Unconference Summer 2026

This was a small unconference in central London - a group of tabletop people gathering to talk about things that interest them.

Many thanks too Sara Cole of Patchwork Fez Games for organising this unconference. Without her efforts it wouldn't have happened.

Travel

It was going to be a quick 30 minute train ride in the morning and then a liesurely 5 minute stoll to the venue - or so I thought! It turns out that Thameslink had some engineering works that meant no trains for the entire weekend. So my wife kindly drove me over to Welwyn Garden City which had a different train line with a train going twice an hour. Well, in theory. After the terrible train crash at Bedford the day before many trains were out of position, and as a result my train was about 25 minutes late!

So I got to the unconference a little late, missed the introduction talk and the post its and voting etc, and the first sessions were already underway.

The Unconference

I'd guess that there were around twenty people there for most of the day, although I didn't count them.

Wait a minute, what's an unconference?

Well, in a normal conference you probably have speakers and topics all arranged.

For an unconference you get together, everyone puts down ideas that they think would be interesting on post-it notes, and then everyone uses voting dots to indicate which topics are most interesting. We had two/three streams potentially available, with two locations in the garden and one in the main building. It was a lovely sunny day, the shade at the bottom of the garden was much appreciated by all!

This was the way the sessions looked across the day.

time	space 1	space 2
11:20-12:00	Printing Advice for first timers	Choose Your Own Adventure games
12:10 - 12:50	UKGE Post-Mortems	The growth problem. Why do UK companies have such problems going full time?
12:50 - 13:30	Lunch	Lunch
13:30 - 14:20	Jerry's Map and Game Design	Patreons (and such) for Game Designers
14:30 - 15:10	RPG Histories and Cultures of Play Discussion	Collage Games Workshop
15:20 - 16:00	Your Thorny Design Problems	Supplier and Distribution Recommendations

There was also a space 3 "Nap time and/or being a potato" - in other words, it's OK to not engage in everything all the time! Some people brought along sandwiches for lunch, I wandered up the road towards Mornington Crescent as I used to work near here and went to one of my old traditional sandwich places.

These are not detailed notes from each conversation, but a few things which I noted down because they struck me at the time.

Printing advice for first timers

There was an interesting discussion of digital printing vs offset printing, and the typical minimum print run sizes for offset printing (which is better quality and the unit cost is cheaper but has expensive set up.) Of course a very large print run can raise the question about where you are going to store all the products! Most of us work at the size where it is a case of boxes around the home.

Different kinds of binding and page imposition were discussed, as was the difference between CYMK and RGB colour spaces (and the importance of having the correct format images in your documents!)

The excellent quality of printing work done in Ukraine was mentioned, alongside the problems of working in a war zone - there was a print run of (I think) Kobolds Ate My Baby which was destroyed by a Russian attack before it could be shipped out.

Some of the value of Print on Demand (PoD) for first timers was discussed. DriveThruRpg use Lightning Source for PoD and they print and distribute in the US and in the EU which can help reduce import and postage costs. At one time PoD was pretty poor, but now the quality is almost indistinguishable as long as you are not wanting fancy binding, spot colour and other things.

UKGE Post Mortem

Everyone who had run a stand felt that it was a valuable proposition - made sales and also made connections with people. Even just hearing that someone had already bought your stuff was encouraging.

Black Armada decided to have a bit more space and used it to run 1hr demo games (in 90 minute slots) and these could be booked in advance or on the day in person. Almost all of them were filled, and they had reached out to influencers who came along to play. It takes a lot of work to showcase a game in an hour, but it is really useful to see if the vibes are landing. They mostly demo'd games which are not yet out, to build some buzz about them.

It is easier to sell your own games because you know them well and are passionate about them. When games are on the TIN stand it is very difficult to know about all the games (although TIN does produce a catalogue to help both the people manning the stand and browsers to find out more about each game)

Personal Note: It seems to me that there is value in making sure that I know both the 'one sentence pitch' and the '90 second pitch' for all of my games. I can also include that in my sell sheets and other advertising material.

Patreons (and such) for Game Designers

Quite a few people had Patreons although most hadn't made much use of them in the last year or so.

It was mentioned that two things are important if you are running a patreon:

1. don't do something that you are not already doing!
2. allow people to pay you even if you don't think you are worth it!

It seems that there are at least two ways in which patrons engage with creators on Patreon.

1. I'm paying for a service, so I want you to provide me with content on a regular basis.
2. I believe in you and want to support you so you can continue to produce things that I like on a schedule that works for you.

There are almost certainly gradations between those (and other approaches) but those seemed to be the most common.

One approach that someone has used is to have free tier articles but allow comments to be open to paid tiers.

Sometimes the primary benefit of Patreon is to enable mailing list/newsletter functionality - although they don't allow you to import lists of people from somewhere else like the other newsletter providers do.

Someone was on Substack, and has 2000 followers there - they would like to move to something like Patreon but doesn't have a clear way of doing that.

There was a little discussion about the problematic nature of Substack.

Personal Note: I think it might be worth registering a Patreon for myself. I've had some success at producing a regular newsletter for the last few months (unlike the previous five years which I've not managed). I could use it as a mechanism for also publishing my newsletter but allowing comments etc on things. Certainly worth looking into.

RPG Histories and Cultures of Play Discussion

Emily Friedman who is writing a book about the actual history of actual play mentioned an existing book which talked about 'six cultures of play', although it made a whole lot of assumptions about people and play.

I think they originally came from this 2021 blog post https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html

We discussed how a culture of play might have a national basis (often adventures which might be grim and bleak in the US like Delta Green turn into black comedy in the UK because of our national character), or a per-game basis - the same person might engage in a different culture of play in Brindlewood Bay, Kobolds Ate my Baby, and a highly detailed combat simulation game like Runequest.

One observation is that sometimes games have an implied culture of play that isn't explicity called out. Someone mentioned a game which had said "you will find that xyz happens during play" but they never found it did, and reading the rules discovered that there was nothing that expressely ensured that it happened. Sometimes there is an implicit culture of play amongst the designers of a game which is overlooked and thus not explicitly called out in the rules.

Personal Note: I remember being very impressed by something I read in the introduction to Our Last Best Hope by Magpie games. A game should say what the game is about, how the game does that, and what behaviours it rewards and punishes. I've tried to include this in most of the games that I've written, but I'm not sure how explicit I've been in the most recent ones. I do want to keep this in mind for the future.

Supplier and Distribution Recommendations

As a general rule getting into distribution is desirable because shops like to order from distributors, and reordering from a single place is convenient for them.

Not all distributors are equal though, and people discussed those which they found they had a good relationship with and those which were not working so well (or ones which were worth avoiding because of poor labour practices, for instance).

IPR is generally speaking a good US distributor for indies, but it doesn't take much for them to stop pushing a particular game, and if they decide they don't want to sell it any more your options are limited. Great if you become an evergreen line with them, but there is no guarantee.

We had a lot of discussion about the difficulties with the EU that people are finding in the face of recent regulation - whether it is the need to have an 'EU Person' with an EU address in everything that you sell in the EU, or the new rules which will apply a €3 surcharge (before tax) for each HS code on your parcel.

Personal Note: I've found good success with talking directly to some game stores over the last year or so, and we all agreed it would be nice if it was easier to find some good lists of game stores out the in the UK. Hopefully something that Big Table might be able to help with when it gets off the ground.

Bottom Line

This was an excellent event. It was good to meet and chat with people I knew but didn't have a chance to talk to for long at conventions, people that I'd only known online, and people that I didn't know at all before this event.

Sara plans to run these again, and I'll definitely plan to attend if I'm able.

Cover photo courtesy of Sara Cole.

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