get to see outside of the expo and new friends that I at most had spoken to before on Twitter. It’s wonderful to spend time with people who are all as enthusiastic about board games as you are! And it’s great to finally put faces to the Twitter profiles!
My convention started Thursday evening with the silly-large press preview, trying to wander round and say hi to as many people as possible. But it’s running into people in the Hilton bar for chats and, this time, playing early prototypes, which is the real start of the expo proper!
The first of too many late nights is swiftly followed by a big breakfast and the long plod to the halls. To join the queue *grumble*. Fortunately I was still there early enough to get in on a demo of Teotihuacan, and what a demo that was. My favourite game of the con, discovered in my first demo of the con! Pretty good going! Not that others didn’t come close. Century Eastern Wonders and Chocolate Factory were both very interesting, but it was my *invite only* (very cool to be able to say that) demo of Detective that came closest to pinching the crown. Also, it was a pleasure to get to meet Ignacy Trzewiczek of Portal Games!
If you want to read my impressions of these games, check the bottom of this article!
That brought trade hours to a close, but my work was not yet done. I had a live podcast to record with Gaming Rules!, Slickerdrips and Heavy Cardboard. Now, hosting a live podcast immediately after Shut Up and Sit Down is a pretty intimidating affair and if I’m honest I was at least hoping there would be more audience members than podcasters. As it was, quite a crowd came along! Enough to make the room look moderately full! The podcast was recorded by the relevant authorities and I’ll be sure to post a link to it when it comes alive!
Saturday is the busiest day by far so my plan had 3 cunning parts. The first was, as before, get there as early as possible and grab a key demo. Then spend the morning visiting smaller indie booths grabbing demos as and where I could. At 2.30 I had booked a demo of Holding On using Hub Game’s superb demo booking form before the show. Demo booking is an excellent idea! More publishers do this please! By happy coincidence, Michael Heron from Meeple Like Us was in the same demo and we had much fun discussing the theme.
There was time after that for a couple more demos and then grabbing a bite to eat before the Gaming Rules! charity raffle, where I was anticipating helping sell raffle tickets but, in the end, didn’t have to do anything – it was all in hand. Which was lucky. I was pretty knackered! The raffle went spectacularly well with the exception of my having ticket 220 instead of 221, which won Anachrony! Oh cruel fates! Saturday evening was spent in the Hilton with, in the end, Ross from More Games Please, who taught a group of us High Society, which was utterly hilarious.
Sunday passed in something of a blur. Somehow I only managed 3 demos, but by the end of that, I was completely exhausted and ready for home! Foolishly, I had booked a 5pm train so had to guzzle tea and wait. Lesson learned: it’s ok to leave a bit earlier next year!
As always, the UK Games Expo was a wonderful time, and quite successful for me too! It’s not everyday you get to do a live podcast! I have yet to attend a UK Games Expo I haven’t enjoyed, and have to recommend it to anyone passionate about tabletop games. Saturday is busy, and the trip, especially if you want to stay the night, is rather expensive. But there’s no experience that compares.
Game Overviews
Here are some thoughts on all the games I played this expo! To help you find the ones you’re interested in playing, I’ve arranged them in alphabetical order. Or just read them all! You never know where the surprises will be!
Fun, simple, and breathlessly exciting, 5 Minute Chase gives 2-4 players a real time race/puzzle to competitively solve that really does feel like a chase. I have a review copy of this so expect some more detailed thoughts in a few weeks time.
Alubari is the sequel to Snowdonia, a Euro game of building railways, and tea plantations, across India. Crunchy, enticing, and with the chai bonus system, filled with exciting opportunities. I loved my first experience of this despite being crushed. We even got a 5 player game finished in a mere hour and a half! Incredible for a chunky worker placement game like this. Highly recommended.
The sequel to last year’s Century Spice Road, Eastern Wonders takes players to the sea and a great chain of islands. Each island offers you the opportunity to exchange your spices like the trader cards of Spice Road. But now you must move around the map to use these actions, adding a spatial optimisation puzzle. Without being that much more complicated, it has made for a much more interesting and interactive title. Sadly I still don’t know precisely how this combines with Spice Road but it is a whole new game in and of itself.
A very early demo copy of Chocolate Factory was available to try, and sample it’s delights we did! The game has a very neat and solid core around a physical conveyor belt your chocolates will move down. Your challenge is to add and upgraded the machines that will operate on the raw chocolate coming in, to turn it into delicious candies. Coordination is required to get the right sets out at the right time. Playing with your personal factory is great and while some of the peripheral systems are sure to change, that core is fantastic!
A pretty game of collectively renewing a shared coral reef using pretty translucent dice. The game looks wonderful but has some serious issues. You score points for creating certain shapes with neighbouring dice but you cannot count the same dice twice, something that is impossible to track. The structure’s growth also makes it nightmarish to track what dice are in the centre, ultimately leading to a game that isn’t really fit for purpose.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective meets the 21st Century and Ignacy Trzewiczek of Portal Games. We played through the entire of the first case which was a fantastic mix of deduction and proper police work. A web-based app allows players to research characters and, using simple Wikipedia, discover elements of the real world history the cases touch upon for context. It also gives you tools for comparing fingerprints and chemical samples, all of which works really well to put you into the world if a modern police department. The one shortcoming the game has is in the writing. Not the story; the overall case is great! But individual card text that is meant to draw you into the world is tragically sterile in a lot of places. It’s the one blemish on an otherwise excellent system.
A new escape room style game from Board & Dice (Superhot, Pocket Mars, 5 Minute Chase) which, based on my short introductory scenario demo, could be the best system yet. It takes the best parts of Unlock and fixes the frustrations I had with the timer and guess-punishment system, and adds a dollop of story in the form of text paragraphs to read as the scenario instructs you and a linked campaign of escape rooms to play through within the set. A really positive first impression!
High Society, that I had the pleasure of playing with Ross from More Games Please, caused without doubt the most laughter I experienced at the Expo. It’s a simple auction game, in which you only ever buying and you never gain any more money. Get the most points but you will lose if you have spent the most money (and are now too poor to belong in high society). It’s a great theme with phenomenal art and wonderfully surprising… so long as you don’t count cards. While it may have been the beer (this was late Saturday night) I had a fantastic time with this one.
One of the biggest games of the show, Holding On was extremely high on my list to try and… it was not exactly what I expected. You are providing care to a terminally ill patient while in theory helping him to understand his jumbled memories before he dies. The overall story plays out over 10 scenarios, but the core system of discovering memories is the same and, because you will only see a few each game, enticingly mysterious. You see a lot of unclear partial memories, but resolving the full memory is a difficult task. What is this man’s story?
However, that story reveal element is attached to a treatment system, the mechanical core of the game, that plays like a satire on the NHS! Complete with horribly over-stressed workers providing the minimum care they can afford to get through the day. The fact that you can only either help keep Billy healthy or talk to him and earn memories means the game encourages you to ignore his suffering in order to extract information. As Michael from Meeple Like Us said while we were playing, it’s like we were in some CIA blacksite. That disconnect leaves my feelings up in the air a little. I still really want to discover Billy’s story, but the process is disappointingly immersion breaking.
Jane Austen’s Matchmaker Chapter 2
Jane Austen’s Matchmaker was a real surprise hit for me way back in the early days of this blog. Chapter 2 reworks and simplifies what was, admittedly, a slightly complicated system and at the same time improves the two player experience. With only a 2 player demo under my belt, it’s a little hard to compare but I did miss the cunning and downright dirty plays you could make with the original. Still had plenty of good and funny moments though!
An area control and tile laying game featuring a mix of city cards (to control) and gang members to create that control according to which city cards they are placed next to. A neat, puzzley game, with elements like playing over lower level opponents or moving parts of the city around to enable lots of disruptive plays. Nice, but possibly hard to get hold of.
Ominoes Hieroglyphs
Ominoes is another classic from my reviewing history and Ominoes Hieroglyphs extends the line into a whole new area. An abstract puzzle game of laying tiles to create sets which then flip, scoring you points. The cool thing is that the other side is another symbol which, with care, will score twice by completing a second set. It rewards careful observation without being overwhelmingly strict. There were definitely some production issues with the first early copies at the expo, but hopefully these will be sorted out soon.
A neat idea, but one that didn’t really grab me. Players have a set of 16 cubes with different combinations of black and white pixels on their faces and they race to complete a particular pattern by arranging those cubes to make up that pixelated image. Racing, pattern matching, dexterity all sounds great… but I got half way through a round and realised I was kind of bored already. Maybe it was being so far ahead of my opponent or maybe I just found the task too simple, but whatever it was, I left disappointed.
An upcoming Splendor-like card game from Spiral Galaxy Games, I found this to be very enjoyable! You are a florist, supplying flowers of certain breeds or colours to fulfil orders, with the twist that you can also plant flowers, to have a constant usable supply, or rely on ticket to ride style draws from the flower market. The real challenge though is in setting yourself up to efficiently fulfill multiple contracts at once, and making best use of the special powers you’ll gain as the game goes on. A very positive first impression!
Tales of the Northmen: Sagas of Noggin the Nog
A semi-cooperative, fairly heavy resource game set, intriguingly, in the world of a UK children’s TV series from way back: The Sagas of Noggin the Nog. Players are gathering resources to, primarily, complete sagas but these will typically require multiple players to complete, requiring friendly investment, or opening you up to massive screwage. I did not get to fully explore this system in a single demo but I can say the main gameplay elements are definitely nice and interesting, especially the turn order rondel.
The nightmarish to pronounce Teotihuacan was my game of the show! A medium-heavy Euro from the minds of Tzolk’in and Anachrony, Teotihuacan is a game of building a great pyramid in an ancient Mayan city. But the core gameplay loop is fantastic. A worker rondel system featuring dice as workers, where a die number represents it’s experience. Taking actions with a die raises its level and lets it perform more effective actions, until it hits 6 and retires. But you also want to try and coordinate multiple dice landing in a single area for even more powerful actions, while avoiding your opponent’s dice. Even in prototype form it is incredibly tight! I can’t wait to get my hands on this one!
A super small and super quick edition of that rather famous game, ticket to ride. The New York map is simply small, a game lasting all of 10-20 minutes, which requires some readjustment of your strategy. Its neat, and really does play as quickly as it claims, but I can’t picture adding it to my collection. If I want to play Ticket to Ride, I probably want to play a full game of Ticket to Ride.
A beautiful looking game of villager collecting. Villagers features a relatively simple drafting mechanic and a pile of things to consider. Certain characters gain money when others are played (you need what they supply) which provides some nice interaction, many others require collecting the right set of workers to play. It seemed to play rather quickly, possibly quicker than I liked. This wasn’t the best demo and I was severely under-caffeinated at the time so while I didn’t immediately like the game, I think that’s more my fault than the game’s. I would certainly like to play again to correct this!
This was never going to be high on my list but I’ve seen it around various conventions now so thought it was high time to catch up, as it were. Wreck & Ruin sadly didn’t manage to change my mind. It is pure dice chucking, smashing into things, silliness without a whole lot of subtlety. Race across the wasteland and grab the objective spots. It is heavily dependent on the following player smashing you down, and most of the fun comes from that. Not enough there for me, and the fun outcomes are mostly tied to you rolling well. That’s fine if you enjoy that kind of thing, but I can’t help but think it is going to struggle to stand next to something like Wasteland Express Delivery Service.
Wow! There we go! Another UK Games Expo weekend slips by in the blink of an eye. Were you there? What games did you enjoy trying?
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