by Brant Guillory, 5 March 2024
There’s a lot to like about GAMA Expo, but the first year at a new facility always results in some teething problems.
First, the seminar rooms are in a dungeon, and the room layouts are long, narrow bowling alleys, which make for odd sight lines, crowded and claustrophobic hallways, and absolutely no wifi signal at all.
Second, the lunch kiosks around the concourse are nice, but the prices make Origins look like a drive through. A sandwich, bag of chips, and soda exceeds the $15 voucher value by several dollars, and the lines are glacially slow.
Third, the media have a really cool view overlooking the exhibit hall, but the worst wifi signal in the entire building, which makes the video/streaming setups seem superfluous up there.
Finally, the hotel is three blocks away – no biggie. Except that the other hotel where the game nights and social events are is 4 blocks in the other direction past the convention center. It’s not that the walk itself is too far. It that at 11pm in the rain with a noticeable homelessness situation downtown isn’t giving off the safest vibes for people walking between facilities. On top of that, the hotel itself (a Hampton Inn) feels like a local rural half-assed attempt at a hotel transported into downtown and had a Hampton label slapped on it. It’s hard to complain about a free hotel, but the hotel itself doesn’t really seem to be making much effort to get people to like them.
Enough of the headaches – let’s talk about cool shit at the Expo!
This was the first day the exhibit hall was open, and there were a handful of specific targets we needed to hit before we just started wandering around. As a reminder, here’s what we wrote last year about the exhibit hall, all of which is still true
On its surface, the exhibit hall at GAMA Expo looks a lot like the one at Origins or GenCon, with a ton of booths with all kinds of publishers and manufacturers showing off their latest products. But as you get closer to those booths, the differences start to emerge.
First, they are not stocked with dozens of copies of games for sale, but rather a wide array of different products, and only 1-2 copies of each, almost always out of shrinkwrap. These aren’t copies of games intended to be sold to attendees, but for those attendees to inspect, inquire about, and (ideally) place wholesale orders for their stores.
That brings us to big difference #2: wholesale price sheets. The vendors aren’t talking about single games, but cases of them. They’re offering free shipping to stores with minimum $1000 orders, and product display packaging. If you had any doubts at all that you were floating in a different ocean, looking at the prices instantly fixed that for you.
We hit a bunch of booths today, and more coming tomorrow
First off, we promised to give you more of Heroscape and here you go, along with some other upcoming titles from Renegade Game Studios
click images to enlarge
First off, the Heroscape minis are obviously the pre-painted ones here. There is an option to get unpainted ones at a lower price point, to save money and/or paint them yourself. The game is supposed to be entirely backwards-compatible, with terrain and units, so if you kept your old stuff, you’re in luck.
The Renegade guys are also leaning hard into a couple of other licenses in conjunction with some existing game systems, which is how you get the GI Joe Battle for the Arctic Circle board game using the Axis & Allies system, and the Transformers RoboRally game. When asked if there were future possibilities of seeing either GI Joe or Transformers crossovers with Heroscape, we were told very particularly, “We have no announced plans for that at this time.” You can make of that what you will.
We mentioned it before, but wanted to reiterate that we’re here on the Hosted Media program, so GAMA paid for most of our cost to attend. That said, they’ve not asked to see anything before we publish. Heck, we’re not sure they’re seeing it after we publish!1 As always, all photos / images you see have been cleared with the publishers before sharing, to make sure we don’t violate any embargoes.
Wargaming at the Expo? Well, Warlord are here, and they weren’t at the last one.
We also talked with Jon Russell, about Origins, and we’re hoping to work with GAMA to possibly co-locate their large minis wargaming area with our large not-minis wargaming area for one damn big wargaming-of-all-kinds area.
Last year, we had -zero- appointments scheduled to meet with anyone in the exhibit hall. This year, we had one (so far). We’d coordinated ahead of time to link up with James Buckley from Phalanx to have a chat, and take a look at what they were showing off. Given that this is a more general-interest show, it’s not a surprise that games like Purple Haze or Unhappy King Charles weren’t at the front of the table instead of Huang and Rocketmen. They did have Triumph out at the game night, though (see below)
We did snag a catalog from Phalanx and will show you some more from that one later.
Ken over at Ad Astra Games has been one of our biggest supporters for The ACDCs and all of our digital events, but we haven’t seen him at a live event since before COVID. We broke that streak at GAMA Expo! The Ad Astra guys have a small booth here showcasing their latest books, with a small demo table for the games.
We showed you Snapship Tactics in our GAMA Expo coverage last year, and Nate’s had some more coverage on his YouTube channel. Well here they are in a full booth, with boxes of ship parts for you to build.
Build your own ships, then take them apart as they get hit!
Another bigger wargame company that’s here this year is Academy Games. They did not have any production samples of their Stellaris game. They did have prototypes of 2 new games that are yet to go to press – Guderian’s Harvest and Western Twilight.
It’ll be interesting to see what’s in stock and available at Origins this Summer.
Some of you are definitely interested in RPGs, and the Limitless guys, and Studio 2 were both here (albeit in different places) with some interesting looking titles. The Fateforge products at Studio 2 always catch the eye.
Fort Circle are splitting space with Bluencore, so you got to see both Votes for Women and War of the Civilizations in the same place
And right next door you got the Choose Your Adventure folks, for all you nostalgists out there
Not sure who Jim forgot to bribe, but the Dietz Foundation are off in their own corner, facing the wall.
After the exhibit hall and dinner, it was time for game night!
Got a pair of games with Jeff from Left Justified: Squatch & Seek and Broken & Beautiful. Got a quick run through the tutorial scenario for Runescape. Played a full game of Confusing Lands and a few turns of Apothecary, and then took a bunch of other pictures.
And yeah, crashed hard back at the hotel. More tomorrow!
GAMA EXPO 2024
PART ONE ~ PART TWO ~ PART THREE ~ PART FOUR
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