by Brant Guillory, 24 February 2025
This is the third year for the Armchair Dragoons at GAMA Expo, and it’s interesting to see the faces that we’re running into over multiple iterations. While it’s normal now for the GAMA staff to recognize us after many years of working with them at Origins, it’s still a little weird when members of the GAMA Board – all of whom are industry professionals – wander over and strike up a conversation like you’re old drinking buddies. It’s not bad, just weird.
To clarify, for folks that are unfamiliar with the GAMA Expo: this a professional-focused B2B event that is largely centered around publishers/manufacturers and retailers (store owners/operators) to talk about what’s coming up over the next year or so, to allow the stores to better plan their events, promotions, inventory planning, etc. In addition to that, there are a lot of educational sessions on things ranging from store decor and employee management for retailers, to understanding contracts and rulebook writing for creatives, and tax planning for pretty much everyone. There’s a ton of gameplay demos, including games not yet released, but this is not a place where people are buying their personal copies of the cool new game to take home. This is where stores are placing orders for cases of games to be delivered in 3 months.
The fun actually starts on Sunday, with a day of professional development sessions focused on creatives – artists, designers, and such – to help them put their best foot (feet? foots?) forward when engaging with publishers and manufacturers. That said, a lot of attendees are still on the road Sunday, en route to the Expo, and then the Sunday night welcome reception / cocktail hour
click images to enlarge
There were a couple of sessions that I jumped into this year, as it was also the first time we had a couple of media-specific ones beyond just a meet-&-greet. That said, the first one was, in fact, a welcome session for the Media & Events division of GAMA that started with a “hello” from our board reps and then became a networking session to talk to other people. This was also where we had some discussions with Moe from Tabletop Bellhop, and several others that we’d met over previous years. Fortunately, we were able to stay parked in the same room for the next session, where the editor of Meeple Mountain talked about some of the tools, processes, and approaches they used to grow their site from 1 guy and a blog 10 years ago, to a larger site with about 30 staff and multiple pieces of content each day. On one hand, there’s definitely some improvement we could make with the Dragoons in how we bring in new voices for the site, and leverage their abilities to spread the work around. On the other hand, it was gratifying that several of his pieces of advice to other creators – leveraging automation, comms between team members, brand consistency – were all things we’re already doing.
After a quick break down the street to grab some Chipotle for lunch, it was back for a discussion on “Branding Beyond the Logo” with the owner of Red Raccoon Games. While this was focused on how his store brands themselves, there were some interesting tidbits with broader applicability. That said, he spent an awful lot of time on discussing the logo, variations on the theme, how to use it everywhere, and the fact that it turns out people can’t spell “raccoon” correctly.
A couple of the slides we snagged
One of the key media events is the Media First Look session with the publishers, and although Warlord was supposed to have a table there, no one ever showed. We did drop in on a couple of tables with games and accessories we thought the Dragoons would dig. One nice touch for this year’s Media First Look? They had staff at the door limiting access to those with media badges.
Steve Jackson Games had a variety of Muchkin products on display.
Loke Battlemats always have some great toys. The follow-up to last year’s Deck of Many Insults is one about stupid dares / side quests to give you some amusing interactions between your players. This year’s battlemats accessory is a deck of cards with in-room dungeon “decor” that’s scaled to fit on any of their battlemats, and which includes encounter details on the backs of the cards. They’ve also added cyberpunk maps to their inventory this year.
Mandatory Heroscape picture. Also, this tidbit from Renegade:
Per Renegade, Squad Leader news not expected until 2026
Probably just pushed back by other games that are taking offCool HeroScape news later this year, tho
#GAMAExpo
— Armchair Dragoons (@armchairdragoons.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Phalanx Games has a lot of stuff to showcase, but tonight the table was split between Bretwalda and the Cthulhu expansion for the Nanty Narking game. You can tell which one we focused on. There’s an upcoming expansion for Bretwalda also – it takes the bot-driven Danes and turns them into a playable faction to bump the game up to 5 players.
There are not all the same game, but just a couple of different toy-heavy, cool-looking games where we took photos.
The Media First Look was followed by an incredibly disappointing dinner at Gordon Biersch. It’s weird that the only good food I’ve ever had from them was at a ballpark, where you usually expect it to be crappy.
The open game night moved from last year’s nearby hotel to the KICC this year, and it was much more open, vibrant, populated, and breathable (because the room was so much bigger than last year’s cramped bandbox). There were also a couple of interesting conversations with GAMA staff and past board members about wargaming’s place in the overall hobby that we’ll come back to at a later time.
Off to day two!
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