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What Happened at International TableTop Day 2016?
May 14, 2016 Rules of Play

What Happened at International TableTop Day 2016?

On Saturday April 30th of 2016, we hosted the big cheese of board game events - International TableTop Day!

International TableTop Day is a chance for gamers and newbies to come together and play great games, new games, old games, family games, you name it! 

Our event took place at The Angel Hotel, and ran from 10am - 10pm, giving Cardiffians (and those from further beyond) 12 hours of uninterrupted gaming.

So, what happened?

The 'Getting Ready'

We laid on around 10 members of Rules of Play staff and helpers. We were there to help out, point people towards empty tables, teach games, sell games, and bring order to a world of chaos. Well, we could try.

From the very beginning at 10am, there were queues in the hotel lobby while the last bits of preparation took place. 

Pretty soon, the tables began to fill up, and it was games ahoy! Power up the engines, boys!

The Game Makers

The guest publishers & distributors at the event helped make it as brilliant as it was - alongside showing off their own stuff, they joined in and played games with everyone else. 

John from Gen42 Games, explaining the brand new Tatsu and the firm favourite Hive

Massimo from Big Potato Games with a table full of Obama Llama and Bucket of Doom

Steve from Librium Games - the master of reverse Jenga! - showing us who's boss of Librium

The wonderful Bez teaching the brand new Wibbell++ and the crowd-pleaser In a Bind

ET Games, the masterminds behind the genius games Pucket and Rollet, were challenging brave souls to competitions

We also had our own French connection with the guys from Morning Family and their game Exploding Kittens. They also sell the gorgeous puzzle cubes below...

Grublin Games, the makers of the beautiful Cornish Smuggler, were previewing and play testing the upcoming Perfect Crime

Tinkerbot Games, our favourite local game makers, were there previewing the brand new Ghostel with their adorable meeple earrings in tow!

Geeknson, the makers of handcrafted gaming tables, brought a few of their beautiful creations along. One of them lit up! I didn't know it was possible to fall in love with a table. Turns out you can.

Cubicle 7 and the Penarth & District Wargames Society were there repping D&D, Doctor Who, and other storytelling gems

The Gamers

Our attendees ranged from families to students to people who'd heard about an event and popped along to see what all the fuss was about. 

In total, we played games with over 370 people! That's a lot of dice rolls.

Our baker-in-residence Jess was at the event, and it was her birthday. Usually, we ask Jess to bake us cakes. This time, we thought that'd be a bit cheeky... So we baked one ourselves!*

The whole room stopped playing games and sang Happy Birthday. If you're the soppy type, it might've brought a tear to your eye. Not us, though. We definitely didn't cry. We didn't.

*Bought, baked, it's all the same.

The Games

The icing on top of the cake - the actual games! We brought along our massive collection of demo games, and lots of folks came with their own. 

No table was left ungame-ified. Games filled the room, the stairs, and even the floor (of course). 

Our favourite blogger Geeks in Wales carried out the sneakiest game of Sneaky Cards, ever...

An epic PitchCar tournament was always going to happen

Rollet and Pucket were also very popular!

Artemis, the Star Trek Bridge Simulator, was set up on stage behind some very secretive curtains...

Family bestsellers like Sushi Go, Survive! Escape From Atlantis and Takenoko were all played endlessly

The Great Stuff

Some of the awesome online feedback we got was enough to keep us going through a very long, warm day! 

We were featured in WalesOnline, as their #1 thing to do during May Bank Holiday!

Geek & Sundry, the creators of International TableTop Day, were quick to say congratulations! Even if the location got a bit mixed up...

Made in Cardiff TV were there, filming gamers and game makers.

We did some filming ourselves! Our videos will be out soon, but we also captured some Facebook live streams and some mini time lapse videos.

Our attendees showed us some love on Twitter and Facebook...

And finally...

We'd like to finish off by saying a huge THANK YOU to everyone who came along! From our gamers to our game makers and everyone in-between, thanks for making International TableTop Day 2016 such a huge success. We were humbled to have such an incredible turnout.

Couldn't make it to the event? You can watch all our videos over on Facebook. 

See our top 7 moments from TableTop Day in our 'best moments' blog post!

Don't forget you can join us every Monday at our weekly Board Game Bar! Head to Urban Tap House, Monday nights between 5-10pm, £3 entry.

Photos courtesy of Rules of Play or Zoe Lim, our lovely & official event photographer.

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Comments

Jamie - May 19, 2016

Favourite blogger, eh? Aww shucks :) I managed to get rid of quite a few Sneaky Cards that day too :)

It was a fantastic day and I can’t wait to see how it grows from there!

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