I skipped the whole of 2018 and 2019 from this blog and I feel kinda bad about that.
Not hugely bad because both years were excellent in hobby terms but still kinda bad as I had plans for this thing. So how do I summarise the last 2 years in my hobby?
2018 : My now annual visit to UK Games Expo, a return to GenCon, the realisation of a hobby dream in Tabletop Scotland and a return to DMing D&D thanks to my players and Matt Colville.
It was a great year for my hobby, a challenging one but a great one. Whilst swapping a large chunk of my free / game time for convention planning wasn’t hard, it wasn’t easy either. I did manage to offset that a little by running D&D 5th Edition. 2018 was a year that reminded me why I love this hobby.
2019 : No GenCon 2019 but I did go to Conpulsion in Edinburgh, AireCon in Harrogate and Glasgow Games Festival in erm Glasgow which was nice. Obviously I also went to UK Games Expo which in 2019 was a different experience largely off the back of the relative success of Tabletop Scotland 2018 as I had people thank me and the team for the con and “recognisable name” publishers mention that they’d heard about how good it was. Oh and Tabletop Scotland 2019 happened too, twice the space and at times really tough but hugely worthwhile. In between all of that my D&D group kept going, with an often disrupted schedule but all good, and East Neuk Tabletop turned 5.
So 2019 was another great year for my hobby. In many respects a more challenging year due to trying to exceed the expectations of those who came to Tabletop Scotland 2018. I could write a lot about my Tabletop Scotland 2019 experience but if I was to boil it down to two things it’d be this –
- we hosted over 100 tables of RPGs, avergaging 20 tables per slot. Including games especially for kids.
As a Roleplayer “first” this gives me such joy. - our attendance was up by 54% on 2018 with almost 1,600 individual people being there.
That’s a success story and one I’m hugely proud of.
- AireCon in March
- Conpulsion in April
- UK Games Expo in May
- GenCon in July/August – there for my birthday and I’ll have my GenCon brother Greg with me as always.
- Tabletop Scotland in August
- Glasgow Games Festival in November
