UKGE 2026

So UKGE 2026 is a bit over a month away and as usual, I find myself realising that I have left it too late to sort out all the things I wanted to do. I had planned to get a big banner, cool table decor, more shelves and boxes. You know, all the stuff you need to look like a proper professional game designer rather than someone selling stuff at a car boot sale.

Heck, this year I don’t even have a car boot as my car decided to die a horrific death involving a snapped fanbelt, a burst coolant tank, and fried electricals.

My hope is that we will be able to scurry around and get everything sorted as we do every year. If not, we’ve managed fine without the accoutrements in the past and I’m sure we’ll manage again this year.

The good news is that we’ve sent Apothecaria: Dragon’s Lair to the printer and should have copies available in time for UKGE! Hopefully we’ll also have copies of Apothecaria: Dance of Seasons too but we’ll need to do some editing on that before committing it to print.

If you’re coming to UKGE, you can find us just to the left of Hall 4’s entrance!

What Have You Been Up To?

Well, since fulfilling the For Small Creatures Such As We Kickstarter I’ve been taking it easy to be honest. After nearly going to the hospital over a panic attack I figured it was best to give myself room to breathe and recover. Of course, trying to change from being a sole trader to a limited company is a headache in itself that is made all the worse by every step of the way basically saying that you’ll go to jail if you do it wrong but hey, I’m sure they’re just exaggerating.

Mostly what I’ve been doing is writing some stuff for a secret zine that I’ve been working on with Dead Air creators Fiona Ruthven and Sadie Woods. We should have our debut issue available at UKGE so come by our stalls and give the password — any suitably cryptic password with a tap of the nose will suffice.

Apart from that, I’ve been doing a bit of work on Spirit Tea and DELVE: Reforged which I’ve posted about over on Patreon. The big new thing being that we finally have a tea brewing minigame for Spirit Tea that I feel captures the brewing process well and adds a bit of challenge.

I’m hoping to have Spirit Tea ready for Autumn. The perfect season for settling down for a cup of tea and a cosy game.

Conpulsion 2026

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to be a guest speaker at the Edinburgh based Conpulsion convention. I hadn’t been to Conpulsion since 2013 when I took my first TTRPG, Those Who Play, over there for playtesting. During that test I met a game designer named Greggor Hutton who gave me some excellent feedback on the system and has been a constant distantly orbiting companion on my game design journey. Imagine my surprise then when after all the talks were over - less than 5 minutes after I had returned from getting dinner - that I was asked to come up to the stage so that he could present me with the Banquo Award. It took all my effort not to cry.

Thinking back on it, that first year at Conpulsion marked a real turning point in my life. I had just come out as trans to my parents and my home life - which was already pretty bad - had become unlivable. After one of my playtests, I was invited out for drinks by a Romanian student who dressed like a camp vampire and called everyone darling. I told him about my situation and he got me a room at his sister’s house in Glasgow less than a week later.

I often wonder how things would have panned out if I hadn’t gone to that convention. As Those Who Play released and then promptly flopped, as most first time projects do, I had forgotten all about tabletop games by the time I finished university. I’d gone down the videogame designer path then the journalist path and then, by chance, returned to RPGs and got lucky.

I think what I’m trying to say here is that my journey has been going on a lot longer than I realised. It’s not been 6 years. It hasn’t even been 13. I’ve just celebrated my 32nd birthday on Sunday and I’m sure that if I could open up the book of my life, I’d find the seeds of who I am sprinkled throughout it in the most unexpected of places.

Media of the Week

Shanice and I have been sinking a lot of hours into the survival/incremental game Planet Crafter.

Starting with an atmosphereless ball of rock, you must build all manner of heaters, drills, biodomes, algae rockets, tree spreaders, butterfly farms, and power plants to terraform the planet.

The subtly genius thing is that the world isn’t procedurally generated. It is a handmade map with a few proc-gen elements like spaceship crashes. As you terraform it though, you see these areas that you have become increasingly familiar with change. Grass grows, the sky turns blue, bugs start to appear, plants, trees, and eventually even fish and other animals!

It is incredibly chill and fills that monkey-brain need to see numbers going up in such a gratifying way.

There’s no combat, it’s multiplayer, and they’ve just launched their 2.0 update so check it out!