Overthinking by the Yellow Meeple:- UK Games Expo - The Haul

With only one day at the UK Games Expo this year, we were trying to cram a lot into a very small time. It turned out that a significant part of the plan was shopping. I prearranged some trades, but otherwise we each set ourselves a budget of £100. Here's what we managed to come home with!


Trades

Eminent Domain, Escape the Room Secret of Dr Graveley's Retreat, Harbour, Artifacts Inc, Among the Stars Revival, Worlds Fair 1893, Among the Stars Revival, Viceroy, Quests of Valeria

There are a couple of UK Facebook groups for board games trading which have been very active in the last couple of weeks with sale posts for Expo collection only. I took the opportunity to arrange a whole bunch of good value trades and they all worked out well on the day. The only down side to this was the logistics of coordinating a meeting place with 8 different people, most of whom don't want to carry around their games all day.

Bring and Buy

Burgle Bros, Orleans, City of Iron

The bring and buy at this year expo was bigger than ever and I could've spent a small fortune, even if I just stuck with my original list of 15 games and the prices I was happy to pay for them. Due to budget constraints though, we were very restrained and just picked our favourites. We were very tempted by some great games with great prices though - Heroscape at £20, the original Necromunda for £70 - just so many bargains to be had.

New Purchases

Century Spice Road, Hanamikoji, Kingdomino, EXIT Series x3, Barenpark, Le Havre, Great Western Trail, Terraforming Mars overlays

There weren't too many big new releases at this years UKGE, but we did get ourselves a copy of Century Spice Road and Barenpark. Otherwise we just shopped around for a few games on our wishlist and found a huge variety of prices, with some in particular seeming very reasonable.

Review Copies and Demos

Hunger The Show, Woo Hoo!, King Frog, Ice Cool Promos, Unlock - Fifth Avenue, Wibble, Reef Route, Era Lyres Pocket RPG, Dobble

This was our first time attending an event as press, and we actually learnt that there are some designers and publishers out there who recognise and like our blog, which was really awesome! After 2 years of working on the blog we only now feel confident to start asking about review copies, and we had some success in this regard. You should start to see these reviews in the next few weeks.

All in all we have 31 different games to play! This seems pretty insurmountable right now and I'm sure we'll still be trying a few for the first time in 6 months or longer, but I am extremely keen to get started! I think Century Spice Road and the promo Unlock scenario might be heading to the front of the queue!