by Brant Guillory, 6 March 2024
The game nights, while awesome, also wear you out. Day 3 was a later start, and that 830am panel that sounded like a good idea at the start of the week instead became an extra hour of sleep. We did make it to the 930 panel with the ICv2 folks, and we’ll have more extensive coverage of that specific panel in a future article, since there was a lot to dig into there.
In the meantime though, it was back to the exhibit hall, as there was a LOT to see. Truthfully, we made it through darn near everything, once you roll in the “gotta see ’em” folks we visited on day 2. Christopher High, of Board Again Games and Catastrophe Games, joined me on the schlep through the exhibit hall.
First stop was taking a look at all the loot you get in the retailer appreciation boxes
click images to enlarge
As a retailer, you need to attend a certain number of publisher presentations, and you get all of that shipped to your store for promos, store libraries, giveaways, your own personal use, whatevs. And no, there’s no wargames in there this year, either.
As to what’s around the hall, we’re going to tackle this roughly alphabetically, but the caffeine withdrawal is kicking in, so “alphabetically” might be more of a suggestion than an accurate organizing principle here.
Ares Games are the distributors for NUTS! Publishing here in the US, and regulars in our #TuesdayNewsday column. We’ve focused here on the wargames, but they had plenty of fantasy tabletop games, as well.
The Barbarian Kingdoms is a 4 3X1, but looks like it could be entertaining as a multi-player game. We are discussing some potential Origins collaborations with Ares, so cross your fingers that we might have some of their games on our tables there.
CMON‘s new Dune game has some damn cool looking sandworms, but it’s one of a dozen different Dune products we’ve been seeing in here.
Collins Epic Wargames are still showing off Polyversal and the table is definitely stopping traffic as people walk by and ask about it. He is still talking about Spearpoint 1943 but the focus is definitely on the minis.
It’s a minis-agnostic sci-fi game with some neat C2 mechanics, and plenty of expandability.
If you’ve seen those Workday commercials with people tell each other they’re “rock stars” and being interrupted by actual rock stars, you’ll appreciate this one, because the design of Rock Hard: 1977 is, literally, a rock star. Jackie Fox was the bassist for The Runaways, and this is her board game of making it in the music business
Couldn’t tell you a thing about the rest of Devir‘s booth, and that’s not intended as a slight against them, it just didn’t grab us as anything wargamey.
Free League are one of our favorite wargame-adjacent publishers, with their rebooted Twilight:2000 line. We’ve covered a variety of their other RPG products as well, and are on their distro list for future releases.
The new Zone Wars game in the Mutant Year Zero universe was the big thing they were hyping here.
As noted several times already, we’re here on the Hosted Media program, which means GAMA covered most of our cost to attend. With our editorial independence, however, no one has asked for, nor received, any opportunity to review our content before sharing it here. All photos / images you see have been cleared with the exhibitors before sharing.
Modiphius has a bunch of stuff that all ‘kind of’ crosses over with the gaming we do – media licenses that we love, minis-focused tabletop skirmish wargaming, and some interesting adventure games – but not a lot of map-&-counter stuff. Doesn’t mean it’s not cool stuff, though!
Their Fallout Factions skirmish wargame was the key product line they’re pushing this year.
Last year, we had a pretty memorable interaction with R Talsorian when we asked about Castle Falkenstein. This year, the reboot is on the tables at their booth, even though they are promoting some other games a bit more.
One of their new games was embargoed, so we’re not able to bring you any photos or other media info about a new sci-fi game coming from them. You know what, though? Castle Falkenstein is back; the rest is just gravy.
Both Drew & Cole stopped by for our podcast hits, but we would’ve included Wehrlegig Games even if they’d blown us off like Kevin did.
They’ve got an early version of Molly House with them (pics on our day 1 article) that were playing with people, but not actively selling.
Wizkids always have visually-impressive stuff at the booth, even if they’re more focused on enabling other gameplay than pushing their own games.
And finally, here’s a bunch of smaller photos that weren’t necessarily their own gallery, but still worth checking out, from our friends at Green Ronin and Left Justified, to just cool stuff we saw around the hall.
Off to dinner! And yes, that’s a chicken-&-waffles taco with bacon and maple syrup, before coming back to the board meeting (which we’ll talk about later).
GAMA EXPO 2024
PART ONE ~ PART TWO ~ PART THREE ~ PART FOUR
Thank you for visiting The Armchair Dragoons and mounting up with the Regiment of Strategy Gaming.
You can find our regiment’s social media on Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook, TwXtter, YouTube, and even Threads, if we could ever get an auto-post to it.
(We have an Instagram page and it’s really just a placeholder & redirect to our articles.)
You can support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, also, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
