The Game Shelf will be at Airecon 2018

I have no idea how it's almost March already, but time is fast approaching for us to attend Airecon 2018 in Harrogate, UK. AireCon is a board game convention held from 9th-11th March 2018 at the Harrogate Convention Centre in Yorkshire. This year will be our first year attending and we're really excited to add another convention to our board gaming calendar.

We're not big convention attenders, since neither of us are great at throwing ourselves into games with new people, but last year, a lot of our friends attended the event so hopefully there will be some friendly faces and some new faces too. I expect Airecon to me a middle ground between the two conventions we've previously attended - the huge UK Games Expo and Stabcon South which is a much smaller event with a focus on playing games, not exhibitors. So far, the organisers are expecting around 1000 unique attendees which is awesome for a convention that was a gathering at someone's house back in 2015!!

So what are we looking forward to most at AireCon?

Exhibitors

AireCon attracts a good crowd of local exhibitors, including online and brick and mortar board game stores, as well as a lot of smaller UK board game publishers, who are certainly growing, especially in the Kickstarter sphere. Names I recognise are Sinister Fish, who I know for their Gloomhaven stickers, but also have a couple of new games, One Free Elephant, who had Kickstarter success with Carcosa, and Yay games, who are probably best known for Ominoes. We're looking forward to seeing what other exciting games are coming out of the UK.

Meeting People

We're not great at saying 'Hi', but we love it when people say 'Hi' to us! Fortunately, over the last 12 months we are starting to make a lot more connections with other board gamers so we might be more sociable at this convention! I'm particularly excited to meet up with some other contributors from Board Game Exposure who we've been collaborating with for the last few months. I'm hoping that we can attend the meetup for Board Game Trading and Chat UK, a really great Facebook community through which we met all of our local gaming friends after we moved house. We should also be able to see some of our older gaming friends from other areas of the UK too. I am also pretty excited to meet Rodney Smith from Watch It Played, but let's face it, I'm unlikely to go up and say hello.

The Games Library

Now that our own shelves are overflowing with games, I love the opportuntiy to have access to a good board games library, stocked with some new releases and older titles that we might have missed out on trying. I can't wait to just sit down and dedicate some time to gaming for a couple of days during the weekend. The games library is provided by The Travelling Man - a chain of local game stores from 'Up North' and what's even better is that I can check out the library in advance and decide if there's anything I'm really keen to play!

If you already have tickets, then we can't wait to see you there. If you don't then why not check out the AireCon website to find out more and get yourself some tickets?