UK games Expo 2016

For the second year I went to UK games expo in Birmingham, this time without the family. Last year I only attended the event on Saturday and played in the Bushido grand masters most of the time, so I din´t get check out all the stuff at the trade show.
This time around I dedicated the entire weekend to the expo, arriving late on Thursday with most oft the other Swedish Bushido players. The expo is situated at the NEC which is must be one of UKs biggest venue for trade shows and conserts and its within walking distance from the airport, so we never ventured into Birmingham.

Friday

On Friday we spent the all day walking around in the trade show hall. Hailing from Sweden I am really not used to big gaming events, the biggest being Gothcon. So this was really great fun!

Not being a player of any Hawk wargames, I was first greeted by a large ship from the Dropzone universe on display. My experience so far with the models from Dropzone commander is that I didn't really like them. But they had on display models for their new game Dropfleet commander they looked amazing. I really got hooked, but it hasn't been released jet. It got funded earlier this year from a Kickstarter. More pictures later in the post.

During the day me and Peder tried Guild ball at Steamforged games demo booth. The models on displayed looked great (they use the same painter as GCT does for Bushido, Dark Iron Studio) and its easy to get started with a game were you only play with seven models on the tabletop. So we got us a starter deal, I got the Union as they supposedly don't have to interact that much between each other. Peder bought Brewers, well because they seemed to drink a lot of beer I guess, we even hooked Magnus up with some Fishermen. More on Guild ball in a future post.

I had a quick chat with the guys from Rubicon models and  a look at their very nice plastic WW2
models. They are working on some nice german motorcycles  with crew, really looking forward to these. I told them I wanted some french motorcycles too!

Another game that had really good looking models was Battle for Troll Bridge from Warplouge miniatures. A lot of character in the miniatures, both the humans and the goblin/orcs/trolls.


Fantasy flight games had a big area in the hall where you could try many of their games and on display was the new ships from wave nine, which has just been previewed on their website. On Saturday and Sunday they arranged one of the biggest X-wing tournaments; Open series - Yavin. Would have been great to attend it but the Bushido Grand Masters was held at Saturday and in the next weekend I would attend the next tournament in the Open series in Copenhagen.

Another miniature company I was really impressed by was Otherworld. A friend of mine has gotten deep into this, investing a lot of time and money in it, but the miniatures he has shown me didn't impress me. But seeing their entire range painted was really impressive. They have a lot of really nice fantasy models!

After the trade hall closed we sat down with the other swedes and played board games.

Next day, Saturday, we totally dedicated to the Grand Masters in Bushido arranged på GCT studios. I played Silvermoon Trade Syndicate as I did last year, but a completely different list. This was my list:

• Jade rose Gumi
• Kyoaku-Han x 2
• Kyoaku-Han crossbowman
• Rakki
• Saki
• Sukoshi Kani
• Sukuratchi
• Tsubaki
• Wasupu
• Bought loyalty
• Dark secrets
• Inside information

I got to play against two Tengu, where I won one and lost one which I am satisfierad with as I haven't played against Tengu before. I only got to play against one Righteous warriors Temple list and I won against it. Righteous warrior is a really good temple list and I thought more would be playing it at the GM, but I was wrong. I also played a Yurei list. In the end I ended up in third place, and Peder got second place!

For some strange reason they hurried the tournament on and we hardly had any breaks, so after the tournament we were quite hungry and tired. After leaving our stuff at the hotel room we went around the area to find some much needed food, this turned out to be a lot harder than we first imagined, all restaurants was full. I guess because it was Saturday, we finally ended up in restaurant at the hotel where gaming part of Expo was held.

At Sunday we relaxed and just went for an hour or two in the trade show doing the last small purchases before going to the airport.

UK games expo is a real nice well run event, and it growing a lot each year. In its tenth year its one of biggest gaming events in the world, well run, more miniature games and big trade show.

My biggest grief about the event is that almost everything closes down after 17:00. The only thing that is open after then is the gaming library where you can borrow board games and try to find a free table and play that.

And now some more pictures: