UK Games Expo Attracts 42,000 Attendees Making It World's 3rd Largest Tabletop Convention

This year's UK Games Expo in Birmingham attracted more than 42,000 unique attendees this year, which represents a 7% increase over 2024. This makes it the third largest tabletop gaming convention in the world, following Essen Spiel and Gen Con.

Essen Spiel remains the largest tabletop convention in the world, while Gen Con and UKGE are the largest in North America and the UK respectively.

The show featured over 780 exhibitors, although some publishers, such as Arcane Wonders, pulled out citing tariff issues.

UKGE started in 2007 with about 900 attendees. In 2023 it attracted 32,000 attendees, with 39,000 in 2024. While it is primarily a boardgaming convention, it has a sizeable TTRPG contingent, with stands from Modiphius, Monte Cook Games, Cubicle 7, and many more (including us at EN Publishing!)

This year the show was in a different hall at the massive Birmingham NEC convention center, with a major car show and a Kylie Minogue concert on at the same time.

ConventionAttendance
Essen Spiel204,000 (2024)*
Gen Con71,000 (2024)
UK Games Expo42,000 (2025)
PAX Unplugged30,000 (approx)**
Origins Game Fair17,706 (2024)

*It's not clear whether Essen reports uniques or turnstile figures.
**PAX does not provide figures, but estimates are available.

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EN Publishing's stand just before the show doors opened!
 

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I had a great time at UKGE this year but unfortunately one of the items I bought back along with my swag is a raging case of convention crud. Despite that I'm still looking forward to going back next year.
 


It was great to meet @Morrus and Jess at UKGE this year!

I've done UKGE for the last three years as a vendor (representing a multitude of Canadian publishers as Compose Dream Games) and once back in 2016 right after my first game Simple Superheroes came out. It was certainly huge this year.
In the back of my head I've equated UKGE to Origins in size (I did both back in 2016) but the numbers here -- and much bigger exhibitor hall this year, shows that UKGE is much bigger 2.5x is huge.

Looking at the numbers here made me double check Tabletop Scotland. They had 3,880 unique visitors in 2024, almost double from the prior year. I imagine that will go up significantly again. That's about 1/4 an Origins.
I always wanted to go to GenCon of course, but never did. As a Canadian, I recently decided that I’d much rather go to UKGE instead of venturing to the USA for anything. Didn’t start planning in time for this year, but I’m very seriously looking at UKGE for next year!
If you haven't been you should consider Breakout Con in Toronto and Terminal City Con in Vancouver, both in March (and unfortunately on the same weekend again in 2026). This year they both had over 200 RPG sessions running. There's lots other great small Canadian game cons too!
 


I went for the first time this year on the Sunday because board gaming friends were going and I really enjoyed it. I was surprised by how big the TTRPG element was, including the board gaming. I didn’t see the EN Publishing stand otherwise I would have said hello.

Next year I’ll get organized and try and book some games in.
 

Essen Spiel said of the 2024 that the capacity they weren’t allowed to exceed each day was 50,000 attendees on site at once. This would actually put it on par, if not slightly less, than Gencon in 2024. The 204,000 would only be unique attendees if everyone only went for one day of the convention.
There were probably more than 50k people per day since their limit was 50k people "at once".
 

There were probably more than 50k people per day since their limit was 50k people "at once".
That’s theoretically possible, yeah. However since the tickets sold in advance I would say that they limited it to 50k tickets per day. Anything else would involve potentially turning someone away who has a ticket or at least asking them to wait, which would be a terrible look.
They did put out the day before that there was no “walk-in” tickets.
 

So I look at that list and those Essen Spiel attendance numbers are stunning. Question I have...how much of Essen Spiel is TTRPGs these days? I'm well aware it's mostly board games - multitude of images on bordgamegeek that are snapped during the event, has led me to believe that for a while. It's just that I keep hearing that Das Schwarze Auge is still the big player in Euro for TTRPGs, so I'm wondering where it gets the exposure and support from to maintain that?

So I guess put another way I might be asking; does DSA have a big presence at Essen Spiel? What about DSA at UK Games Expo?
 

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