How a minister and a GP created the UK's biggest tabletop gaming event

The story of how an event, celebrating Britain's thriving tabletop gaming community, went from hosting 900 people to expecting 50,000, involves two unlikely figures - a minister and a GP.

The UK Games Expo is preparing to host its 20th show at Birmingham's NEC and has staked a claim to be the third biggest event of its kind in the world.

Its growth mirrors the increasing interest in all forms of tabletop games in the UK, with board game cafes becoming a familiar sight in towns and cities in recent years.

Co-founders Tony Hyams, from Kidderminster, and Richard Denning, from Sutton Coldfield, said they never expected their show to get as popular as it has.

"We thought we could do something but never really thought on the scale that it's got to," Denning said.

Tabletop games - or sometimes hobby games - is the term used to talk about any form of a game played on a table, such as board games, roleplaying games, or miniature wargames.

In 2007, Denning had been a doctor for 17 years when he set about organising the first expo with a group of friends.

At the time, he was the chairman of a local wargaming group, with players carrying out miniature battles, and said the UK had wargaming conventions but nothing on this scale for board games as a whole.

To prepare, he went to visit Spiel Essen in Germany, known as the largest tabletop games convention in the world and found a number of British publishers with an interest in a British-based event.

Hyams, a minister at Emmanuel Church in Droitwich, was brought on board through a mutual friend to help organise the first convention.

He was running a small IT company as "being a minister doesn't pay much" and was asked to sort out the ticketing system in only six weeks, which he did for free "just to be involved".

Their first expo was held at the Clarendon Suite Masonic Halls on Birmingham's Hagley Road in May 2007 - but for Hyams the date was important for another reason.

His wife went into labour the night before the show, just as he was delivering the ticketing system to the venue.

"I got a phone call that basically went: 'You need to come to the hospital now," he recalled.

His daughter was born on the Saturday of the first one and he joked: "She has refused to volunteer ever since."

The show saw steady growth over the following years and Denning remembered that they would meet after every one and joke that they could not get any bigger.

But Hyams said: "After about five or six years of saying that, we said 'let's just stop saying that and see where it goes'."

They soon found they needed warehouse space for all the games and offices for meetings but Denning said: "We couldn't afford all that, so we had to make do with garages and late night Skype calls."

In 2016, the show moved to the Hilton hotel at the NEC, doubling the available floor space, and the following year to the main NEC exhibition halls.

As that was happening, the pair were still trying to manage the show around their day jobs but, while Hyams continues working as a minister, Denning decided to pack in his medical work.

There came a moment in 2016 when he said a patient had collapsed and he was arranging for an ambulance, all while taking calls about the show.

Hyam's reaction was shock: "I told him he was nuts. He was leaving a GP's salary and I was like 'you've got to be a lunatic mate, what are you doing?'"

Denning said fortunately things worked out and the event now fills six halls at the NEC and attracted more than 41,000 people last year.

The pair claimed only Spiel Essen in Germany and GenCon in the United States could currently boast bigger tabletop gaming shows.

Their 20th anniversary will be this year, between 29 and 31 May, and they expect it to be their biggest yet, with a projected turnover of about £2.2m.

Denning said he believed public awareness of tabletop gaming through TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things, as well as through celebrities like Henry Cavill and Vin Diesel, had opened up the market in the last decade.

The quality of the games had also made a difference, Hyams said - 20 years ago he added that they could be "fairly ropey and very functional".

"Now we're seeing the artwork you get now is bright, interesting, engaging and that then spreads it to a bigger audience," he said.

Jon Drew runs Boardroom Cafe in Wellington, Shropshire, offering customers the chance to pick from their library of more than 1,000 games.

He is a board games fan with a collection including a 1937 edition of Monopoly and and game of Cluedo from the 1940s, and said the growth of the industry was "always exciting".

Drew said he had seen a change with "people wanting to reconnect together, as friends, as family and being round a table".

He also said: "Games are constantly being created by independent people who love games and not just being created for the sake of it."

Benjamin Lycett, from Telford, said he has been into board games since he was 10 years old and set up his own company, Cerberus Studios, five years ago.

He believes the coronavirus pandemic gave board games a huge boost, with families forced to find new forms of entertainment.

Tabletop games were a "massive industry" now, he said, with some giant companies dominating the market and smaller companies having to watch their finances carefully.

"But there's always room for something new and something different," he said.

Ian Adams from Mold, Flintshire, got into board games in 1989 and believes their surge in popularity is "because the stigma has disappeared".

He is a member of North Wales Tabletop Games Club and said it was also easier than ever to buy games in shops, or play them at clubs.

Adams has been volunteering at the UK Games Expo since 2022 and said games were a "great leveller".

"A factory worker can sit at a table with a solicitor, doctor and any other person and they have something in common straight away," he said.

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