Well another year and another Expo.
Spirit Games managed to get it's usual spot in the Traders hall:
Phil, Sally & Nick had managed to setup on the Fri night but had brought some extr stock for Saturday so we were still unpacking as the public started to pour through the doors.
Things were a little more cosy this year as the organisers had crammed a few more things in where they could, the demo tables were a little too close together but everyone manages to cope alright.
We started off the day with a demo of
Wiraquocha:
This is a really nice little game which play quickly, is easy to teach and did prove very popular during the day.
Between us Nick and mysekf managed a few demo's of this with a lot of positive feedback. This is a game where you need to be prepared to accept a lot player interaction in the form of contest as players battle over the resources in order to meet one of the 3 winning conditions.
All of the Demo tables around us were kept busy all day, as was
Spirit Games stall.
We did not break for lunch until quite late in te day but it was a welcome break from the busy hall. With the nice weather outside and the sheer number of attendees the main hall proved quite warm, as the "air conditioning" consists of roof fans (sigh).
Later in the day we broke out
Kairo which is a beatiful looking game with simple actions but lots of stategy to be had as you all compete to build the best market stalls.
On the Sunday we had
Assara
Which is a really nice looking game that is also a joy to play. They have managed to cram a lot on the modular boards but even so it does take up a fair bit of table space
This also proved quite popular during the day with Sally and Carole having to pop back and forth to either demo or help with questions.
Also out on our other table was
Martinique
A really nice 2-player piratey game which looks really good as well as being quite an interesting game to play. Players move their pieces around the board collecting tiles to try and match the available treasures to score, whilst also trying to pick up maps to provide clues as to where the treasure is buried. If at the end of the game, after placing pieces out where you think the treasure might be (The map tokens tell you rows/columns that do NOT contain it), one of your pieces is on the Treasure site you win otherwise you count up the points for the treasures collected and the one with the highest points wins.
During most of the afternoon I ended demo'ing
Kingdom Builder with the
Kingdom Builder: Nomads Expansion.
This game is one of my favourites of recent times and I have played/demoed this a LOT. This takes minutes to teach with a playing time of around 45-60mins making this an easy game to get to the table. Whilst there may be a bit of luck with the draw of the cards this can be mitigated by careful placement and by gaining the use of extra actions which are collected by building nect to them.
The Nomads expansion adds more scoring options, boards and extra actions. The scoring options are instants unlike the main game where they score at the end of the game, also some of the new extra actions provide means of interacting with the other players more directly. I would probably not ever just play the vanilla game anymore as the additions of the expansion are really great. This again proved quite popular and kept me busy so much so I forgot to take a break for lunch but Carole did and grabbed some bargains so it was not all bad
Once again a biug thanks to the organisers of this who done another sterling job and I look forward to checking out the new venue next year. This should prove to be bigger and better.
Here are my pictures from the weekend:
