by Brant Guillory, 27 February 2025
Once the exhibit hall opens up, it can be tough to take the time to really knuckle down and write much about what’s going on, so you’re getting two days for the price of none here.
Watching the exhibit hall get assembled from the media overlook was pretty cool. Sorry about the glare. We need to turn those lights in the media room off next time.
click images to enlarge
Non-exhibit-hall-content out of the way first!
Wednesday, before the exhibit hall opened, there were still some panels & seminars going on, including a second one led by Mike Dunn of Gaming Trend that I was late for, but this time it was Mike D’s fault, as we were having a nice chinwag. The panel, co-hosted with Drew Wehrle, was a follow-up to last year’s discussions about US FTC disclosure guidelines around compensation for content, including review copies of products. It’s definitely something that’s going to cause us to look at how we inform our audience about such things, but who knows if the FTC will even exist in 3 months.
Our division of GAMA is technically known as the “Media & Events” division, and we manage to fall on both sides of that line. While there’s multiple dozens of media folks here, there’s only handful that are classified as “events”. The end result is that while there’s been some programming developed for the media audience, there was one, maaaaaybe two, sessions that were directly applicable to the events crew, even if there would be some ancillary value gained from other programming. To that end, Monica, the board rep for the Events folks, organized an informal lunch the events people, which ended up being 3 GAMA people, two BGF staffers, and 3 people who run other events (conventions, tournaments, etc). So (including us) BGF-connected people were 33% of the attendance for something that’s supposedly a global organization.
Now, you’ve heard me comment a few times about the dearth of programming for the Media & Events division at the Expo. Well, you can make it someone else’s problem or try to help solve it. Although we may not be able to attend in 2026 because of other scheduling concerns, our plan is to put together at least 1 session each on both the media and events side of the house for overall professional development. We’ve been doing this a while now, so it’s time to dump some of that advice, and lessons learned through hard experience, onto the table for others to use (or ignore) as they see fit. It might be 2027 before that happens, but we’ll make it happen.
Finally, a major lesson that people need to learn about the Expo is talk to everybody. Yes, everybody. Standing in line? Chat with person behind you. Waiting for a seminar to start? Chat with the person next to you. Playing a demo game? Chat with your fellow players. You never know what other interests they might have, or who else you know that could be valuable to them.
Some random connections we helped people make included an overseas vendor who happened to bring along a fully-painted force of Polish cavalry for some 15mm wargaming that we pointed to an RPG publisher who loves playing those games.
We linked up a publisher looking to broaden their convention footprint with another events team looking for publisher support.
And we pointed a GAMA volunteer to a game we thought they’d dig, which resulted in a bunch of new plans for a launch event that on one had ever imagined until that conversation took place.
Talk. To. EVERYONE.
The Exhibit Hall
You’re not going to get a lot of commentary here because we were moving too fast to get a lot of details. What we will tell you is that Moe from Tabletop Bellhop was sitting down at all sorts of booths for gameplay demos and photos, and you should really check out a bunch of his threads on Bluesky for better commentary than we were going to get to, for games we weren’t likely to check out.
If you have questions about specific photos or companies, throw them in the comments and I’ll answer as best I can about what’s here. If you can get the specific number of the photo (click to enlarge you should get it) then it’ll be easier to reference.
A few quick comments on the hall as a whole
- Not as many dice companies this year, but the ones that were here had very nice booths and were a far cry from the “3D printer in the garage” tchotchke companies that have started over-running Origins.
- Nothing new for Twilight: 2000 that Free League had on display; they were talking to retailers every time we went by so we didn’t want to interrupt.
- A bunch of new stuff coming from Chaosium and their product line really feels like it’s exploding.
- Per the head of Renegade (and slightly contradicting what we posted earlier in the week), you’re likely to hear some announcements about Squad Leader this year, but no actual product until 2026. We’ve got some collaborations in the works with them about it and we will reveal when the time is right.
- Map-and-minis “ameritrash” games are everywhere. So are tile-and-minis dungeon crawlers. It’ll be interesting to see how many survive.
- Nostalgia packaging continues to proliferate. 1985 Games and others have excellent product design, but what’s inside that packaging can be sparse compared to similar products. Looks fantastic, but is it worth your shekels? That’s your call, obvs.
- We overheard some conversations – crucially, this was not a retailer talking – about what products are keeping stores open, and the claim was that right now RPGs are not doing it because people buy 1 book per quarter for their favorite game, but no other core product. It’s accessories (minis, maps, dice, dice cups, etc) and the usual glut of CCGs that are paying the bills for a lot of stores. Never heard a store say that, but that was the claim from someone who ought to know based on his day job.
- There are still evergreen titles in this business. Steve Jackson’s still selling Car Wars, Munchkin, and TFT. Catalyst is still selling BattleTech. Chaosium’s core titles are still expanding. Savage Worlds won’t slow down. Green Ronin continues to keep AGE games in print and moving. Renegade has continued variations-on-a-theme for Risk and Axis & Allies. Those games are all old enough to be on their second job past college1. Contrast that with how many new games we saw last year or the year before that are already out of the marketplace.
Also, we did try to shoot a bit of video, but the background noise, even with the clip-on lapel mics, didn’t cut it. I’ve previously discussed some of the differences between this exhibit hall and one like Origins/GenCon that’s more consumer-focused. Let’s just say you don’t see any couches in the booths at Origins; they were everywhere here. You also don’t have 4 large blocks of tables and chairs for business conversations like you do here. Not a single game was getting played on any of them, but they were full of people making business happen for both days the exHall was open.
Click to enlarge these pics, and a couple of the close views of different minis can get pretty big. Enjoy a whirlwind trip through the GAMA Expo 2025 exhibit hall
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