The UK Games Expo 2015

Two weeks have passed since the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, but life has a way of interfering with blog posts, so my comments have had to wait.

This was my third Expo and and each one has been a markedly different experience. Not because the show itself has changed a great deal, but because it is broad enough to encompass a range of activities and one persons Expo can be different from another's depending on their interests.

I spent Expo 2013 bouncing from demo game to demo game, squeezing in giant-sized games of Castle Panic and Ticket to Ride along the way. At my second Expo I squeezed in visits to the dealer room around seminars and an RPG session, while this year I took part in my first wargaming tournament.

I decided to have a go at the Bushido tournament because I had never done anything like it before, because I already had plenty of painted models and because they were offering a 20% discount to anyone who took part. In the end I did spectacularly badly, though my opponents were unfailingly courteous and sportsmanlike, at least in part because I chose my warband based on the models I like best and had painted most effectively. The experience cemented my belief that I am not a very competitive player, plus eight hours of one game in a day is two to four hours more than I want. But it was a new experience and now I can now say I don't much like tournaments based on experience.

 Tournament in Action

I have seen the Expo described as basically a board-gaming convention, but in reality it seems to be several different conventions sharing a space. As well as the wargames tournaments, there are board game and card game tournaments, RPG sessions, seminars and a few quirky oddities like LARPing and cosplay. The dealer rooms cover everything from board games to goth fashion. The whole thing demonstrates the extent to which geek interests tend to overlap and it is quite possible to have an enjoyable experience while ignoring more than half the convention.

It is unusual for me in that is the only event I regularly attend for which I stay more than a day and which takes place at a hotel.This gives the experience something of a community feel as groups of gamers hang around the bar into the evenings or compare notes over breakfast.

 The UK Games Expo Food Festival - I'm betting you won't see many pictures of this

Next year though the character of the event is genuinely set to change as large parts of the event move out of the hotel and colonise parts of the neighbouring National Exhibition Centre. This is largely for reasons of space, the hotel having become increasingly jammed. This lead to rooming problems for several events and I found myself involved in a kind of tournament musical chairs as the Bushido tournament was bounced from one room to another a total of five times. It could have been worse, in 2014 an air conditioning failure resulted in a far warmer atmosphere than was comfortable.

It will be interesting to see what effect dividing the event has. Will there be a division between the tournament players and the casual gamers as one set are left in the hotel and the others troupe across to an exhibition hall? Will the sense of community be lost if there is a division between the event and the accommodation? And will the breakfast queue be even longer as everyone gets up even earlier because they have to walk further?

If nothing else, the UK Games Expo has provided a different experience each time I have attended and that, compared to the predictability of so many gaming shows, is very welcome.

Exponential Growth

The UK Games Expo was one of those events I always seemed to miss because I thought it was later in the year than in actually was. By the time I got round to looking at tickets it turned out to be the following weekend, or worse, the weekend just gone. But last year I finally got my act together and booked tickets for Saturday and Sunday.

The Expo is a very different event from Salute. While Salute is, essentially, a shopping experience focused on wargaming, the Expo is a multi-day event which is as much about roleplaying, board games and card games as wargames, if not more so. It also a broader event, taking in tournaments, roleplaying events, seminars, family rooms and even some weird new electronic games.

 You can tell this isn't a wargames convention because the Forge World stand isn't buried under the bodies of the dead and dying.

It also takes place in a hotel, which lends it a very different atmosphere to Salute, which is to say it has one. That isn't entirely fair to Salute, which does have atmosphere, but one that is entirely imported, the location itself being essentially a huge sterile box. The Expo has spent the last two years in the NEC Metropole hotel in Birmingham, which gives it more the feel of a convention or conference.

 Raising funds for world conquest through begging in a hotel lobby. How the mighty have fallen.

I had a great time last year, playing and buying a bunch of different games. Having a room in the hotel meant you could retire from the bustle for a rest, or drop off your purchases so you didn't have to drag them around and there was plenty of space set aside to simply sit down and game. The organisers even offered a game library, which was a nice touch.

Given how much I enjoyed last year, I made sure to get myself organised this year, booking time off work so I could take in the whole event from Friday to Sunday and booking in for a tournament and a roleplaying session as well as making a point of attending some of the seminars, as I had ignored them last year.

 Some strange new game that runs on electricity. I doubt it will have much appeal.

This years Expo was even better attended than last you could see it was a big success. Though not everyone seems to think so - take a look at this blog post and then come back.

To be fair, Saturday was by far the busiest day and things did ease off considerably by Sunday. The bring and buy sale was accessible and the trade halls much easier to navigate. That said, I wouldn't have wanted to try negotiating the Games Lore stand mid-morning on a Saturday with a child in tow.

 Annoyingly, I forgot to take any photos until Sunday, so these make the event look positively sedate.

The organisers had taken into account the increased numbers and booked more space in the hotel. This meant there was a third trader hall, many of the tournaments were moved into a separate area and the amount of space for roleplaying events increased. But some parts of the convention couldn't be or simply weren't expanded. The seminars were still held in the same room as last year. This space had little ventilation and the air-conditioning struggled to cope with the mass of bodies. The trader hall increased in size, but so did the number of traders so there wasn't any more room to move. And, weirdly, the breakfast buffet, which had been a relaxed affair last year, was left with queues to get in and then again to get food. Again, to their credit, the hotel had recognised the problem by Sunday morning and opened up a second area.

All of this illustrates the paradox of these kind of events. The more successful and popular an event, the more attendees it attracts, but the more this increases crowding and reduces the enjoyment for those same attendees. Eventually, the event has to move to a bigger venue, which costs more and so demands even more attendees. And so the cycle continues.

The organisers of the Expo seem quite relaxed about this at the moment. In an interview in the show guide they talked casually about attracting as many as 10,000 attendees. However, the organisers of other shows have adopted a very different attitude.

The Salute guide included a half page advert from Newbury and Reading Wargames society announcing that their annual show, Colours, would not be taking place in  2014. Apart from the weirdness of advertising the non-existence of a show, the advert neatly illustrates the paradox of success. The advert is quite blunt, the event had simply gotten too big for the society to run comfortably and they would rather take a year off to plan than face a potential disaster.

 Colours 2014

Nor is this a problem unique to wargaming. Hyper-Japan is a Japanese cultural festival taking in elements of fashion, food, manga, anime and any other bit of Japanese culture it can find, including Yakult. It has always taken place from Friday to Sunday, but this year the Saturday event will be further divided into two seperate events divided by a one hour gap between 14:15 and 15:15. This was, apparently, to avoid the huge queueing problems created because the show had more attendees than insurance would allow into the venue at any one time. I've booked a ticket for Friday and it will be interesting to see how many others make the same decision.

Similarly, I have skipped the MCM London Comic Con (Formally the London Expo) for the past two years, because what was once a reasonably relaxed event had grown to the extent that you could expect to queue for over an hour for entry, even with pre-booked tickets, and could expect the same level of gridlock experience at the UK Games Expo Games Lore stand on Saturday, at the whole event.

Is there a solution to this? I think there is, of a sort, though it's a fairly brutal one. Either a show reaches the point Colours has, where its organisers decide its all gone too far and decide to kill it or rest if for a while or it grows so big that the experience stops being fun and the show dies on its own. I'm not sure that has happened to any show I know of yet, but it remains a possibility.

 Well-attended or over-crowded?

But doesn't that mean the show is dead? Well, yes, after a fashion. But if the demand is there someone, somewhere will step in and set up a new show, starting from scratch and the business of watching it slowly grow begins again. And so we retain a kind of equilibrium in which shows come and go, but the experience of them remains constant. Where is the Expo in this cycle of growth and decay? Who knows, ask me again next year.

The UK Games Expo

I'm sorry I haven't updated in ages. I hadn't realised it had been that long, I have a whole other post just ready to go that just needs pictures uploading and it will be ready. I'd forgotten I hadn't already posted it.

Part of the problem is that I write most of these at work, during my lunch break, and having taken a few days off I haven't had any lunch breaks. But I promise to get things up to speed and will have new Chaos Dwarf pictures very soon.

Now that I'm back at my desk it feels like a good opportunity to talk about the UK Games Expo in Birmingham, which took place a little over a week ago. The Expo was an event I had been meaning to go to for years but, somehow, always failed to get myself organised. I was always labouring under the misconception that it took place later in the year than it actually did. By the time I got round to looking it up, it would be the following weekend and far too late to sort anything out.

Well not this year, I had tickets, train tickets and a hotel room for me and my little brother booked months in advance. We set off early Saturday morning, got there for about ten and stayed the whole weekend, leaving on the morning of the bank holiday Monday. It was my first true multi-day convention. I have been to conventions that last more than one day, but not stayed for more than one day. More significantly, this was the first convention where I was staying at the venue, in this case the Birmingham NEC Metropole Hotel, which did have an effect on the atmosphere.

Having a proper base at the venue meant we could pick things up and drop them off easily, no need to carry out cumbersome bags of stuff. The fact that we had two days gave a relaxed air to proceedings. Both the bar and the buffet restaurant (when it wasn't serving breakfast) were quickly colonised by gamers trying out newly acquired games. It was nice to be able to withdraw from the rush and find a quiet spot to game.

Most of my convention experience has been at shows that emphasised wargaming, with a handful of RPGs and board games on the side. I have also attended board game and RPG focused shows. The Expo was unusual in striking a pretty good balance between all three. The dealer room was, perhaps, slightly biased towards board games, but Mantic, GCT and Exodus Wars flew the flag for wargaming and there were plenty of stands selling Games Workshop stuff and RPGs. Board games and wargames were pretty evenly represented in tournaments and RPGs were run all weekend in a room of their own.

There were also plenty of demo and pickup games. Most of these were board games, unsurprising as these were the easiest to set up. As well as trying out a few new games, such as Red Dragon Inn and Smash Up, both of which made there way home with us, MLB and I also got to try out giant-sized versions of Ticket to Ride and Castle Panic which added a bit of novelty to already enjoyable games.

The Expo was also one of the most child-friendly conventions I've been to. The giant games attracted attention, but there were also family areas set aside and plenty of child friendly games to try out. I'm quite sorry I left it so late to start coming, MLB would certainly have appreciated it when he was younger. Another nice addition was the inclusion of the cinema room, showing Avengers Assemble, the Judge Dredd fan film Judge Minty and the documentary the People versus George Lucas, which gave us something to do in the evening.

If there was any kind of problem it was that it was very difficult to sample a bit of everything. MLB and I hadn't booked any RPG sessions, partly because of the amount of time they would have taken up, nor did we look at the tournaments. In retrospect, I think that was a mistake, but it would have been hard to squeeze any more in. Next year, I think I will make a point of signing up for at least one RPG session.

Overall, it was an enjoyably different experience and one I intend to repeat next year.