Friday, June 7, 2013

Convention report: UK Games Expo

source: UK Games Expo 
It's been almost two weeks now since we returned from the UK Games Expo, one of the coolest gaming conventions in Europe. This fair is a lot smaller than Spiel Essen or Lucca Comics & Games, but it draws its force from the passions of people, from organizers to participants.

Every person involved in making this event possible was helpful without hesitation, we got everything we asked for and more and the organization was flawless. It's a pleasure to have the feeling that you're among friends rather than business partners from day 0.

When it comes to the Expo participants, the situations is the same, we met mostly positive people, asking questions, eager to play and we've also met some fans, people who got Warriors & Traders last year and this year they came back looking for us to check out our new games. It is always a pleasure to hear people complimenting your games and if you add to that the label "heavy gamer" it pretty much the highest satisfaction for a game designer.

Sadly, we had very few copies of Exodus: Proxima Centauri left, so we took all of them with us to England and, as it turns out, people had an eye on it for a while and since it's not so common in the stores anymore, we sold all of them. We actually left from the UK Games Expo empty handed, every single copy of Wild Fun West and Warriors & Traders was sold and that's the best kind of news from the publisher's angle.

source: UK Games Expo 
I was also a guest of Michael Fox and Paco Jaen on the seminar about crowd-funding. That's the moment when it all came to me, we (we as in NSKN) represent one of the success stories in crowd-funding, having had one of the very few board games backed by people on Indiegogo, Kickstarter's little brother. It was both pleasant and stressful to be in front of a quite large audience and I must confess that while sharing my experience, I also had the chance of catching a few innovative ideas which we plan to use for our future campaigns.

On top of everything I've just shared, we also managed to establish a record inside NSKN for the most demos in a gaming convention. We had 42 demos in 2 days, covered by 2 peoples! For reference, in last year's Essen we had about 30 demos in 4 days split among the 7 of us present in Germany.

Honestly, I cannot wait to go back to UK in 2014!

__________________
Find out more on the NSKN official website Facebook  | BGG |  ScoopIT Magazine 
Follow us on Twitter: @NSKNGames

No comments:

Post a Comment