A week ago, at the end of Tabletop Scotland 2023, came the news that Tabletop Scotland 2024 would be different. Due to ongoing uncertainty with the venue and taking the significant risk to go to Edinburgh, the capital city, the indie convention would be leaving Perth, the city of its birth.
2023 was a great success; Tabletop Scotland raised £6,967.73 for the charity Scottish Autism, added an extra day, and Turnstile attendance was up 38%.
Rumours of the move, though, were loud and clear from Friday, and this blogger, wearing a press pass, talked to several exhibitors and (when they started it) attendees. It was easy to find people with questions but next to impossible to find people who didn’t trust the organisers to do a great job.
For example, Cat Tobin of Pelgrane Press told me;
I was really impressed by the size of the event this year, and kudos to Dave and his team. Getting a bigger venue has clearly become necessary to maintain their persistent growth in the future.
The Dave mentioned is David Wright, the Convention Director.
Cat and Pelgrane aren’t the only British tabletop publishers who think highly of Dave and the team. I also got the chance to ask Nightfall, the publishers of SLA Industries and the Terminator RPG, whether they’d be coming to Tabletop Scotland 2024. Mark Rapson said;
Nightfall Games are big fans of TTS, both the organisers and the event. We will always be keen to be an integral part of the show.
I wondered whether all this faith in the Tabletop Scotland team would be tested by the move and reached out to the convention organisers. Dave kindly agreed to speak to me about the future of Tabletop Scotland.
An interview with Dave Wright: Tabletop Scotland Edinburgh
Why move from Perth to Edinburgh?
Mostly this is covered by the post on our website. TL:DR version is that we needed more space and the options for a larger venue in Scotland are very limited. Edinburgh, or specifically the Royal Highland Centre, provides us with significantly more space and has better parking and hotel accommodation infrastructure compared to Perth.
Alongside the information presented on the website about the process you went through in choosing to move to the Royal Highland Centre, what other steps did you take to ensure it was the right fit for the convention long term?
Much of the process followed was the same one that led us to the Dewars Centre for 2018’s event. i.e. we have a checklist of things that we want from a venue. Each item on that checklist was used to test all of the possible venues, and then retested prior to the contract being signed with the Royal Highland Centre. Does the Royal Highland Centre tick all the boxes on that checklist? Not entirely no, but then again no venue in Scotland does. Where ticks weren’t put into boxes, we had conversations with the Royal Highland Centre team to see what mitigations we can put in place and that was something they were very open to. From all of the engagement we’ve had with the team there we can tell that we have a productive and proactive relationship, which adds to our confidence in our choice of venue.
What will the bigger venue allow Tabletop Scotland to do in 2024 that it couldn’t do in 2023?
We had to not do certain things in 2023 to fit into the space available whilst ensuring that we added capacity for more attendees and exhibitors. Panels being the more obvious one, but we also removed our Gateway Zone and we were unable to experiment with other things. With the additional space we can re-establish those things if we want to, and we can also experiment a bit more with other things.
You mentioned the Royal Highland Centre could also reserve dates for the show in 2024, 2025 and 2026. Is that right? Are the dates safely set in stone so that people can arrange and plan years in advance?
It’s a three year contract with guaranteed dates in 2024, 2025 and 2026. The contract has break clauses after each event so that we can choose to cancel the contract if we want to. Dates are 6th-8th September 2024, 5th-7th September 2025, and 4th-6th September 2026. Beyond that we have first option on the same weekend in future years. Guaranteed dates are very important for conventions, so when we were looking at our options we needed a venue that gave us this level of certainty over multiple years.
Will the early September date, rather than August, change things for Tabletop Scotland?
Yes it will. How it’ll change things is TBC.
Specific factors? It’s not the English Bank Holiday weekend anymore. Schools in England and Wales will have started back by then. On the flipside, Scottish schools start back mid-August, so by the time of the convention those will have had 3 weeks to get into a rhythm, this might mean we can engage with them more effectively to promote the educational benefits of the hobby. Naturally the move into September means that we’re not clashing with the Edinburgh Festival. We’re also not clashing with a Lorien Trust LARP event, which has already had some cheers from that audience. Ultimately though, we will clash with something somewhere that either is related to the hobbies we celebrate or isn’t. Based on the assessment we did throughout the engagement with the different venue options, we have the best date we could get, and we anticipate that the net outcome of those items mentioned is a positive one for the event overall.
September helps avoid Edinburgh’s August prices when the city is packed with Festivals. Do you envision the ticket price of Tabletop Scotland 2024 to be radically different from 2023?
We already know our ticket pricing for attendees, and whilst it is higher than 2023 we have aimed to keep it as low we as we can given the commercials involved in the move. From an exhibitor perspective the pricing difference is mostly down to the venue change but also includes the difference between using a venue that provides a % of all the furniture we need, and one that provide an empty building. So there are more costs that we need to cover that historically we could absorb, unfortunately that is no longer the case. We intend to publish all of the prices by end of September.
Could the show strike any hotel deals with Moxy or the nearby Hilton? Are you worried about the price difference between a weekend in Perth and a weekend in Edinburgh at all?
Before signing the contract with the Royal Highland Centre we had already spoken to all of the hotels within a 4 mile radius. Some of these don’t do discount codes and some do. Those that do provide discount codes have either already provided us with that information or are in the process of doing so. We will be sharing that info in due course, ideally before the end of September.
Will accommodation be more expensive for a weekend in 2024 compared to 2023? Possibly. Ultimately it will depend on where attendees choose to stay.
Isn’t the Royal Highland Centre tricky to get to? How will someone with an armful of Bring and Buy games or a pushchair manage?
This depends on where people are coming from and the mode of transport they are using to get there. Increased parking capacity was a major part of our search for a replacement venue, and the Royal Highland Centre has that in abundance. The North Car Park, which is the one nearest the Highland Hall, has 5,000 spaces in it.
For exhibitors there is dedicated car park which is within the secure perimeter of the venue. Someone with an armful of Bring and Buy games would have been coming by car anyway, so the parking provision is an immediate improvement over 2023’s event.
For those not travelling by car, the venue is reachable by bus, train and plane. Granted those three don’t drop you off at the front door, but we are looking at options to provide some kind of shuttle service from the airport to the venue. We will have lots and lots of information for people to review on how to get to the venue on our website in due course.
I loved the trade hall in Tabletop Scotland 2023; it felt like it had grown and was friendly and diverse with RPGs, board games, card games and crafter stalls. Is there a danger if the trade hall expands again in 2024 without a similar boom in attendance?
There’s a symbiotic relationship between attendance and exhibitors trading. Naturally there it is not simply a case of more exhibitors = more attendees, it has to be the right exhibitors to attract more attendees.
Since creating the convention we have adopted a level of curation about who exhibits and who doesn’t. In 2023 we had 72 exhibitors confirmed, compared to 49 in 2022. Of that 72, 33% were board game developers, 25% were crafters / makers, 23% were RPG developers, 8.5% were retailers, 8.5% were artists and the remainder were merchandise folks. The maker percentage share was higher than in previous years as an experiment, one that worked in an overall commercial sense for those exhibitors based on their feedback. The goal in 2024, is to bolster both the board game and RPG percentages with some fine tuning of the others. Is there a risk that we expand that without proportionally expanding the attendance? Yes, but in reality that’s been the case every single year we’ve hosted the convention.
I tell friends that the difference between a comic con and an event like Tabletop Scotland is that you get to play games at Tabletop Scotland and that much of the trade hall comprises game-selling stands. Is there a risk that the move to Edinburgh might change that DNA and make it crafter and more merch stands than games? Does it matter?
We will not be blurring the lines between us and a Comic Con or any other type of event. Tabletop Scotland’s identity, or DNA as you put it, is a board game, card game and roleplaying game convention. The curation approach we take to exhibitors prevents us from filling the hall with one exhibitor type or another. It wouldn’t make sense for us, our exhibitors, or our attendees if we did that. Will we diversify within that identity? Yes we will, but more in relation to what events we host and other similar things. Essentially looking at the breadth of things that constitute the hobbies of board games, card games and roleplaying games and understanding where we can add more diversity of stuff that attendees can engage with.
Are there plans for organised play RPG events in 2024?
So, it depends what you mean by organised play. We already host more sessions of Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League than any other in-person convention in the UK, and this year we’ve added a Pathfinder / Starfinder Society component to the convention.
Other organised play? I’m more than happy to be corrected but there are no other organised play schedules out there other than those for D&D and Pathfinder/Starfinder. Chaosium’s “Cult of Chaos” is badged as organised play, but what that does is provide GMs with specific scenarios to run at conventions. These are not the same thing.
We will be looking to broaden the range of RPGs, and other events, we have at the convention. Some of that range may be from programmes like the Cult of Chaos or the equivalent programmes from other publishers like Pelgrane Press, Modiphius, Monte Cook Games and many more. However, the challenge with any event schedule is finding GMs to run those games, as it always comes down to what GMs want to run at the convention. We can, and will, engage with those publishers that have a ‘run a game at a convention’ type of service for GMs but that won’t automatically result in more games from those publishers being run.
In the magazine for Tabletop Scotland, you had Scottish clubs and shops. In 2024, are you planning to do anything else to boost Scottish companies? Anything in the trade hall, games or with a return of seminars/sessions?
That section of the programme is something we have included every year of the convention. As an ex brick & mortar retailer, and someone who has run and been involved in running of multiple board game and RPG clubs, I know the importance of word of mouth to those businesses and communities. We include that information because it’s the right thing to do to support the fabric of the hobby in Scotland.
With regard boosting Scottish companies, it depends on what that means exactly. One of the benefits of the new space is that it enables us to bring back seminars, the content of which depends to a certain degree on the who we have attend or exhibit at the convention. We could, theoretically, have a panel about the history of RPGs in Scotland, especially given the people we had in our exhibitor pool from 2023. Similarly we could do one about board games in Scotland for similar reasons. The primary driver for seminars and panels is to host something that our audience is interested in seeing. Not all of our exhibitors or guests have historically wanted to be on panels, especially if they are staffing a stand at the convention, so we need to make sure we’re not adding a burden to them unnecessarily. We would love to be able to celebrate the creative people we have in Scotland, and how in many cases they have been involved in the hobby for multiple decades. But we, and they, need to balance that with everything else that’s happening at the convention. One of the other things we are looking at in 2024, and beyond, is diversifying our event schedule to enable greater representation from designers, artists and others from Scotland and further afield. That can happen in a multitude of ways, and we don’t have the options completely defined as yet but we do have lots of options to explore there.
The key is that Tabletop Scotland isn’t a convention about the Scottish tabletop scene, it’s a convention which is held in Scotland. Can we also act as, and be challenged to be, a ‘force for good’ in relation the Scottish scene? Yes we can, but that’s not why the convention was created and also isn’t why it continues to exist. Ultimately if there are people reading this who are looking for us to do more in this area then they need to help us to work out how we do that in the lead up to the convention.
I thought the food trucks were an excellent touch for Tabletop Scotland 2023. Will the Royal Highland Centre let us do something similar for 2024?
As with the hotel deals question, before signing the contract with the Royal Highland Centre we had multiple meetings with their preferred catering supplier to understand the flexibility they can either provide directly or through other parties. Now that we have an indication of volumes of food sold in 2023 we will be working with that supplier to ensure we can provide flexible and varied food, and drink, options to our attendees and others. We’re obviously aware that the Highland Hall is not right beside a town centre, but we are confident that we can create an environment and provide options to offset that.
To call out, Dave found time to answer all these direction questions in the days immediately after the convention. He and the team must have been swamped, and it’s appreciated.
Handiwork Games is another Scottish publisher, another regular exhibitor at the show and I also got to talk to founder Jon Hodgson whether he was concerned about the move. Jon noted;
We’ve attended and loved Tabletop Scotland for years, we’ve sponsored the show several times, and we’re absolutely delighted to see the show grow to the point where it can move to a bigger location that’s easier for people (and us) to get to. We’re very excited about what the future holds for Tabletop Scotland!
It was in Tabletop Scotland 2023 that the news broke that Handiwork Games had had a shipment of books for Kickstarter backers had been stolen. Seeing attendees visiting Jon’s table and offering support was heartening.
Of course, Handiwork also had teasers for King Beowulf ready for the convention, which was also a reason for a visit.
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