UK Games Expo (hereafter, just expo) is big. Unimaginably big. You think it’s far to the chemists but expo is bigger. It is, apparently, the third largest convention of its kind in the world, and the biggest in the UK. It’s three days long, fifty two thousand people attended this year, with a footfall of eighty eight thousand across all three days.

You would think therefore it would be difficult to lose money going to expo. You would be wrong.

Before I talk about my experience at UKGE 2026, I want to draw your attention to some statistics. Expo this year took up halls 1 through 5 of the NEC, with the main exhibitor space taking up halls 2, 3, 3A¹, and 4. There were a little over 860 exhibitors at expo this year, and between 3 and 4 kilometres of frontage². This means the average stand has a frontage of about four metres. Now, if a three-day visitor wanted to visit every stand, after taking into account some time for collecting their badge and getting food each day, they have less than 90 seconds per stand. And making a small assumption, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that people give bigger stands more time, it works out to about 20-25 seconds per metre of frontage.

There’s two fundamental problems with this analysis: the first is that not everyone is interested in every stand, but it still takes a moment of time to walk past and disregard a stand as not your cup of tea; the second is that most attendees aren’t visiting for three days. Based on their own attendance records, the median visitor is only at the NEC for a single day.

It’s more reasonable to assume that a particularly attentive visitor might actually pay meaningful attention to fifty to a hundred stands per day. That gives them between five and ten minutes per stand, give or take and depending on the kind of stand that might be a long time, or nothing at all³. The key takeaway I want people to consider here is that you absolutely need to have a plan to make sure as many people as possible will want to stop at your stand.

My biggest lesson from expo ‘26 was that I didn’t.

Preparing for Expo

Preparation proper started around the end of 2025. After the success of expo ‘25, it was clear I needed to make sure I had the help I needed to run the stand. Expo is open for twenty five hours over three days and the last thing I wanted was to have to leave the stand vacant whilst I got food or went to the bathroom. To this end, I’d arranged to share a stand with Richard who runs Shiny Games, a retailer/distributor, and also a close friend and regular in my RPG group. We were splitting four metres of premium space, which is sold as having superior footfall to regular space. I had had a starter stand in ‘25, and it was on the far wall from the entrances, which gave me a good hour each morning of hearing the wall of people make their way through the halls before even seeing anyone, and it felt at this time like this was a sound investment.

Compared to wargames shows which usually charge by frontage in increments of three or six feet, expo sells its space in square metres. I rationalised going for the 2×2 space as being basically the same as the six foot pitch I usually went for at other wargames shows. I had the stand layout down pat from now two years of wargames shows, which usually consisted of a six foot folding table, with a demo board at one end, some grid racks at the other with miniatures and accessories on it and books in the middle. I would sit behind the table with a banner, and call out to passers by about the wonders of tiny tank combat, or tiny sci-fi skirmish. It’s worked reasonably well this far.

I ended up changing this at the last minute for two reasons: firstly the small tabletop racks I previously used functionally disintegrated after two years of abuse, and I took the opportunity to upgrade to a floor standing rack instead; and secondly Annie from Bad Squiddo had been recommending for ages that I move to a layout that invites people into the space, as often people find it difficult to approach a table.

In terms of products, Hypersteel Meatgrinder was published ahead of Salute and I was looking forward to strong sales based on its reception there. I had restocked my miniatures, although I was disappointed that I had been unable to get more miniatures into production⁴. And I had new accessories: tokens were finally back in stock with new 3D printed versions and I made a last minute decision to get unit roster pads printed.

In the run up to expo, I was nervous but confident. Everything was ready, and the week of expo came up much sooner than I expected.

Thursday

Exhibitors can book in on Thursday to set up, and Richard and I arranged to collect the van in the morning, get to the NEC for about 2pm and set up. You have to book in advance to get vehicles into the loading areas, and you’re meant to print the pass which has your vehicle’s reg on it to give to the staff at the NEC. Richard collected the van, loaded his stand and drove to me, but as he got here he said it had been flashing brake system errors. Not wanting to chance the brakes we ended up swapping the van, thankfully the rental place was on our route towards the NEC. It cost us an hour though, and I ended up frantically booking a new time slot in the booking system over the world’s dodgiest 5G tether driving down the M1.

This triggered another problem: parking. You had to prebook the parking linked to your reg and it can only be changed the night before your booking. We sorted it out eventually but it was a bunch more stress, the expo volunteers had no way to help⁵ and of course there are no human staff to talk to about it at the NEC.

We got to the NEC on time for our new booking and found that our assigned loading gate was full. What’s the booking system for then? We were directed to another gate and rather than the 20 minutes it took to unload the van as we switched vans it took most of the two hour slot we were given just to unload. I was very glad to have my new handcart, and that most of my stuff goes in Dewalt T-Stack cases⁶ and I’m mad enough to have bought the one with wheels.

Actual setup was fine, although it’s always a bit of a faff when you don’t know who you’re next to and they’re setting up later/on Friday morning as you don’t want to block people off but also you want to use all the space you paid for.

The one real issue on Thursday was badge pickup. Entry to the halls is done via a yellow wristband (that you put on your highviz for reasons) but you need to collect your exhibitor badges from Convention Services. This is something they know all eight hundred and sixty seven exhibitors will need to do. I queued for almost an hour.

There are a bunch of events that happen on Thursday evening, and we went to none of them. We were staying in a Premier Inn in Birmingham City Centre⁷ so we got the train from Birmingham International, got set up in the room and went out for a disappointing burger at a place called Fat Hippo.

Day 1: Friday

We caught an early train to the NEC and arrived in good time, including having a McMuffin on the way in. The feeling of the NEC before everyone gets let in is infectious. We said hi to the people around us and got ready. Our stand was 2-905. I only found out that the numbers mean something after expo ended, but obviously the first number is the hall, but the first digit of the second number is the row number, the the last two digits are the distance in metres from the end of the row. Premium space secured us a stand near both the interconnect between halls 2 and 3, as well as close to the hall 2 entrance/exit.

This doesn’t mean a huge amount on Friday morning, because most people spend an hour to an hour and a half in the queue to get their pass in hall 5, and then have to make their way around to hall 2 to see us. People did start filtering through relatively quickly, but the first two hours were very quiet. Unfortunately, this sense of quiet would persist and a number of the people around us would say the same.

Sales were slow. After two years of selling the game, I have my patter down pat. I was hitting a roughly one in three success rate, and almost every sale was a combined set of the core rule book and expansion. The two problems were that I wasn’t managing to upsell to tokens or miniatures (which had both sold very well the year before), and I wasn’t managing finding it very hard to get people to stop.

I am going to step back from the events of Friday for a moment to talk a little more about the statistics I shared at the beginning. If we considered there are eighty eight thousand people over the three days, and that each will give a meaningful amount of time to about 80 stands per day, you have a roughly one in ten chance of seeing any given person. I run a miniatures company selling a war game. Worse for me, I’m selling a game that requires you to not only be a war gamer, but to own small scale sci-fi miniatures and be in the market for a new ruleset⁸.

Salute, the biggest wargames show in the UK, had about 7400 visitors. If we assume, madly, that as many wargamers went to expo as Salute, about 1 in 8 people at expo are wargamers, and lets assume about 1 in 3 of those are in my target market. That means about 1 in 25 people at expo (between 2000 and 3500 people, depending on the how many of them buy two and three day tickets⁹) could even be my customers. And I need to hope that they’re in the one in ten people I might even see.

Dear reader, I think I was fucked before I set up. My stand, whilst fine, didn’t have the wow factor to get people who weren’t already at least a little bit sold to actually stop and pay attention. And my products were too niche and required too much buy-in for a casual audience, and I still lack a good “here is a single product you can take away and have a good time” option for people who are on the fence. Add to that that my products design is good enough. People commented very well on the covers (shoutout to Juan Ochoa for doing a fantastic job on both of them), but they’re very traditional and the consensus is that consumers are looking for design that is either superlative or iconoclastic.

That being said, I ended Friday nervous but not fatalistic at this point. Sales were a little up on 2025, but not enough. I’ll go over this more as we recap Saturday, but I needed to sell, in reality, about 50% more to stand still and I sold maybe 5% more.

A bunch of wonderful people from the Rollmodels community had come to UKGE, and an evening meal had been arranged for us all at a food hall somewhere in Birmingham proper. I had a lovely evening with lovely people and lovely food. I returned to the hotel, watched the For All Mankind finale and went to bed.

Day 2: Saturday

We caught a slightly later train to the NEC on Saturday morning, after purchasing lunch at the Tesco outside New Street Station to avoid the nightmare that is food in the NEC proper. This meant we were on a train with punters, and the train staff were very excited to ask us all what we were doing. It was becoming clear that Friday had broken records for the number of attendees, possibly contributed to by a BBC news report on Thursday night, and so we were expecting Saturday to be even more manic.

We got into the hall in good time, and were ready for the day, and once again the first hour or so was a bit meh. I am convinced that the premium space becomes more of a thoroughfare for the rest of the halls, a thought evidenced by the fact that just forty metres down the row it was often too busy to move, and on the vertical path that ran the length of hall 2 by the entrances, it was generally similarly rammed. The premium space section we were in never really got above mildly busy.

I took some time out of my day to attend a panel on Generative AI in the Tabletop Industry, run by my close friend, head of studio at Modiphius and Epigram alumni Evie Moriarty. I think the panel went well, it was sadly not recorded. My friend Zach, who runs the RPG company Soulmuppet, looked after the stand whilst I was gone for an hour and a bit, and said that they’d spoken to four or five people whilst I was gone. That wasn’t great.

The rest of the morning and the early afternoon were fine but very slow. Over the weekend I got to talk to the people opposite, Hall or Nothing Games, a fair amount. Their takings were down about half from 2025 and I was down about two thirds from the previous year’s Saturday. When I could get people to stop, I was having success. People just weren’t stopping.

And then the chest pain kicked in.

About 4pm I saw that the NHS website says to call 999 for basically all chest pain. I asked Richard to keep an eye on my stand, and went to find the medics¹⁰.

I will not describe my evening’s journey through the Same Day Emergency Care cardiac pathway at a Birmingham hospital here in any detail, but the long and short is that I was told that I had lovely lungs, a strong heart, a clear panel of bloodwork and nothing to worry about in the short term for blood pressure. What I had was a stress induced inflammation of my pectoral muscles. I was advised to take some OTC painkillers, get a good night sleep and not to worry.

I will say, the medics at the NEC were brilliant and almost everyone I dealt with at Heartfields Hospital was kind, empathetic and had seemingly endless curiosity for what I was doing in Birmingham.

I got back to the hotel in the early evening, picked up a pizza from Rudy’s and got a reasonably early night.

Day 3: Sunday

We got up in good time, and ambled to the McDonalds near the station for breakfast. We had bought tickets for all four days on Thursday, but there was one small problem today. There were no trains until midday. After a fortifying McMuffin, we took the world’s rudest-but-still-I-guess-professional Uber to the NEC. Whilst Saturday had been quieter than Friday, the entryways on Sunday were less than a third as full as they had been on Saturday and this was starting to give me The Fear. Although only a little bit of The Fear as I had mostly resigned to spending the day in a much more relaxed fashion given my trip to A&E the previous night.

It is at this point I should talk briefly about The Spreadsheet of Doom. I have a master spreadsheet I use to calculate event profitability that I can enter my fixed costs, enter the number and kind of products I sell, and it calculates the royalties I owe as well as the net profit for each event. I was updating it throughout the day on Friday and Saturday, and I went into Sunday looking at a roughly £400 loss and whilst I was mostly resigned to this given the situation, it was still distressing.

The morning was abnormally quiet, but sales did start to pick up. Not enough to save the weekend, but enough to make me feel better about the day. Soon enough, 4pm rolled around and the attendees were ejected from the halls¹¹.

Breakdown was mostly without issues, and Richard left to go collect the van and ended up waiting in a queue for over an hour. It’s fine, I had a book. Unlike setup, breakdown did not have a booking system and instead you had to take your vehicle to the lorry park at any time from 7am. Vehicles were then let out in order of “size and time of arrival”, whatever that meant.

We left about 6pm, stopped at Trowell Services¹² for some food, and I was home with a cup of tea by 9pm.

Counting the Cost

In terms of raw financials, my half of the pitch, hotel, travel, and van hire¹³ came to about £670. I had a total cost of goods sold of about £300. And after payment processing fees I netted about £800 over all three days. The astute will note that this isn’t enough to cover the costs, let alone enough to pay myself even minimum wage.

In reality I lost nearly £200 exhibiting at expo, and whilst expo isn’t directly causally responsible for me ending up in A&E, the stress of attending was almost certainly a contributing factor to the high level of background stress.

I have, in the past, justified previous underperformance at shows and conventions on the basis that I need to get the word out about Hypersteel somehow, and it’s an ongoing effort that has paid off in terms of increasing numbers of people who approach the stand already knowing about Hypersteel Nightmare. But by my own reckoning I feel like I spoke to maybe a hundred people over the 23 hours I was exhibiting. At a price of about ten pounds per conversation, it absolutely was not worth it.

It was not an entirely negative experience. The depth of feeling I witnessed from many of the people I did speak to was incredible, and genuinely affirming. The panel was a wonderful experience and I’m very glad to have been able to share my views and experiences. And also on Sunday I ran over to Chaosium¹⁴ and Deep Cut and picked up some bits I’ve been meaning to grab for a while.

Fundamentally, Epigram is not my dayjob¹⁵. I run it as a proper business as much as I can, both because that’s the right way to do it and also to avoid improperly subsidising my output to the detriment of other people in the industry in the way you often see people in RPG spaces underpricing their work to the harm of professional creators.

But given how badly I did at expo this year I need to significantly reconsider my plans for next year. Here are my main thoughts, distilled from everything above:

• Bigger is better: a 2m stand is smaller than they will give you as a solo exhibitor anyway, but even a 3m stand is going to risk getting overlooked if you get stuck near larger or more popular stands. Starter stands have a minor leg up here, as they’re almost always with other starter stands, which are all 3x2m.
• Have a very distinct hook: props, demo tables, banners all help, but someone looking at your stand from a distance should have something (ideally multiple things) that scream “look at me closer”. Bonus points if there’s clear segues to selling them products from said props.
• Premium space is of dubious value: for the same price as premium space, you can get a corner. Corners increase your frontage, and it’s unclear what benefit you get from premium space anyway.
• Staffing is key: being able to step away from your stand is vital¹⁶, as well as the fact that having multiple people at or around your stand helps attract more people to your stand.

There is a throughline here: investment is key. UK Games Expo is not a cheap event to exhibit at. It is, after travel, setup, and packdown are accounted for probably a 40 hour week over four days. I clearly did not have enough of a plan.

I do not think I will be attending UK Games Expo in 2027. Whilst I will hope to have a new game in Able Artemis, which will help address some of the issues I faced this year, other issues remain structural and I don’t have a good idea as to how I can fix those. Expo is too large, too generalist, and too long for a small, niche producer such as me.

It is obviously possible to do well, and do very well, at UKGE if you have the right products, the right stand and the right plan. Learn from my mistakes.

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1. Why 3A? As proof that god the NEC hates its visitors and wishes them nothing but hours spent wandering the wrong half of the hall trying to find a stand. ↩︎
2. A rough estimate based on the length of the rows and the number of crossroads between rows. ↩︎
3. This varies so much, but stands with a large selection of stuff or involved demos might take ten to fifteen minutes of a visitor’s time. Stands with booked activities even longer. But a lot of stands though are more geared to faster turnaround times. This also doesn’t account for just perusing, and time spent doing things other than interacting with exhibitors, like tournaments, open play, hanging out with other people. ↩︎
4. There’s another blog post to be written here, but the two major contributing factors were the difficulty making moulds and the temperamental nature of the resin I am using. I’m working to address both, but it’s an ongoing process. ↩︎
5. I will say that the volunteers across the weekend were excellent, but too often powerless to do much more than signpost to other services. ↩︎
6. I love T-Stack cases. They are cheap, resilient and easy to carry. But I am worried someone is going to nick them and then both of us will be disappointed. The thief will have not stolen easily sold power tools, and I might have lost even more in value of miniatures. ↩︎
7. Getting a hotel in the city centre was less than a quarter of the price of staying at the NEC, but is reliant on the trains running. This, dear reader, is foreshadowing. ↩︎
8. Granted, my experience is that Hypersteel Nightmare is actually quite easy to sell, as long as the customer has some small scale miniatures. ↩︎
9. Expo haven’t to my knowledge published detailed breakdowns of how many people attended per day but the numbers they have published indicate that a small minority attended for all three days. ↩︎
10. This now marks two years in a row where my UKGE was interrupted by terrible personal events. ↩︎
11. Most attendees left very quickly. Apparently enough were left that we got regular announcements getting increasingly irate over the first hour of breakdown telling non-exhibitors to leave immediately. ↩︎
12. Not my favourite services on the M1, but it’s had a fairly recent facelift and it has decent food options. ↩︎
13. What isn’t counted here is the cost of food over the weekend. My thought is that I would have had to have fed myself over the weekend anyway, but I should have been running those expenses through the business. If I had had employees for the weekend they absolutely would have been getting expenses/a per diem. ↩︎
14. It was sad that they didn’t have the Johnstown Compendium with them this year, and also that the Guide to Glorantha is out of print now. Bonus points to the guy on the stand who told me how he sold the last copy in Europe last year, and was then gifted a copy by one of the main Runequest contributors that same weekend. ↩︎
15. My boss asked me some time ago if there was a risk I would leave my employer to run Epigram full time. When I stopped laughing, I explained that there’s functionally no way Epigram will ever get to the point where it can replace my software developer salary. ↩︎
16. Reading some other retrospectives, staffing is the major cost for many medium size exhibitors. Epigram isn’t in any kind of position to be able to do that at the moment, and I feel bad even thinking about asking for volunteers. ↩︎