UKGE 2023 recap - Day 1

The first day of UKGE is over. So many people, so much noise, such sensory overload.. but it’s awesome! 😄 And even though most of the big guns are hidden away for GenCon or SPIEL, there are still so many cool new stuff to discover. Time flew by really quickly, and we already have a bunch of plans of what to do tomorrow. Let’s hope we have enough time! 🙂

Let us highlight some of the games we played:

🧟 Survive Alive is a roll&write style game - though instead of rolling, you draw resource cubes from a bag. It has an evergreen zombie apocalypse theme, as you control a camp of survivors trying to survive. Each turn you have to cleverly spend your resources to build new buildings or equip your survivors with weapons. Then after your actions the zombies attack from one or more directions. As you get stronger, so do the zombies, so you always have to watch out. 🙀

🐙 Kelp immediately caught our attention. It has such an attractive sales pitch: a completely asymmetric 2-player game where one side plays as an octopus, and the other as a shark. 😁 The octopus uses deck-building and card play to do actions, trying to hide and outsmart the shark. The shark draws dice from a bag and rolls them to use them for actions - moving around, searching for the octopus or attacking. This prototype had a lot of cool ideas!

🗿 Ancient Knowledge is the next expert game from Iello - though the rules teach was ready in around 5 minutes! It’s an awesome engine building game. 🥰 You play monuments and artifacts, and learn technologies. A fun twist is how your cards in play keep sliding forward, eventually going to your Past. This means you have to keep rebuilding your engine and coming up with nice new combos. We’ll definitely write more details about this one!

🔐 Side Quest Nemesis. Okay this was just an extra demo made for this con, but we enjoyed it. 😊 Side Quest is a new escape game series coming from none other than Board&Dice ! We are always up for some escape games, and these ones promise more theme and immersion than usual games. And as we are fans of Nemesis too, we think this is a brilliant idea!