The UK Games Expodition

It has been nearly a month since UK Games Expo, with the official attendance figures showing that the event has fully recovered from the hit from the pandemic and is now bigger than ever before. I haven't seen any breakdowns, but from where I stood, Friday seemed to be incredibly busy, Saturday even more so (though the end of the day seemed to drop off more), and Sunday was a lot more relaxed - though still very full of people.

As planned, I spent almost my entire time at the Playtest Zone, wearing a red t-shirt and helping keep things going there, though for most of the time it wasn't hard work. We have a sort of saying there: unlike most other stalls and zones around the Expo, the busier it gets, the less we have to do. When things are going well, there are a constant flow of players wanting to playtest a prototype, and sometimes they don't even need directing to a table. 

The Playtest Zone (red tables) in full flow on Friday morning.
There were more tables behind me and to the side as well!

I actually found that most of my effort was spent explaining to passers-by how the area works, as it isn't really obvious, especially as so much other stuff around the halls requires you to book a spot in advance. In the Playtest Zone, if you are a player looking to test something, you just need to turn up and if there is a game requiring players you can just sit down and play.

There was a nice facility next to us that I didn't take advantage of, but may do in future: this was an area run by Panda Game Manufacturing, who sponsor the Publisher-Designer track of the event, where they provide a few tables that can be used by designers and publishers for ad-hoc meetings, and there were quite a lot of people using the tables throughout. Panda also had some giveaways, including the rather cute "Game Design Toolkit", which is a small game box full of tokens, dice, stickers, and blank tiles and cards that you can use to create a game. It's largely there as a promotional demo of the sort of quality of the components they can produce, but it's genuinely a cool box of stuff and would be a great focus for an introductory game design workshop or something. 

I managed to get playtests of both Sympolis (in an official playtesting slot) and Grab Bag Zoo (as a casual play one evening), getting valuable feedback for both.

Sympolis in play for three players, one of whom is
accumulating Jealousy and Hubris cards at an alarming rate.

As seems to be my way, I didn't get to play many games over the weekend and didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked with... anyone really, and I spent most of my evenings just too tired to do anything much, but it was again an amazing experience all around and I'm already looking forward to pretty much doing the whole thing again next year.

I'll just sign off for today with the most exciting news (for me, anyway) of the weekend: we have found a publisher for Grab Bag Zoo! We are in the process of negotiating a contract (so it's not quite a done deal) and I can't tell you any details at the moment, but when there is anything to officially announce, you bet I'll be shouting about it! Watch this space for more information when I can...