TechRaptor @ UKGE 2019 – Day 3 Overview

Well, it's finally over. UKGE 2019 has actually closed it's doors for another year, and let me tell you it has been one hell of an experience. Here I present my final day at the show, though the output related to it is far from over.

Geeknson

Since a large part of my focus yesterday was on scenery builds, I decided today that another great must-have of tabletop needed a little light today: gaming tables. While gaming tables can be a pretty big investment, they are seen as a necessity by a large section of the gaming community. I stopped by the booth of Geeknson, a gaming table company with a pretty interesting philosophy when it comes to designing and selling gaming tables.

As you can probably tell from the accompanying image, Geeknson's tables are pretty spectacular. There are big models with screens in them, there are tables with every conceivable utility included and, of course, they also offer a high level of customisability when a table is ordered. When you order a table from them you give out your exact specifications, from the wood used to the different gadgets included, and pay down a deposit. You then have 3 months to make sure your table it paid off, as it takes that long to make the tables from scratch and deliver them.

However, it is not the 3-month window or even the customisability that makes Geeknson's tables interesting. When they were faced with a sector of the industry filled with either high-end, high-cost tables or crowdfunded budget options, they decided that a series of professional, affordable gaming furniture was much-needed. As an answer to that, they released their Moby Geek series of tables.

The Moby Geek series has a maximum price of £950 and can be bought for as little as £320, without compromising on quality. You can get smaller coffee tables, perfectly square tables and even custom designed 'Bristol' tables. On top of all that you also save on the postage since the entire range was designed to be flat-packed. Not only easier to ship for Geeknson but also less expensive for the consumer! Win-Win. As if that wasn't cool enough, Geeknson also has a stunning range of wooden gaming accessories, such as dice towers, rolling trays, and deck boxes. So if you just have to have a dice tower the same wood as your table then that is totally an option.

Gaming On The Go

Another interesting thing I found time to try out was Lantern Dice: Lights in the Sky, an abstract puzzle game from Renegade Game Studios. The version of the game that was available for testing at UKGE 2019 was a newer revision, changing the game from a tile-laying, dominoes-like game to a micro-game more about dice rolling and shading in shapes, previously titled Lanterns: The Harvest Festival.

The theming of the game is based around a Chinese firework display being put on by the players to impress the emperor. Each player rolls the 4 dice in a special tray and then rotates the tray so that each player is assigned one of them and shades in a triangle on their sheet which matches the showing color. The goal is to fill in the triangles to create specific patterns, placing firework tiles on top of the squares once they've been filled in.

In a similar way to Azul Lantern Dice only scores up once you reach the end, meaning that if you're a new player you might struggle to figure out how well you're doing during play. In many ways that made the game more exciting, although as it turns out my two opponents had played previous versions of the game and completely wiped the floor with me.

The most interesting thing about this new revision is that it comes in a much more compact form. Instead of many tiles and cards coming in a medium-sized box, everything is stripped down to a compact travel-sized box with a pad of single-use sheets, a tray with dice and very small tokens. All-in-all this new version of the game is actually pretty appealing if you're looking for an abstract game you can literally fit in your pocket. You might want to laminate some of those sheets to make them re-usable though.

The Last Hurrah

Well, my time at UKGE 2019 has drawn to a close. I have to say that I had an awesome time at the show and got to try out some truly impressive games. The wealth of content that has come out of the event will probably be running the site for a fair bit of time to come, so don't forget to keep your web browser glued to TechRaptor to make sure you don't miss a moment. I'm already counting down the days until UKGE 2020.