I don’t check Instagram. There is an official Epigram Games account there but it lies dormant most of the time. I accidentally opened it December last year and discovered a message asking me if I’d like to come to a new convention being held in September 2026 focused on the indie wargames and miniatures market. The message was months old, but I emailed Ben, the organiser, and there was one singular table remaining.

The pitch he gave me was fascinating: it would be held here in Nottingham, and every exhibitor got the same six feet. Also, quite notably, it was free for exhibitors. I tried not to tear his arm off saying yes.

Tiamat says: Even for small, regional shows a nominal fee for exhibitors¹ is the norm. £70-100 for a six foot space is the norm, even for brand new club shows. Big commercial shows, like Tabletop Gaming Live, demand £30+/sqm (so at least £200, given they usually start at 6sqm and quote ex-vat).

Now it would be remiss of me to say I then spent the next nine months planning what I’d do for Spru with every waking moment, but given the focus my thoughts were roughly: put on as many demos as possible, use that to upsell to games. A little closer, I had the bright idea of having one Hypersteel Nightmare table and one Able Artemis table, and use it as an excuse to do some light market research/marketing, but as the event approached Artemis wasn’t really in a demoable state (not whilst also wrangling sales) and so I planned to put on two tables.

I have everything needed for two 2ft tables, but decided last minute to make some new roads for a folding grass board I have. So this was an excellent time for my laser cutter to start dying and then plan B hit a wall when the cork sheeting I was planning on using as a road surface wouldn’t stick to anything and I just decided that “I have a six foot table, I have a 3ft square city board, lets just take that”.

Before I knew it, Saturday 26th rolled around. I’d loaded everything in to the car the night before, because whilst the show being in Nottingham meant a comparatively late start², it’s never good to load everything in in the morning. The show being held in the city centre and that the venue didn’t have an exhibitor accessible loading area meant that we all had to drive up to the front of the building, drop off our stuff and go find parking. This worked remarkably well, at least in part down to the presence of many hi-viz wearing staff³.

Parking was a bit of a pain, but mostly because I refused to plan for it, on the basis that I live here. In a desire to get in as quick as possible, I found street parking nearby and got gouged for twenty pounds⁴, and due to the one-way system around Maid Marion Way still had to drive a good 10-15 minutes from where I’d parked back to the venue when we were unloading⁵.

Everyone having six feet made setup much easier. There were only two real wrinkles here: first being that the venue is not great for disabled/level access and everyone had trolleys or in my case a big stack of T-Stack cases to get in. Venue staff did lead us to the disabled access, but clearer briefings for exhibitors and event staff would have been welcome, but hardly a showstopper.

Second, I had assumed from the layouts provided, that the tables would be set up with access around all sides, but when we got in, people were setting up with a traditional “behind” and “in front” layout with generally fairly traditional market/convention sales layouts. So there was some on the fly re-organisation.

Tiamat says: This did cause one slightly larger problem. The gaps between tables, and the fact that some tables did have people moving around the side and behind the table meant that punters were often in the shaded green area. I am used to behind the table being sacrosanct, and we’ll see this come up later…

I knew a few people also there, but a large portion of the exhibitors were from the indie miniatures scene. There were a lot of small artists sharing tables to take advantage of sharing the logistical challenge of attending a show⁶, even if the show itself were free. There was a lot of the thing28/turnip/scrungly miniatures crowd, a bunch of the mork borg adjacent crowd, a couple of printer/crafty people, and a couple of more explicitly RPG people. It was a really nice mix, and I only felt a little bit out of place⁷.

Before I knew it, 1030 came around and punters were let in. Ben had done the rounds during setup⁸ and let us know they’d sold out the night before at 500 attendees, and by goodness by 1035 the place was rammed.

I would like to say something about the show itself but from 1030 until gone 1400 I did not stop talking. My good friend Been was helping me out and I swear for those first three hours we just ran demo after demo, breaking only to grab a drink or sell something, or pause as a PA announcement made all talk impossible⁹. About three o’clock I took my first actual break when Been brought me a treacle tart and I sat down and ate it. I still had to turn away two punters in the five minutes it took me inhale the sugary goodness.

It was so busy in fact that I failed to take any photos, hence the lack here. If you happened to get a photo of the stand, please email connor@shearwood.work for my eternal gratitude.

Tiamat says: The astute will note that my UKGE retrospective had long periods where I had nothing to do, and in fact I read a large portion of The Guide to Glorantha during said downtime. Before about 4pm, Spru had no such downtime.

The only problem here was that the crowds plus punters feeling like they could take a shortcut through the exhibitors space meant that at some point in the morning someone stole my demo rulebooks. Slightly dog-eared copies of Hypersteel Nightmare and Meatgrinder I used for sales patter, that I put down on top of the cases whilst I poured a cup of tea from my thermos, gone. The actual monetary loss is small but it was frustrating and dented my confidence. That was basically the only poor behaviour the entire day.

One thing I had been worried about was that a ticket cost £30. Now, they’d told us previously that they’d sold several hundred tickets so I wasn’t worried about attendance, but I had a niggling doubt in the back of my mind asking if people who had just paid that much would still want to buy stuff in the show. I should not have worried. Over the course of the day I only had two meaningful timewasters¹⁰, and even a smaller percentage of people who took one look at the stand and went “nah I only do eastern flank battle of waterloo before midday”¹¹.

In terms of financials, it was my single best non-Salute day of trading. I took in about £450 of sales, of which the stock cost me about £100, royalties about £55, and I had costs of about £40¹². In the end I made about £250. The astute will notice this does not include staffing costs. As director, owner, and primary operator, it feels silly to draw money from the business I might have to/want to put back in at this point. Been very kindly volunteered his time, and I am forever grateful for this, and it’s my goal to be able to not have to rely on such charity as soon as possible.

Spru was my most successful show to date on almost every metric. It took in more profit than any other show, by a factor of two. It had a higher margin than any other show by 50%. I did more demos, with a higher hit rate, than any show except Salute, and bearing in mind that Salute had ten times the number of attendees, that’s mad.

After the show, Been and I retreated to my house for well deserved pizza and Babylon 5. As much as I would have loved to have gone to the post-show social, I was dead on my feet and within angstroms¹³ of losing my voice.

As a closing remark, it’s a common refrain both in the tabletop industry collective and in my group of localish wargaming friends that it’s mad that there has not been a decent Nottingham wargames show in years. Spru doesn’t really fill the gap left by Derby Worlds or Britcon, and it’s not trying. Instead it’s forging its own new thing, a thing I think we sorely need. I would still love for someone to run a more traditional wargames show somewhere in the East Midlands, but also if we could have more shows like Spru, I think the world would be a better place.

Spru was a real pleasure. This is the future of the industry I want. Friendly, welcoming, creative. My only real question now is when’s the next one?

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1. Since most shows charge for entry, I’ve never really understood the purpose of charging exhibitors beyond an attempt at the more efficient distribution of space, but also some very rough calculation suggests that most shows get about 1/3rd of their income from exhibitors. ↩︎
2. Spru opened its doors at 1030. This isn’t that much later, but I’m used to being asked to get to the venue before 9am, and the doors didn’t open for exhibitors until 9am. ↩︎
3. Spue is notable here too because the staff were paid! It is not uncommon for most of the staff at wargames shows, even the big commercial ones, to be volunteers. ↩︎
4. Still better than paying for official Excel Centre parking for Salute, not realising the Premier Inn I was staying at had 2 nights of parking for under a quarter of the Excel rate, and actually, due to a quirk of how the parking at the Excel centre works, closer to the entrance. ↩︎
5. This still beats the hour or more I spent in the car waiting to be let into the hall at Salute. Granted, that was entirely understandable, and maybe had I thought for five minutes would have realised “no they won’t let me leave my car unattended in the staging hall”. ↩︎
6. This is entirely spitballed, but also having done many shows solo, no, pal up and do it with friends. It is 100% the right choice. ↩︎
7. This is only really half in jest. My goal for Epigram is to be superlative in everything we do, which ties into my overall feeling that visual perfection is good and worth striving for. This contrasted significantly with the turnip/28/bork predilection towards grunge/punk/lowfi authenticity. ↩︎
8. This is very high on my list of “things that make a show good”. Having someone from the organisers come say hi, say thank you, ask if there’s anything you need, just makes a real difference to me. Spru joins Vapnartak and Salute as the apex of good on-the-day presence. ↩︎
9. A very minor gripe in the scheme of things was that the PA system emitted a constant white noise. It was never quite enough to justify finding a member of staff during the day. ↩︎
10. Defined as people who play a demo never intending to buy, or try to fob their child off on a demo, or the inevitable “GW is the spawn of satan” people. ↩︎
11. Only slightly hyperbole. Someone at Hammerhead rebutted my call of “Can I interest you in scifi skirmish” with “I only do interwar Prussians”. ↩︎
12. Parking, onsite food and drink expenses, and the replacement cost of the stolen books. ↩︎
13. Roughly the size of a hydrogen atom. ↩︎