So we’re in the middle of convention season within the board game world. The big ones kick off with Dice Tower West in Vegas, PAX East in Boston, then UK Games Expo in Birmingham, Origins in Columbus, GenCon in Indianapolis, Tabletop Scotland in Edinburgh, Spiel in Essen, PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia, and ending with Dragonmeet in London. There are dozens of other smaller ones in cities dotted around the world, but these are the highlights of the calendar.

The big four are considered to be GenCon, Spiel, Origins, and UKGE – in that order. Spiel is the biggest, but has a bigger focus on manufacturing and developers, so GenCon is always considered the ‘big one’. But here’s where it starts to get interesting with one word…

Tariffs.

A majority of the board game and RPG industry is based around the US market, with the European (and thus, the UK) being secondary. The problem with this is that a majority of the games are made in China. Yup, that China with suddenly massive import tariffs to the US. Games just got a lot more expensive to sell in the US. This will become relevant shortly.

I was at GenCon last year and the year before, as well as at UKGE for both of those years. My experience at GenCon has always been great – a wonder filled trip around new games, shiny math-rocks, and countless industry friends from that side of the pond. But every year my trip has been marred by the US customs and immigration system who take an instant dislike to any punks walking up to their gates (i’ve been escorted into a back room on every occasion for further scrutiny, but as of yet my butthole remains undefiled); so with the US state’s increasingly xenophobic attitude I won’t be risking a stint in Guantanamo Bay over a Black Flag tattoo.

GenCon is 4 days over the huge space of the entire Indiana Convention Center (sic), and UKGE has always felt like its smaller cousin with just 3 halls at the NEC. But this year, ther UKGE took up 5 halls, a literal entire wing of the NEC. It had more traders than GenCon.

Let’s put this into context. The big companies in the board game and RPG world are American; Wizards, Paizo, Hasbro, Arcane Wonders, and a literal ton of others. Whether it is uncertainty over tariffs, fluctuations in company fortunes, or an updated 5th edition of a game that people aren’t interested in – a sizable cohort of US gaming companies either reduced or completely cancelled their plots at UKGE. Somehow, this didn’t make a difference to the convention – it was still the biggest it’s ever been.

Oh, and even Games Workshop weren’t there. You know them right? That little company from Nottingham that makes plastic figures with a company value larger than the entire UK fishing industry combined? Yeah, those guys weren’t there (although for their own reasons apparently).

I only went for the Saturday, and while I was there I spoke to a number of friends and vendors at the show about how it was going for them. One told me that Friday had been their best day of sales at any convention ever, and one even reported a 10x increase in sales! At a time where the talk of the board game world has been how the tariffs are going to cripple the industry, it seems that the UK and EU market has stepped in and shown that there’s more to the world of gaming than just the USA. Having only gone for one day I didn’t even get around to seeing a 3rd of what was on show, and even with that I don’t have the space in this article to cover the cool games I saw (although I will definitely be telling you all about Trench Crusade in an upcoming article).

So, as of now, the two biggest games conventions in the world are in Europe – Spiel and UKGE. Origins is happening as I write this, and GenCon is coming up shortly, but I have a strong feeling that the statement has been made about how the America-centric viewpoint of the games industry is going to have to shift its focus to the other side of the ocean. IF there’s one good thing that Donald Trump has done in his life, it’s that he’s accidentally given the UK games industry a huge boost.

We’ll see how GenCon goes in the summer, but I have a strong suspicion that Spiel is going to be a serious one to watch this year. AJ Laveaux