Another spring. Another UKGE.

(And I've still never seen "The Dark Room")

So… the UK Games Expo 2026 is a thing that happened 😁

I’ve spent the last week or so in the usual post-convention fug; that depressing sensation of plunging straight into a week of work after a pleasant, sun-shiny weekend in an environment devoted to nothing but games. I’m still not sure that I’ve fully recovered … but I should probably scrawl down a few notes before it all becomes nothing but a dim-and-distant memory.

Hall three (of five!). It’s really hard to capture the size of the thing now … hall three is the biggest space at the National Exhibition Centre, and is huge. I did miss one trick though; Asmodee had an open-topped london bus parked on a stand in this room … it seems like that was the place to go to to take elevated, scene-setting pictures from. Oh well. Next time…

I still consider myself a relative newbie to the expo; my first trip there was in 2018 … but that’s a big enough chunk of the expo’s 20 year history to have seen a lot of change.

Possibly one of the biggest changes (especially when I look back at my blogs from 2018) is the trade part of the show, and the mad dash for games-of-interest-which-are-likely-to-sell-out-quickly on day one of the expo. Back in 2018, I casually drove down on the Friday, arrived really late, and didn’t do much game buying until towards the end of the show. Nowadays… it’s a case of calling in at the NEC on Thursday night to pick up tickets, making sure I’m on-site, parked-up, and ready to enter the halls the moment that the doors open, and having a pre-arranged battle plan of exactly which stands I wanted to call at during the all-important first hour or so of the show.

Friday morning, view from the Hall 2 queue

The day one (Friday) queuing seemed to have caught the organisers off guard. Though, to be fair, the sheer number of visitors on Friday was quite a surprise. We arrived early, expecting a leisurely stroll over to the main halls, maybe pick up something for breakfast before joining the queue … but were already being directed into the very last of the East Carparks. (Once the East car parks are full at the games Expo, traffic gets sent to the NEC’s “North” car parks. Definitely the less-desirable place to park; it’s about a mile from the entrance, and the shuttle busses stop running early in the evening, so it’s not great for late-night gamers!)

By the time we got over to the show, all of the trade hall entrances had long queues…. none of which were particularly well-segregated from the general milling-about crowds beyond the first 10 meters or so. So it was, perhaps, completely predictable that our position in the queue would count for nothing when the doors actually opened, and all of the crowd-at-large all just surged towards their nearest entrance. Oh well… my route planning paid off anyway; an initial stop at the Engames stand secured a copy of Taikai Shinzawa’s hot-off-the-press new tricktaker “Can’t Win”, and we then managed to get to the Saashi & Saashi stand before the day’s allocation of Railway Porters disappeared. Subsequent early stops at Playte and Revelation Games secured a heap of other stuff on my “would-really-like-to-buy” list … and within an hour of opening, I was already so laden with games that a trip back to the car to drop stuff off seemed like a VERY good idea 😆.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur; mostly spent traversing the trade halls at a much more leisurely pace … trying things out, chatting to game creators, catching up with some gaming chums that I only ever bump into at conventions. I bought a LOT of stuff …which, I’m actually surprisingly happy about. For a few months now, I’ve been a bit bored and disinterested in most new gaming releases (maybe you’ve got a sense of that from the scarcity of new-and-interesting things appearing in my writing?) … but there was quite a few things that caught my eye, and excited me in ways that I haven’t really been excited about games in a very long time. But… we’ll come to all that in due course 😁

It was a fun — but very tiring — day. We were back in our hotel room by 5pm! We managed a game of Railway Porters before heading out for food (Hot take: it wasn’t great with two players. I’m hoping the 3-4 player game gives you a bit more to think about, but — at first blush — this one seems very much at the super-light end of Saashi’s range. And the boards warped faster than one of those little plastic fish that you find in a Christmas cracker!!) … but, yep, that was about as much gaming activity as we managed to fit into the first day.

Doesn’t bode well, does it?

Day 2…

We promised to be a little bit kinder to ourselves on day 2, had a pleasantly late start, and accepted the inevitability of being sent to the dreaded Northern carparks (for the very first time in ALL my trips to the expo!)

The north-end car-parking experience was, however, very much mitigated by my discovery that at least TWO other gamers have excellent taste in motor vehicles, and had left a convenient third spot in which I could park the shepmobile!

Surely there’s some kind of victory point bonus for putting three in a row?

Day 2 highlight? The Bastion Indie Market! Held out-of-hours, in one of the seminar rooms rather than the main halls, The Bastion Indie market was an attempt to capture some of the vibe of the Tokyo Game Market’s “chuck bag alley”; a place where indie game designers could pitch and sell small-run, experimental, self-published passion-project games to an eager audience…

Fortunately we arrived early, and got a good place in the queue; the level of interest very much outstripped the size of the room.

A “Mr William Blake” and associate, attempt to sell a Quantum Kebab Van to an unwitting member of the public.

It was brilliant to see this kind of event at a UK games convention; I know AireCon tried to do something similar with their “Yokocho Alley” this year, but that mostly just felt like a couple of slightly-cheaper stalls slightly out of the orbit of the main trading area, selling slightly-cheaper games. This felt more like the real deal. (Or, rather, how I imagine the real deal to be, having never actually attended the Tokyo game market!) I’m hoping it’ll be back bigger and better next year … I might even be tempted to test my own indie design chops if these things become regular!

Sadly, this was the only time that I bumped into chums Matt + Tony (above), and Aaron (Bastion Organiser) over the course of the weekend … and, obviously, they were all very busy with the event, so we didn’t linger too long. I guess that’s another thing with the expo getting so big; there was a time when, if you knew somebody who was at expo, you could pretty much guarantee that you’d bump into them and have a chat or a game at some point over the weekend. These days … in a crowd of 50,000 people … that’s not so much of a dead cert 🙃

Yeah… expo broke the 50,000 unique visitors figure this year (up by almost a quarter on last year!). It’s a lot of people. There are UK cities with smaller populations than that. In fact, I saw some off-the-record claims earlier in the week that Saturday had beaten the record for the biggest single-day attendance of any event ever held at the NEC. I’m a bit dubious … you would’ve thought the organisers would be trumpeting such an achievement from every available channel, and that the current record holder — “Crufts” — would be a tough act to beat. But… who knows. NEC attendance figures always seem to be a bit vague and hand-wavy, and official sources tend to mostly only talk in terms of admissions (the expo managed 87,000 of those this year). Perhaps there are contractual things involved?

Either way, UKGE is now a VERY big show, with a massive trader presence. It was great to see publishers like Engames present this year (with copies of Nokosu Dice, Ghost Lift, and — briefly — Can’t Win, at only £20 a pop. You’ll normally pay twice that to get an imported copy of any of those titles in the UK!) … Korea’s Playte were representing themselves this time (they’ve previously only had their games appearing courtesy of a third party) … and it was great to see Saashi and Saashi back after their debut success last year, with a brand new title to sell.

In fact… given those visitor numbers… I’m still a little surprised that more sellers aren’t seeing the UK expo as a very significant game release opportunity. 51,196 punters looking for the latest hotness is nothing to be sneezed at. The Saashis had a big queue for Railway Porters … and there was a queue the length of the hall for the new 2-player Flamecraft game (possibly some kind of limited edition version? I’m not super-interested in that particular series, so didn’t pay a lot of attention). Oink were debuting The Frozen Passage and a cat-themed remix of 9 tiles (Meow Tiles) … and Hachette usually fetch a couple of new releases to the expo. But on the whole … it seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Anyway, I’ll end this post with a bit of a haul photo. Yes, I know haul pictures are super-cheesy, but you can consider this a preview of things I’m very likely to be writing about in the coming weeks, so if there’s anything you’re super keen to hear about … well… here’s your opportunity to express an interest 😁

I should point out that two of the things in this picture weren’t things I specifically set out to get, but were actually freebies! That big Cube Express game on the right came as a freebie for buying two games from the Revelation Games stand. I had no idea that was the deal … but when the guy told me “You can pick anything off that shelf”, and gestured at a shelf containing three games I’d never heard of, the one with trains and cubes on the cover seemed like the obvious choice 😉

And the other freebie? Well… that was quite a surprise. Just to the bottom right of “More Containers” you might spot a tiny green box. That’s a “mini” edition of DnUp. Apparently it’s exactly the same as the full-size version … but printed on mini-cards, and you need to use pen and paper to score instead of getting score tokens. DnUp is the brand new card-shedding game from the designer of Scout, and Asmodee were giving it away for free, on the basis that people will enjoy the tiny version so much that they’ll want to go and buy the full-scale pack to play with!

Just how confident must you be in the strength of a game to do a promo like that??! … It’ll be very interesting to see if their faith is justified.

Oh… and that big brown box with an allplay logo? It’s a neoprene playmat for Container. Allplay were doing a VERY good deal on the deluxe edition with all the extras. I had, initially, thought about picking up the retail version (£30) … but they had a demo copy of the deluxe version out to fondle, and — frankly — the moment you touch that version, you WANT to play with it. In my experience, there are very few games with a “deluxe” tag that truly make you feel like you’re playing with a super-fine, actually-deluxe version …but this is absolutely one of them. I’ll admit that I bounced pretty hard off the first edition of Container, way way back in the earlier days of my euro-gaming history… but I’ve always thought it was something I needed to go back to … and the last couple of editions have had some significant additions to prevent the economy going too far off the rails with newbies at the table. So I think it might be time 🙂

However, so many new games!…

I should stop typing, and start playing, shouldn’t I?..