We're going to UK Games Expo (and we have no idea what we're doing)

We’re going to UK Games Expo at the end of the month. We do not have a booth. We do not have business cards. We barely have a build. But we have train tickets to Birmingham, and that’s basically the same thing.

If you’ve never heard of it, UK Games Expo is the biggest tabletop games convention in the country. It’s three days, somewhere around 40,000 people, and the entire NEC turned into a board game cathedral. Indie publishers, big studios, demo tables, tournaments, that one stall that only sells dice — all of it.

What we’re going to do there

Honestly? Mostly walk around with our mouths open. But also:

• Playtest Arthur’s Round on strangers. We have a laptop and the current alpha build. If we can get even five people to flick a few discs and tell us what’s broken, that’s a successful trip.
• Find a real Crokinole board. There’s a stall (apparently) that imports proper Mennonite-made boards from Ontario. Ferg is unhinged about this.
• Meet other small studios. We are extremely new at this and there are people there who have actually shipped games. We would like to politely ask them how.
• Eat a Greggs sausage roll at NEC station. A non-negotiable Birmingham ritual.

We are realistically going to be the smallest, scrappiest people in the room. That’s fine. The whole point is to learn what we don’t know we don’t know.

If you’re going

We’d love to meet you. We won’t be hard to spot — look for four people huddled around a single laptop, one of them visibly stressed (that’s Rushi, on debug duty), and one of them taking too many photos for instagram (me).

There’s no formal way to find us yet — we don’t have a booth, a badge, or a table. But if you drop us a line on our about page or find us in the crowd, we’d love to demo the game, talk shop, or just compare notes on which hall has the worst lighting (early money on Hall 7).

What I’m hoping happens

Best case: someone plays Arthur’s Round, smiles, and tells their friends.

Worst case: nobody plays it, but we leave with three pages of notes on what to fix, a real Crokinole board in the back of a Vauxhall Astra, and the quiet conviction that we’re closer than we thought.

Both outcomes seem fine, honestly.

— Jess

Next time: the post-mortem, the photos, and whatever Ferg makes us buy at the dice stall.