UK Games Expo 2026 Vlog (Cyberpunk TCG & Star Trek Space Hunt and more!)

0:00 Good morning everyone. It's Rob from just the road.com and no intro this time because and I went straight into a game. I played Kano. Uh I play for Kano where you are gathering paint pots from the middle. So you can switch two adjacent paint pots in the middle and then pick any one orthogonally adjacent group of the same color and you put them onto your playerboard and you're trying to match patterns with the paint pots to put those tiles on the board. You're then going to get points for put where those tiles are. You're going to get points for the tiles depending how big they are. You've got your big masterpiece tiles that are worth more points that come with awesome cards with really nice artwork. You're going to get points for things in the grain green area at the top of the board which is shown in the middle of the play area and you get points for lots of stuff. I don't know how to get points. I came last in this game. I was terrible. Just won another one of those games where you just you're picking stuff to put stuff into spaces and then changing those things into other things. It's difficult because you can only pick up one color and as you're placing the pl the paint pots onto your board, you have to think of gravity. You see your boards go from the top down. So you can't put them above an empty space. You have to keep think of gravity. But because you need sometimes you need like a red on top of a white, you can't take the red first cuz the red will drop down. Then you can't put anything underneath it. So you got to kind of try and plan ahead. Uh you're also trying to diversify the different tiles. You're trying to get the biggest tiles, but you also want as many different tiles as possible. It's a lot to think about. It's looks really pretty. It's one of those games where the reason I played it is because I stopped to look what was going on because those paint parts look really nice and a lot of people while we're playing it stopped and looked and wanted to know what the game was about because of those paint parts. They look really nice. They felt really nice cuz the nice

1:30 ceramic feel as well. It felt really good. I really enjoyed that. That is Kano Pano Kano. Well, that was a mad 4 hours. Um I'm Rob from just the road.com. I'm here at the UK Games Expo. Finally get a chance to speak. How are you doing? I hope you're doing well. Um, remember I have got a press pass. So, this video does constitute an advert because that's the rules we have in the UK. So, here I am. The goal was to get here early, get breakfast, uh, and then go into the halls and start playing games. But, unfortunately, what happened was, uh, the queue for the car park was big. I was running late. Um, I got my pass and ended up going straight into a hall and playing games. So, I didn't get a chance to catch my breath. I didn't get a chance to eat. So, I've had my lunch already, which is not good because it means I'm a meal behind and I'll get cranky later on. But, I did learn from last year. I brought my lunch box. I bought a new lunch box. I brought that with sandwiches and stuff in. So, that's good because the food is still very expensive this year, unfortunately. Yeah, it's been good fun. At the moment, I've only been through hall four. Now, the way the halls are laid out much better than last year. So, last year it was a bit all over the place. This is sort of a more organized like a a U shape, and across the top of the U is hall three, and to the left of the U is hall two, and to the right of the U is hall four. So it kind of makes more of a sensible shape as you're walking around. You can go from hall to hall. Been around hall four at the moment. It has mostly trading card games and roleplay games. There's a few board games in there that kind of know that I played. I also got a demo of Panda Spin which was pretty awful. The person teaching did not know the rules whatsoever. Um unfortunately. So we

3:01 didn't get a very good that once he left us alone, we were fine because we got the rule book and worked out how to play ourselves. We played with five players and that was all good. But um it's not the best experience there. But that is a card shedding game. You try to get all the cards out your hand. You just need to play beat the trick this out by playing either more cards or cards with a higher value. So very much like T2. You can play a bomb as well, which is like four of a kind. Four or more of a kind. You can beat anything. You can win the the trick. But the cool thing is you can play weaker hands to get those cards back into your hand. And when those come back into your hand, the whole thing of panda spin is those cards spin and they change from the white side to the blue side or the white end to the blue end I should say. and the blue ends are more powerful. So on future turns when you're trying to beat your people's tricks, your hands a bit better. That was a great experience. But hey, we're going to go back in. We're going to go to hall two and see what that's like. Also, forgot to mention the reason I've got the lunch box as well is that because so I have absolutely no idea why my camera decided to go into slow-mo mode, but basically what I do is I go on to say that when I go to these board game weekends, especially in essence, I overeat and end up feeling quite horrible on the Sunday. So I want to cut that down. And also the reason I'm walking is that I make a deal with myself that if I walk to the car, I get the bus back. But if I get the bus to the car, I walk back and I got the bus to the car. So I'm doing that. And those are two of the five personal goals I wanted to achieve over UK Games Expo weekend. Back to the vlog. So I've just been around hall four, which is sort of that area over there. It's very much the same as hall two. This is hall three, the main one. It's obviously the biggest. Uh can't see if you can see over the top there, but

4:33 um this is the big one I'm going to go around now. I didn't get to play any games in hall four. I've seen I've noticed two jackpot and mustache that were on my uh games to play list. So, I'll have a look at those later, but hopefully hall three has more empty seats. It's starting to get a bit busier than normal. I think people are coming back from lunch uh and uh it's filling up. Never said it before, but this grab and go in hall four has the best value coffee you get this for, which compared to all the other places is much better. So, it's already 3:00. I've still only played two games and one of them didn't really count because the rules were completely wrong. Problem I've got today is because it's been so hot in the UK, I've not really slept, so I'm incredibly tired. Um, I've just had this coffee, but I've only It's really hot. The The coffee is cheap, but it's really hot.

5:27 The other thing as well, I bought this donut. This donut very nice donut. It was not five. It was £5 and I might not have bought it if it was £5, but it whatever. I needed the sugar, but um so I'm going to go around the halls now. I'm going to be more try and be more alert and see if there's any games to play. Need your opinion cuz I'm keeping my eye out on pun game names. Is War on Terror a pun game name? Let me know. Yeah, I'm definitely going tug of roar is a fun name.

6:04 So, I'm back in my car at the end of day one. It is 26° according to my car. It's a hot one. Um, and apart from the chaotic start and me flagging sort of the middle of the day and not too many opportunities to play games, I've had a really good day. Now, one thing I did do was I did buy P despite the bad demo, I did buy Panda Spin. I didn't realize it was for sale for20 and uh it's the Kickstarter edition which is the edition I was after with the nice little tokens in. So I've got that. Um actually it was it was for sale for 20 but the cheeky little people at Mat whoever it was Mato or whoever they took the payment in euro so actually cost me 20 and 13p. So that's 13p I will never see again. But anyway yeah so panda spin I've got that. The second thing is for the couple of people that stopped me. the two people that stopped me and said that they enjoyed my videos.

6:55 Thank you very much. Uh this time of year, not just in board game content for a lot of people, but content across all of YouTube. Numbers are down. Uh you know, the sun's out, people are going out, people are spending less time on the computers and watching videos. Uh especially the comedown when for board game YouTube is peak at Christmas when everybody's buying new board games and stuff. You get a big peak and then you just get this rocket down. It always feels really low. I've considered giving up again this year. Um, I am going to do less content going forward. I'm not going to do a video every week because there's the videos I like doing like such as my time travel video which I I enjoy doing, but the time and effort they take to do and nobody's interested in watching them. So, there's no point me making them. So, I'm going to stop doing that sort of thing moving forward and stick to how to plays and top 10s of uh topics that I know people are going to watch and things like that. So, the the two of you that stopped me, I want to say thank you very much. It really really helps, really motivates me and really makes me feel really good. I'm sorry I didn't get your names. I am useless. I was a bit shocked because it's still not something that ever happens what three times in my life now twice today. Um so yeah, thank you very much. Um that's really motivating uh to keep doing what I'm doing. And finally, thanks to the donut, the coffee, and the paracetamol, I did get a a second wind uh and I found a game as well which is really good. This is something slot simulator. scary slot simulator, a spooky slot simulator, something like that. There's the here's the front of the box. Uh, and it's a very weird game.

8:26 You have these six decks of cards labeled A to F. And each of those decks is has the same sort of symbols in, but there's different numbers of the different symbols. So, there's like cherries and bells and all the things you get on a fruit machine, watermelons and things like that. And on a sheet, you have those same symbols. And what you do is, it's a real time game. That's why there's no video. You take turns picking one of the decks. Say you take deck A, you shuffle the deck, and you've got three or four minutes. And what you do is you you lay out three cards and whatever you see on there, you cross off that one. So if you've got deck A and you see a bell bell and a cherry, you cross off bell, bell, and cherry on your sheet. And then you shuffle those three cards back in and then you reveal the next three. And then you you maybe you get watermelon, bell, cherry. You cross off watermelon, bell, cherry. And as you go through this deck and the more you see more more sets of three of these cards, you're going to get sort of a mathematical magic, whatever it's called, probability thing. as then say the deck's got more cherries in than anything else, you're going to see more cherry crosses as you cross them off.

9:22 And what you do then is anytime you can put one of the decks back, you put A back, get B, you can get D, you can get whichever one you want. And what you're trying to do is match up the deck of cards on the table numbered A to F, you're trying to match them up with the numbers one to six you've got of the distribution of those cards in those decks and try and work out how you match them up together. I managed to get four of them right. I got two wrong. It's very clever the way that you are just looking at these three cards and you can uh as you get bells, you cross your bells off every five bells, you can then draw a fourth card for for the next hand. So, you can look at four cards. Uh and then when you get 30 bells total throughout the four rounds that you do, you can then look at four cards every time. But the way you're looking at the distribution of the tick boxes and comparing it to how the cards are distributed throughout the decks and trying to work out and say, "Right, there's a lot of cherries, a lot of watermelons in this one, but I've also got a lot of cherries here." Sometimes like there's only one moon in a card and you just happen to see that moon every time. You think, well, there can't be more than two. There's no no deck has got more than two moons. Why how am I getting a moon every single time? And it kind of throws your stats out a bit because you've got to try and find the averages amongst all the decks. It is really really clever, really fun. I don't know about long-term replayability, but short-term is a lot of fun. That is the name of this game here. And the other thing I'm going to do with my second wind is use it to, you know, drive home safely. It's It's quart 5 anyway. I'm in here leaving 45 minutes early. So, uh, for now it is Cheerio to Cheerios.

10:53 Been waiting a month to do that. So, it's weird. If I go to a game day, I always take my breakfast with me, but I never think of doing it here. And this is the first time I've done it. and I can have breakfast before I go in because it's uh 10 to 9. So, I've got an hour before it opens. So, I got some time to chill before I make my way inside. Um what you don't see, what you do see is you see a bowl or you see Cheerios with milk in. What you don't see is um a spoon. Forgot my spoon. Uh but I've had 7 hours sleep. My back is hurting a little bit. Uh but that's I'm sure that's unrelated. Um so today I'm going to be more alert, more with it. We'll get some more footage. just play some more games and we'll see how it goes. Oh, hey. How's your day going? Oh, yeah. It's fine. I started off by eating soggy cereal out a bowl using the lid of the flask. I kept the milk in, but apart from that, it's good. How are you? So, it is 21°, which is 4° cooler than yesterday, and you can really feel it difference. It's much better. We'll see how it is when we get inside. So, now I keep thinking that this place opens at 10:00. I think it is 9 because it's only 20 9 now. So, uh yeah, I may be making a mistake, but anyway.

11:58 It is hall 4. We're starting and we're going to have a quick little wander around and see what we see and look for places to play. I'm hoping that by 20 9 by the time I get to some tables, maybe the first demo of the day is finishing and I can play something. But we will see. So, I'm down for the Cyberpunk TCG demo at 12. So, I got my name down. So, I've got 2 hours to pass for then. do actually keep forgetting. I've brought my microphone. I forget to use it. So, we'll see if this makes any difference. But, I've just played got careful say the Star Trek space hunt where you are, it's basically a four-player version of Captain Sonar. So, one player is moving the ship around. You got to get to a a quadrant with an enemy base. You got to fire to shoot that base. And so, the enemy will then know which quadrant you're in. You need then you need to go around and try and find each other. find out where you are and shoot them on the in the battleships style by the grid reference of where they are. You do that by one player tracks their boat's movement. So when they move, they'll say north,southeast, west. You track your movement on the acetate paper and then you can move it around over the map and try and work out where they are. There's certain space on the board they can't go through. So they that can narrow down where they are. You got special abilities like having a hidden movement.

13:14 You can wipe your movement, but then you have to give away where you are. And there's all all little things like that. There's different uh people you can be. You can be uh we were picard and data. You can be Kirk and Spock. And you can be my favorite whose name I forgot. But yeah, basically it's just a simplified version of Captain Sonar, but they took away all the gunk and all the fluff and it made it so you don't need eight players, you only need four, which is a much more um accessible game. And it was loads of fun. That is Star Trek Space Hunt. Okay, it is nearly 12:00 on the Saturday. Nearly time for Cyberpunk TCG. not plugged the microphone in, so we'll see if there's a big difference between the two, but I've just played a game. The first game I played on my top 10 games I'm looking forward to play, Green City, I found, but they're not demoing it. And also, it's sold out, so I can't do anything about that one anymore. But, um, yeah, I played Mustache. This is a fourplayer, it's best four player. I'll explain why in a bit. Trick taking game where the cards are numbered 0 to 10 in four suits. And you take turns playing a card into a trick, following suit if you can. um the highest card wins. If you can't follow suit, then you can play off suit and the suits are ranked from right to left on this card here. So, blue is the most powerful suit all the way down to the other suits. So, that is standard trick taking. You can see the cars have stars. The cards in the middle of the number spread have stars and the players with the most stars at the end of the trick will get the points token for the round and then you move on to the next round. But there's a lot of different things. First of all, you are playing in teams. So, you randomly decide which two players are playing on teams to begin

14:45 with. So you're playing two versus two and you randomly pick those each of the four rounds. The second thing is each of the round adds a rule. So we had one where pink cards are worth an extra star at the end of the round. Somewhere green stars are worth negative. If you played a two, you automatically won. And there's loads of these different cards that change the rules as you go. Not only is the teams changing every round, but also each round there's a new rule being added to the game as well. And it was a lot of fun. And if you're if you're good at trick taking games, you'll be good at this. But also, if you're not very good at trick taking games, you can get something out of it because you might have somebody good on your team. You might have a good play that just gets you a few stars. You might find a way to get rid of your uh crappy cards so that you don't give stars to the other team. And that was good. And also, we played three player, so we played 2v1. So, in this case, the whoever was the one player had three special cards. One where they could instantly win a trick, one where they could remove a card from a trick and stuff like that. Um, and it was good. It was very good. Um, it's called Mustache because the cards on it have this nice rainbow effect mustache on them. Apart from that, I don't know why else it's called Mustache, but that was a fun game. Mustache. Okay, I'm just enjoying some time in the sun in front of the lake before I go back in. Just had the dinner at Karag. Love Kag. So nice. I played Cyberpunk Trading card game, which is the big Kickstarter from a while ago. And basically, you have a deck of cards. We've got the like starter deck. So, I had Nakamura and sort of the baddies from the video game.

16:06 I was playing against my opponent who had like V and all the good guys from the video game. Basically, what you do is you you untap, you draw a card. I can't remember the terminologies, but you basically have dice from D4 up to D20. And you choose one of those. You roll it and you put it into your area. And the total value of all the dice in your area is your street cred. And that matters for cards because some might say if you do this, draw a card. And if your street cred's higher than this, draw another card and things like that. So, your your street cred is important. Also, it's very important. We'll get to that in a bit. Uh, and then you can take a card from your hand if it has the Eddie symbol, the currency in game. And you can put that face down into play to use to tap as as mana to to cast spells from your hands using the magic terminology. You've got people you can put into play and you've got gear you can equip to them. You've got programs you can play like spells that do something and then go to a discard pile.

16:52 And you can attack with your people. When you attack, you can attack. If you've got opponents got uh people that are tapped, you can attack them. and the one whoever's got the highest attack will uh defeat the one with the lowest attack, it'll go into the graveyard. Or you can attack to steal the dice from the opponent's area, one of the dy they rolled at the beginning of their turn. And so if you steal and they're not able to block it with a blocker, you get through, you choose which dice you want, you just put it on your side of the table and it keeps the value as well. to your street crediting crews as you steal your opponent's resource beers, whatever it's called. And that's the main part of the game because what you're trying to do is trying to have seven dice uh in your pool at the start of your turn. If first player to do that wins and it's it's pretty decent. It is very very much like Lana. Very similar. Instead of instead of, you know, adding story points or whatever it is, you are just collecting dice in the middle of the table. You you still you you're putting cards on your hand face down as a resource in the exact same way. you're attacking uh either to steal dice or to uh take an opponent's tapped creature out of the game in the same way. It's very similar. Um but obviously it's down to it's going to be down to whether you prefer Disney characters or whether you prefer cyber punk. Now I like both. I love the video games. It's one of my top 10 video games of all time. We played with simple decks and obviously when you get to the buying the cards and your deck building, that's when the game gets good. You start building these combos and these synergies and that's when the that's when these trading card games get good.

18:14 So, while it was a bit of a flat experience because the cards were pretty poor, once you get the cards and you start with debt building, it's going to be a pretty pretty good game, I think, going forward. I do know that two of the stores near me are thinking of playing it. One of them's definitely planning playing it when it comes out later this year. And another one who they play every card game in there, so they'll probably play it as well. So, probably depending on how it is, how it's reviewed when it comes out when people build deck building, how much cards are, how much it is to get into playing, how much, you know, cuz you want to build a couple of decks. If it's going to cost so much money just to put build two decks so you can play every so often, then I'm probably not going to be interested. If it's got a cheap buy in and I get to play it a lot, then I'll probably give it a go because I really like the art and I like the cards and I like probably it probably a game worth collecting. I've got the Buffy trading card game. I've got my collection of that still nearly every card in that set. So, it would be good. But yeah, it's it's a good fun game. Just need to see more of it. Okay, so I'm going to go into hall four. I'm going to see if I can play Stixs. If not, I'm going to start on hall three. So, Stixs wasn't there. They put it away uh for the weekend, I think, or maybe just for today. But instead, I'm glad because Spy World was there, and that was the one I was more interested in playing. Uh it's called Spy World, or was art call it welcome to my secret layer. So, what you're doing here is it's a flipping, right? Uh you flip over the three cards.

19:29 The card that you revealed telling you what action you can do. And the card, the deck it came from on the back of the deck is going to show you if it's a trap, which row or column you can build that in on your little sheet. When you fill in, you draw the little diagram. Or it will tell you if it's a skill. So the movement, stealth, and combat. Uh instead of using the row and column, the number is how much cash that skill will cost. If it's secrets, um you put them on your sheet. you put it in in the same way you would a trap. Uh but you get money back from adding them in. So if you add like 10 value worth of secrets, you'll get two money and then stuff like that. So you can earn money as you're going through the game. And you continue this until the debt runs out. And then you tear off the side of your sheet that holds all your stats. You pass that you pass your layer to another player either left or right depending on the combination of red and blue cards shown at the end of the game. And then they use their stats to walk through your dungeon. You move one square at a time.

20:27 If you've got 15 movement points acquired through the game, you can move through 15 squares. Each of the traps have different ways of taking stats off you. So, in the game that we played, there's three that use stealth and three that use combat. So, as you go through, you'd not mark them off. And if if you can't if you haven't got enough stealth or combat to get past them, you can't move through that space. If you move on to secrets, you steal that amount of secrets. And at the end of the game, you'll score for any secrets that's left at your base that you your opponents couldn't get to. You score for secrets that you managed to steal. you score for any money you had left over at the end of the game. Uh there's also missions and things just like welcome to all different other things you can do. Whoever's got the most money at the end wins. And this was really good fun because you're trying to build out this base and some of the traps are walls and you can like put little lines on to stop people. You can sort of funnel people through a kill box if possible out the way. You can try and the winner of the game. They funneled people into a corner and all the traps in that corner used stealth so people couldn't get through.

21:25 there was no way you could get through. You didn't have enough stealth points to get through. So, so that's one way of doing it. And then, yeah, this was really good fun for a flippant ride because you haven't got just like Welcome 2 when you you finished your town, your suburb, you then you're done. But here you you play through the game and then there's that extra game on top which is really fun as well. And uh yeah, it was really good fun. That is spy world. So, I've just been in the bing and buy same as always. It's you can get some rare stuff which is good. And a lot of it is sort of the same you get same prices you got on eBay or Facebook marketplace whatever but it's uh I don't know you get some really good bargains if you go early I think we have people get out the way farms race farms race have another pun game. Okay I'm back in the car at the end of the day.

22:10 One of those very rare if ever days where I don't come back to my car midday but there we go. But um it was a really good day considering it started off basically waking up with really bad back pain and then forgetting a spoon to eat breakfast with. My back pain went virtually straight away which is good. I ate breakfast with the lid from the pot I brought my milk in as I said. Uh and I played a lot of games and it's it was quite old school feeling today. It felt precoid times where it was busy. There was people everywhere but it was never too busy. There was some choke points. The sort of the areas between where hall three and four connect and hall two and three connect. Especially the one where games law is in that corner which games law is always two or three people deep anyway. That those two areas are like little choke choke points and there's one near water stones as well. But apart from that there was room to move everywhere. Not always room to play games cuz like the tables are still full but it felt not like the last couple of years where it's felt too busy. So that was really good. I did manage to get another game in. I didn't take any pictures or film of it for some reason.

23:08 Um but it is first giants. This is a game I've already pre-ordered. So, Asma day do that good thing where they book a time slot so you know when you're going to get to play a game which I think is the best thing. It's like I did with Cyber Punk earlier in the day. Yeah. So, I play First Giants. This is based on that old game called Allesium which I used to like back in the day but Allesium every card had text on it. You you revealing new cards all the time and reading the cards every turn was was slow. But basically what you do is you have these four little pawns on your turn. You put one of your pawns on one of the two sets of cards. You take one of those cards. You put it in front of your board face up. And some of them have abilities. Some of them let you gain amber. Some of them let you cards in from your dis into your display, which we'll talk about in a bit. And all little things like that. Some have abilities that say uh every red dinosaur you get you take, you then get some amber and things like that. Uh so basically you the dinosaurs are in five different colors for five different things and they're numbered one, two, and three. And when you put them from your the top of your board, which is like you've dug them up and you put them in your display, you turn them face down and then they're worth victory points.

24:10 You're trying to get sets of those as well. So you're trying to get up to five threes. So the threes of different colors, different colors of the same number is what I'm trying to say. Or one, two, and three of the same color. And if you do that first, you get a little token that uh says you've done that before anyone else. You get points. You get points for your sets. You get points for you get points through the game for um performing different actions and stuff. And this was really good because we played the game um in less than it took 20 minutes to teach. The teacher quite a long time because the guy was really good at teaching, but he's one of them who's putting stories into the teach as you go, which is really nice, but I sometimes just think just get on with it. Um but he did a yeah did a really good job of teaching the rules and then the game didn't take long at all. Um so that was really good. Um I'm glad I've pre-ordered it. Like I said, I did used to like Alleion back in the day. This is a not as nice looking and I don't I I prefer the gods they Greek gods theme to the dinosaurs theme, but it is a much snippier game, snappier game. So that's good. So I look forward to playing that when that arrives. That is First Giants. So I'm going to go home. I'm going to come at the right time tomorrow. Trying to get here for 9:00 when it opens cuz I want to go straight to Asma day. They had Gundam which is number one on my to play list.

25:18 They had that there. Uh and also there was another robot game that I can't remember the name of. I'll put it at the bottom that I want to try and book in to play as well. You can't book for Gundam, but you can for the other for some reason. Whatever reason that is. Yeah. Let's go home. Let's get some sleep. Let's get up in the morning. Let's go. And let's remember to bring a spoon for breakfast. Morning. It is the first thing on the Sunday, and I had a plan was to get here early, have breakfast with a spoon, which I managed to do. I wanted to get to the halls about 9:00, so I wasn't queuing to get in, but I was here before most other people. Got here exactly 8:59, which is perfect. Then come to the Asthma Day booth to book in for Cyberpunk Legends, which isn't here today, unfortunately. So, I'm going to miss out on that. I do have a ticket for Rocket Rollout which is just over there. But I'm here with Gunser which is my number one game to play. So I'm hoping two or three people turn up and we can play this later on. So hopefully next hopefully now will cut to me explaining that I played it. And I did. I played it and it's quite good. So it's Gunsen Battle of the Something Something Set in the Legend of the Five Rings universe.

26:17 And it's a very simple game. So basically on your turn, all you're going to do is take one of the five cards available, put it on the top of one of the columns, and then activate everything in that column from the top to the bottom. And these are going to be things like some of them just let you be better in combat, so they don't do anything. Some uh let you recruit by putting units onto the board. Some give you resources that you can spend. And they let you move around and you can move around and depending which colony you activate, you spend a resource to move extra spaces. And when you go into a space with somebody else, you can you start a fight. That's done with dice rolls and you can do the thing where you can lose the most units and win the battle. You can win the battle by wiping out all your opponent's units by wounding them all. Uh but you've got armor that you can get in those cards and things like that. And you've got uh commanders you can bring into the game who have all special abilities. Each of the different factions all special abilities buildings you can build onto the board for different things. You've got special cards that you can put in the rows. You've got things that you can spend influence. This is one of the resources you can spend influence to do special abilities like hire hire one of your commanders and one of those to put one of your special cards into the row and things like so basically you're going to collect resources, spend those resources to do things. You're also going to be drafted those cards. Those columns are going to get better and better and better. And if you see if I can remember all of them. If you win a a combat by attacking, you can do that twice. If you control the center area at any point in the game, if you control two shr three shrines, if you build three buildings, if you control three

27:47 towns, these will give you permanent points out on the board. And there's other ways to get temporary points. If you're trying to get another point out on the board, first person to do that at the end of a full round wins the game. It's a very simple game. The combat's done with dice, which is what I like. I like randomness in my combat. Uh and it's just a very simple you take a card, put it in the column, do what it says. The game was ticking along really quickly considering all four of us had never played before. Uh they took some stuff out the game for the demo and played for four points instead of seven. So the game didn't take very long. Um but it was very very good. I'm looking to see it's coming out in August. So I'm looking forward to seeing how much it's going to cost when it does come out. So one bit thing I need to tidy up is my five goals for him. Five non board game goals that I wanted to achieve. So I've done two of them. One of them was to take cash and a list to the bring and buy and I did. I wanted Hero Realms if there was any, but the only copy they had there was salotape shut. So, I didn't know what was in the box. I didn't know what condition the card were and stuff like that. So, couldn't really do much with that. So, I didn't do anything there. One was to buy 29 copies of Slime Against Humanity, the Magic card. I've been through every Magic Trader. I couldn't even find one, never mind 29. So, um that one's a failure.

28:57 Some Clay Rocket Roll out. This is the big days of wonder release for next year. It's going to be early next year. I think they said February. And it's a bag building game where you are start off with some poor dice that give you one money or one blast or attack or whatever it's called. And you slot those dice into those actions at the bottom of the board. Once you slot slot dice into an action, you can't use that action again. First one's action is attack. And when you attack, you can take one of the cards from this bottom row is sort of enemies. And then you can replace those actions to make your actions that you're selecting stronger at the bottom of your board. Uh the other one is credits and you can spend that to buy more dice, better dice with different sides on higher value sides and different actions. The third action is to gain shields and that's important. We'll get to that in a bit. Fourth action lets you remove a dice from your pool. There's another action that lets you clear one of the you discard one of the dice from one of the action slots and remove the other dice from the action slot. So you can take that action again in the same round at the cost of one of your dice.

29:53 And there's another one as well. I can't remember what that is, but it doesn't matter because the main thing is is you're moving up this track and as you move up the track, you're trying to get to the end, the purple bit at the end. If you get to the purple, then triggers the end of the game, end of the round. Whoever's furthest ahead wins. But what you will do is you will see the in the path there, there's three different colors of board. Further up you go, the more dice you roll and you will take damage. So, you need to have the shields to prevent the damage. If you prevent the damage, then you get to move forward a space. If you don't prevent the damage, you will take a token that will block out one of your actions. You can't take that action till you repair it. Uh but also as well at the end of the game when somebody hits the purple area for each of those damage tokens you've got on the board that you haven't used, you'll move back. So it could be the case that you trigger the end game being ahead and then suddenly you end up losing because you've moved back a few spaces. But this was a very fun game. I played with three really excited people as well. So every action, every time somebody spent eight money to buy the big purple die that had the big numbers on it, there was a big round of applause at the table. It was really good fun.

30:52 But it is a good fun game. It's quite light, medium, light. I could see it being a spiel uh nominee next year as well. Um production quality for a work in progress game is really good. The dice were good. There's still some things. The only thing I'm worried about is as I always I'm long-term replayability. There's nothing like there's no asynchronous powers really apart from the powers you buy throughout the game. There's no missions. There's no personal objectives or anything like that that you can do which I would like to see. But um apart from that, really fun game. Look for that one when it comes out next year. That is Rocket Rollout. So, I've just been back to my car for lunch and I'm in one of the furthest park car parks away. So, I took the bus there, so I've got to walk back as per the rules. So, I thought I'd do a bit of a bit of a round up because it is a 20 minute walk.

31:38 Uh, don't worry, I'm not going to talk for the whole 20 minutes probably. But I thought I'd round up sort of the weekend cuz it is 1:00 exactly. So, there's only 3 hours left of the day. And when I get back, I'm going to go into hall two and see if I can catch up with some of the games I haven't played yet. Uh, so first of all, parking is £10 a day if you pre-order, £20 if you pay on the day, which is expensive. So, yeah, definitely pre-order parking. The car parks are great. The buses that run quite regularly are really good and all the drivers are really nice and stuff. So that's all good. Price of tickets is £50. Now to me that sounds like a lot for 3 days. Especially if you come with a family, it gets quite expensive. But obviously I don't pay for my ticket. So it's fine. But uh people around me, every time I hear people talk about the ticket price, they keep saying it's really good. So I'm not going to argue with people for that. Food options in the hall and around. as as I say it's quite expensive. Now I did see that those pasties that I keep talking about that are £7. There are other places that do pretty much the same pasties but about Fiverr. So so if you shop around you can find food that's a bit cheaper depending place to place within the halls themselves as well. And the ones around the outside I I don't think the food quality is great of those. But if you need to eat you can. Like I'm glad I bought Pat lunches this time because I've saved a fortune apart from the Japanese meal that I treat myself to every year. The halls themselves, like I said, I think the layout is much better.

33:07 I I seem to know where I was. I have found out that if you look above the exits, cuz that was the problem I was having before. I couldn't find an exit sometimes depending where I stood. I didn't see there's massive black and white stripes painting above each exit. So, you can see the exit from wherever you are, which makes sense that for safety and stuff like that. And also the halls didn't feel stupidly full, which was really good. You feel like you've got room to breathe. You've got room to move around. I said there's a couple of choke points around, but everywhere feels open. There's plenty of games to play. It does feel like, and I've said this about Tabletop Gaming Live and Aircon, that there is a lot of roleplay game accessory places. If you want to buy dice, you want to buy role play, you know, dice trays and things to hold cards and and stuff, perfect. You've got loads of places to buy, but they do seem to be creeping in, taking over, and board games seem to be getting less and less. There's definitely fewer board game publishers, including small ones as well, which is very odd. All the staff at the booths are great. All of the um what's the word I'm looking for?

34:14 Volunteers who are doing things for the UK Games Expo are great. People who work at the NEC are great. It's been a really pleasant experience overall throughout the whole weekend. Most importantly, of all the games I've played, I've not played a bad one. So, I mean, there's still 3 hours left yet. So, there's there's time yet, but um I have spent more on food than I have on games. I've still only bought Panda Spin. I bought one Magic Card for £6. So, that was less that was about as much as a coffee coffee cost. So, yeah, I spent more money on food again, but then there's still time. That is it. It's half past 2 on the Sunday and I am done. And uh big shout out to Gareth. I said earlier I forgot when I'm when people come say hi. I should get their names and remember them. And uh I got I think it was Gareth. I forgot your name immediately.

35:02 I'm so sorry. Uh I hope you had a good weekend. Um but yeah, very good weekend. I think now while the UK Games Expo weekend is never sort of 8 out of 10 or less, I think this year has been particularly good compared to the last few years. This feels like the pre-COVID times. There was the one after COVID which was weird where it was sort of half empty uh and everyone was wearing masks and that was that was pretty good as well because it was all empty and then since then it's been overly busy but this year it didn't feel that way which was really good. I had a very good time. But for now, I've got a headache, so it's time to go home. I did actually buy a monster, some paracetim for £5 from the Londis in the NEC. That was Yeah, that was uh that was expensive. But anyway, yeah, I'm going home. Um, so keep you out on the channel cuz I'm going to have shorts of all the games, all the all the games, most of the games that I've played as well as the reviews on here. And then going forward, I've got I've got a top 10 coming up. I've got how to plays and stuff. So yeah, make sure you like, share, subscribe, and all that good stuff. Comment below what your favorite game's expo was.