And that was UKGE 2025 – Day 3

Something we’d heard from folks who attended the recent Expos was that Saturday is easily the busiest day. Because of this, we joined a bunch of gamers getting to the Hitlon open gaming areas early (like 9am early) and sat there for the morning. We enjoyed a really nice chat with Craig (@midlandmeeple) and his partner Matt (@mattyeaves) before being joined by Jenny and her big game bag full of games.

Around lunch time we decided to head over to the Expo, grab some food, and see if we could track down some other friends in Hall 4 for more gaming. It was as busy as we’d been promised and we were both getting quite stressed by the time we made it to the buger van (which was my favourite place to eat all weekend).

After our hunger had been satisfied, we found a table near the competition tables (which took up so much room un Hall 4 that open gaming looked like it’s smaller, poorer cousin). My wife visited the library and returned with a game I’d never heard of called GEMBATAN. It appeared to be simple enough that I was able to learn and teach within minutes.

After that we shopped around a little, grabbing some dice here and some artwork there, before fleeing to the saftey of the Hilton again for more gaming goodness. It was our last evening at the Expo (as we’d be driving back on the Sunday afteroon) and it was a good one.

PLAYED GAMES

RAILROAD INK: LUSH GREEN EDITION – We love these games, but had only tried Deep Blue (obviously) and Blazing Red before now. Jenny had a copy of Lush Green, which we discovered is a mean version of the games. The roads and tracks on those dice are things I just never wanted in my town with some new designs that kept us on our toes. My town ended up a mess of dead ends and unlinked routes. I think I’ll stick to the comfort of my Deep Blue edition.

TINDERBLOX – This is a small tin game that we usually take with us when we travel. I was worried about playing a game that involved precision and balancing with other people playing games along the same table, but it went well . . . until my wife squeezed the tweezers too hard and snapped them. Yikes. Thankfully Alley Cat games were super helpful when we visited their stand later in the day and we got two replacement tweezers. My wife has now booked in to resit her tweezer exam to show she’s qualified to use them the next time we play.

SKULLS OF SEDLAC – This is one of the handful of ButtonShy games I took with us, It’s a really good in which you draft cards and have to place them in front of you in a pyramid shape, starting at the bottom. Placement is key as each of the five types of characters in the game scores depending on it’s location relative to other characters, or where it is pacedwithin the pyamid. We also roped Cassie (@spookymeeples) into a game for our first ever 3-player game. It’s okay at 3, but your pyramid is more restricted. I think it plays best at just 2.

CASTLE COMBO – We love this game. It’s simple card drafting with a crunchy little puzzle around it’s placement mechanism. Each card scores depending on a specific requirement, ususally based on which cards are where within your completed 3×3 grid at game end. There’s a nice little mechanic where drafting cards from one of two rows is dictated by a Messenger marker (a wooden piece that is unnecessarily, but comically, oversized). You spend keys to mitigate this if you don’t like what’s on offer. The cute art belies the really thinky game beneath the surface where each card you take is an important decision. At this point we’d only played other peoples copy, but after this 2-player session, we would go on to add it to our collection a week later.

CITIES – Another favourite game of ours, and one I love to teach to people (which today was once again Cassie). This was our first time playing 3-player which is the only player count where not every card, tile, and building piece get drafted off the board. It still works absolutely fine and it was a good little play that saw each of us to mutter expletiveswhen our plans were interfered with.

GEMBATAN – Our first Expo library game of the day, my wife picked out this random tile laying game. It was a small box game with only two different types of components; tiles and gem tokens. The rules were short (though a little vague) so it wasn’t too long before we were under way. You play tiles from your hand but each tiles has a number of slots on the outer edges where you can place gem tokens. Am I sure that we played it right? Not really, though I don’t think we were far off. Could the BGG commuunity have helped with any rules ambiguities we had? Not really, as most people in the game’s comments and forums came to the same conclusion I did after just one play: “won’t be playing that again”.

LOVE LETTER – When we returned to the Hilton, the open gaming areas were a lot fuller than when we’d left. We ended up finding a small space and sat down with Mark to play LOVE LETTER. Now, I’ve never played a full game of LOVE LETTER. People always ask to wrap things up before the amount of victory tokens the rules require are dished out. I announced this to my two opponents and I was over the moon when, 36mins and 8 rounds later, we hit the five point requirement for a three player game. Mark picked up the game well and near the end he was making plays with the required amount of bluffing to keep us both on our toes, and really getting into things. We went in to the final round with anyone of us in the mix for the win (though I needed a Spy victory to manage it). I went out early in that final round and then sat back to watch my wife and Mark play mind games with each other where the victory could have gone either way. My wife took it in the end, just, and I got to finally enjoy LOVE LETTER correctly while having a great time doing so.

CHINATOWN – A shout requesting players from the far end of the table led to my wife and I joining a game of CHINATOWN. This is a game that I’ve always wanted to try. The teach was straight forward and it wasn’t long before we were off. I’m so glad we joined. CHINATOWN is all about controlling locations and building businesses to maximize profit each round. But some locations mean a lot less to you than they do to other players, and each round sees tempers flare up during sometimes brutal negotiations. Business tokens and cold, hard cash are thrown around while deals are made to aquire key locations. I definitely feel that the game would sink without the right group, so we were lucky that all five of us worked well off each other. And yes, I did unnecessarily dig my heels in at one point and refused to budge of $10,000. It was the principle, after all.

DRO POLTER – After 90mins of tense negotitions, Dan (@boardgamist) took us to the other end of the scale with this hilarious small box game from Oink Games. It’s all about dexterity as a card gets flipped and you must drop the items shown. Sounds simple, but you can only use one hand, and thats the hand holding all these small, awkward items. Worse, if you win a round, you pick up a little bell (like those that are on a cats collar). These represent points, but they also sit in your hand. Drop a bell on a future round and you lose it. This means that it’s a tough climb to the required 5 victiory points, but winning is second to the absolutely laugh out loud chaos this game produces. It’s a great stress release after a longer and more serious game.

PHANTOM INK – We’d played this once before at 4-player, and while I ended up enjoying the game, it was obvious that bigger player counts improve things. We started with 3v3 and ended with 4v5. Each team has a ghost who is trying to get their team to guess a word. These is done by using question cards to think of an assosiated word that gets written down one letter at a time. Your team can stop you writing more if they think they”ve figured it out. This is key, because your words can be seen by the other team, and their ghost is trying to get them to guess the same word! It made for a great end of the evening game with a big group. We were all exhausted which just made things sillier.

THE ARCHITECTS OF AMYTIS – I took this from the library earlier in the day when I thought it would just be my wife and I gaming for a while. But after we got pulled into bigger games throughout the evening and the fact that I had hold of this box went out of my head. Until 10mins after the library closed. That meant that it came back to our hotel for the night. As we walked through the quiet bar area of our hotel, my wife suggested we sit down and play it as we wouldn’t get a chance the next day. THE ARCHITECTS OF AMYTIS is a farely recent release and I was keen to try it. Players place wooden pieces on a 3×3 board stacked with building tiles. You take the tile you placed on and put that somewhere on your own 3×3 board, but placement is usually based on it’s own scoring conditions as well as bonus cards you have that require certain patterns to count towards end game. The interesting mechanic thrown into the mix is Tic Tac Toe. If you can get three of your wooden pieces lined up on the drafting board, you get to place a scoring token on a seperate board for more end of game points. The game ended with me having three of these for a nice bundle of points at the end, while my wife wondered if being first player had a massive advantage. Yet when we looked deeper, we realised that, based on certain rules, it might have been better if she’d not tried to block my 3 in a row on every occasion so as to get an advantage when I took back three pieces instead of four. I think if we play this next time, it’ll be a very different game.

And that was our Saturday, as well as most of the Expo, done. We were both more exhasuted than ever, though this triedness gave me my best nights sleep of the three.

(continue on to Sunday)