UK Games Expo 2025 Convention Diary – Friday – Space Games & Daggerheart

This was the first proper day of the Expo and a joy to be staying right next to the con. Normally I’d be up super early at my friend Graham’s place, preparing for a lengthy drive, or at a Travelodge nearby. Here I was able to read at breakfast while watching the procession of nerds walking to the show. I had my pass, I was already on the grounds, I didn’t need to rush. The most pressure I had was finding a postbox to send a birthday card out to my stepmother. Fortunately there’s one by WH Smith in Resort World.

That said, I had places to go, friends to meet up with and scoops to get, so after fortifying myself with breakfast and coffee, I was off.

Wise Wizard Games

I’m a big fan of Star Realms and a friend of Saffron, one of the workers at the stall, who had returned to Expo for the first time in a little while. There was also Rob Dougherty, the company’s CEO, available for a bit of a chat.

Star Realms Academy was going shown off, as a version of the game rebuilt for an all-ages audience with no language comprehension needed to play. It was clear they’d done more than remove trickier mechanics, but actually considered the audience.

Rob told me about the next expansion of Star Realms, which is going to be dealt with in a different way than usual. There’s going to be a Gamefound campaign for a digital version of the campaign, with a physical campaign to follow. This will allow playtesting and amendments to be made in the digital sphere before things are committed to cardboard. It’s an interesting idea, and they’ve also thrown in a deal for people who back digitally to get promos at a discount if they back the physical edition later.

And what does this expansion do? It brings a new type of card: Planets! These planets are bought using the combat resource instead of cash, and when acquired, they’re permanently added to your side of the table. There will also be new commander decks with single factions, where the previous packs had a combination of them.

As a person with an interest in Star Trek, I decided to ask about Star Trek Star Realms, which is currently simply a reskin of Star Realms’ core set. Rob explained that he was thrilled by the license and the depth of conversations about which faction matched which (a surprise as I thought it was simply that Blob & Romulans are green, Klingons & Machine Cult are red, and so on). There’s going to be an expansion which introduces the Borg as either an enemy for everyone to fight, or for a player to control when fighting against other players. This will be unique to this version of Star Realms (but compatible with opaque sleeves). Rob said he was a fan of Trek and excited to actually be designing with it in mind. Personally, it’s an incentive to get Star Trek Star Realms when a new expansion arrives.

Wise Wizard was also showing off Elemystic, a two-player game which was a lot more self-contained than Star Realms. Players have nine cards each that they’re drafting as they’re looking to master the elements. It was only a brief preview, but looked interesting as a portable game.

Paizo

I don’t normally cover D&D or any offshoots, which includes Paizo. My friend Graham was down for one day and in his gregarious manner, dropping off bags of sweets and biscuits for folks on stands. The people at Paizo’s booth were really friendly and chatty, so I’ve covered some of what we talked about.

Starfinder Second Edition has been looking to bring Starfinder up to rules parity with Pathfinder Second Edition. The whole Action Economy (if you want to show people you know about Pathfinder, just mention the Action Economy, they all love it). There’s not going to be a Beginner Box at launch for second edition, but they’re looking to make a deluxe introductory adventure. They’re going to experiment with one-book adventure paths compared to the multi-book versions previously released.

There’s going to be a Starfinder novel, “Era of the Eclipse” which goes into some of the early days after “The Gap”, the big plot device where everyone’s lost their memories after a certain point and all histories prior to that point are gone, too.

Speaking of which, a product being shown off was The Infinity Deck, an in-universe prop which was a fancy foil-embossed deck of cards. because the rules for the game were lost in The Gap, there are a lot of folk games which have sprung up as people have made their own games. As such, there are a few different example games and people are encouraged to make their own.

Yay Games

I was lured into playing a demo just before the trade hall closed. I thought I was going into a sheep game, but the demoers in the Yay Games stand suggested one about body parts instead. Frankenstein’s Bodies is a game about being grave robbers who are making their own monsters. You’re collecting pieces from a deck and a few open cards to make one of two monsters. You can also steal other people’s body parts or ‘gift’ them parts which don’t quite match. It’s fine, it feels a bit old and looking it up, it’s 11 years old. 

RPG Night “Daggerheart”

Last year I tried out Candela Obscura out of morbid curiosity. I’ve never really followed Critical Role, although I’m aware of their work. I was looking for a Friday night game and there were a shrinking amount of slots for Daggerheart, their latest game.

Daggerheart is an RPG very much in dialogue with Dungeons and Dragons, possibly second only to Pathfinder. What I saw of the rules and character sheets looked like it was formatted in a very similar style, and the style of high fantasy is almost identical. The GM said the phrase most trad GMs say to win folks over, about how it’s got a ‘very narrative focus’ but at least my tally of mechanics being directly compared to D&D was only three.

The system uses six ability scores which are added to a 2d12 roll, then summed against a difficulty rating. It’s nice someone’s trying to do something with a d12, I guess. The big difference is that they are coloured differently. The player earns a meta-currency of Hope if one die is higher, the GM earns another called Fear if the other’s higher. Hope fuels some player powers and can add a bonus die to rolls if spent beforehand. The GM can add a negative die, have enemies act outside of their turn order and I assume more, but I wasn’t behind the screen.

Characters have a number of different traits. My character Khari had the following:

Ridgeborne – My community lived on rocky peaks, giving me bonuses to navigate them.

Giant – My ancestry meant I had an extra hit point and treated melee ranges as being very close. I should have paid attention to what that meant.

Stalwart – For being a Guardian, I was hardier than the others.

Whirlwind – I could spend Hope when I was in Very Close range of multiple people, in order to damage them all a bit.

I Am Your Shield – I could mark Stress (another metacurrency) to take a hit meant for someone Very Close to me.

This was a first level character, and just through this you can see I could do more than a D&D fighter type. I could absorb hits well, and take on groups, acting as a great bodyguard.

Fights use a structure of passing between player and GM character turns, with everyone deciding on their order and the GM potentially interrupting by spending Fear. Attacks are handled like skill checks, with an Evasion score to meet or beat, but not generating Hope or Fear by the sounds of it as there’s a lot more rolling. Everyone has wound thresholds which mean you’ll be suffering 1, 2 or 3 hit points based on how much total damage you take. Armour can downgrade the level of damage, but generally you can only do that once per strike. My character could do it twice, or if defending someone else could mark any amount.

There are long and short rests, with characters choosing from options like refreshing health or armour, or getting some Hope which was great as I rolled higher with my Hope dice twice in the entire evening.

As far as the story, we were disastrously close to being caravan guards, something I’ve grown to loathe as a lazy high fantasy con game trope. Luckily we were just travelling in one, trying to get to an arcanist. We had some exploration, a couple of fights and a nice encounter in a tavern. The ‘map’ was all printed standees, which I was fine with, and the range was abstract. 

There’s a point in my notes where I started drawing the forest wraiths we were fighting, stag heads and pondering how to make a Carved from Brindlewood game specifically to run in a convention time slot. This is no shade on the GM, who didn’t seem to have been given enough time to learn the system to a level an irritating player was when he kept prying into it again and again. There was a nice d8 ‘ritual’ counter on the map, with us having to kill eight undead while there were only four on the table. We had to fight forest wraiths and get them to spawn more undead specifically to end the ritual and tick the counter down.

I think ultimately it was fine. It’s still pretty trad and incredibly in dialogue with D&D. I would like to see how it can stand on its own, without having to basically be a not-D&D. I guess that’ll be its ultimate challenge in the long run; whether the pedigree of Critical Role and their use of the system makes it a contender. At the con it seemed to do pretty well. My friend Graham was pleased to nab the penultimate copy from the stall Darrington Press were demoing at. 

That was day one. I had a couple of long chats with Pelgrane Press and Soulmuppet, but I’ll be compiling them with my longer RPG chats soon enough.