I keep going back to the UK Games Expo. With images;
cc-by-sa-nc on
everything.
This time I abandoned my usual hotel, the Ibis in Coventry which
is about a 15 minute drive away, and stayed on site-ish, in the Arden,
just the other side of the railway line. It's about a 10-15 minute
walk from any useful parts of the site, but that's the same experience
one gets just trying to reach the official car parking, and it was
rather cheaper than anything in the NEC proper.
Green route: round the back of the hotel (or out of a back door),
through a trading estate, and into the railway station, from which
there's a bridge that drops you outside hall 2. Nominally accessible
to wheels, but the lifts in the railway station were unavailable two
days out of four.
Magenta route: out onto the main road, cross the tracks, cut in
through the southern parking areas and go past Resorts World. As
shown, to the front door of the NEC, but this is obviously better than
green if you're going to the Hilton (circle the lake and cross "The
Rough", soon to be s "glamping" site, to get in through the back
door). Basically flat all the way.
Also the Arden had a decent breakfast.
Yet another hall rearrangement this year: the big boring companies
were spread out among the more interesting ones rather than lumped
together, in a single flat space made up of halls 2, 3 and about a
quarter of 4 (it trailed off in a mess of food sellers and empty
tournament tables).
On Thursday night I got in some illicit Flip
7 in the Hilton
bar.
As usual I was demonstrating for Wotan Games, mainly War of the Nine
Realms
each morning. It's not a new game, but people continued to be
surprised by it, and I think mostly to enjoy it.
Rather than dive into the boardgaming as soon as my shift was over, I
did some role-playing with some of the Whartson Hall crew. On Friday
this was the Call of Cthulhu scenario "The Derelict", which was great
fun. (Even though, like many Chaosium one-shots, it's basically a lot
of wandering around finding things and then a fight.
But in the evening I played some more
Flip 7, then
Project L,
and finally Xenon
Profiteer.
Saturday's planned RPG session was cancelled, but we got in a quick
two-hour session of "Games On Demand" playing SLA BORG. I think I have
worked out a new trick for doing well in a game in which the random
element vastly overshadows your character's attributes or skills (we
were mostly in the range -2 to +2 to a d20 roll): be generally funny,
laugh at your own failures, and when you actually want to achieve
something, describe it so amusingly and plausibly that the GM forgets
to ask you to roll, or makes even a failure a partial success.
I make no apologies for the character name.
While Friday's Call of Cthulhu had been in a pleasantly cool and
quiet room in the NEC, this was in an overheated and very noisy room
in the Hilton, and we all felt a bit wiped afterwards. So we ended up
just playing Coldwater
Crown
before turning in for an early night.
After my demo shift on Sunday I finally had some time to see the
halls, starting with our neighbours across the aisle.
We felt we should join the games together. "Who killed Thor?" "It was
Hjördis, with the bloody great axe. That's her over there, waving the
axe and smiling." "Welp, another mystery solved!"
An unfortunate coincidence. (The "Tales of the Old West" booth was
actually on the other side of that banner.)
Then packing and home. I think we were all badly wearied by that
Saturday game, and even though Friday's was great I don't want to risk
playing in those Hilton rooms again.