Our Expo Experience Day 2: Saturday- A Day of Firsts
A brief (ish) run down of Adam and Elaine’s three day, magical adventure at The UK Games Expo 2017, held at the NEC in Birmingham and The Hilton Metropole Hotel, Birmingham. This is our third visit now to the Expo and the experience has been different each time.
Saturday 3rd June
Woohoo a whole day of playing games, drinking and eating junk food for my birthday!!!!
An Expo first for us today. The Saturday is always the busiest day by far so we decided to have a leisurely morning and attend a seminar, of which there are many various ones held throughout the three days . We choose ‘Style vs Substance’ (Art in Gaming) which consisted of a panel of guest artists talking about their work and how this related to style vs substance. They included Ralph Horsely who designed the artwork used on the cover of the this year’s magazine and tickets, Jon Kovalic (‘Munchkin’) and the lovely and very talented Gillian Pearce of Hellion’s Art, who we commissioned to do some custom artwork for us, but that is another story, which no doubt will be in a future blog. Ad and I are suckers for great artwork in games and we found this thoroughly enjoyable. In fact as soon as it was over we braved the hordes and headed back into the trade hall to check out the artists’ stall in more detail. Ralph had some spectacular, original oil paintings for sale and although these were a bit out of our price range we did pick up some beautiful prints which will decorate our dining room nerd cave nicely.
http://www.hellionsart.com/ & http://www.ralphhorsley.co.uk/
We also bumped into yet more Herefordshire Board Gamers at lunchtime; The Beavanses (Emily, Rob and Abi). It was really great to see so many Herefordshire Board Gamers yesterday and today, although none of them were called James which was rather unnerving.
The afternoon brought another Expo first for us- pre-arranged gaming with strangers. We had arranged a four player game of ‘Through the Ages’ (a heavy, civilisation building game) with two lovely chaps via the Facebook group,’Board Game Trading and Chat UK’; Christian who we later found out runs Board Game Monster (online gaming retailer) and Uli. What could possibly go wrong?! After a strong start by us, in first and second place for much of the game, we got mercilessly beaten down by war after war in the third age (about 4 hours in) and on my birthday too 🙁
‘Board Game Trading and Chat UK’ have done some great work this year by facilitating member meet ups, as it can be very daunting to wander round the gaming rooms, trying to sum up the courage to approach others for a game. They also have t-shirts so members can identify each other easily and therefore hopefully feel less nervous about approaching strangers. This is a great idea, although our t-shirts are much better obviously! We still have some for sale and Christmas is just around the corner…
https://www.facebook.com/groups/UKboardgametrade/
So endeth the second day of firsts.