Following in the footsteps of Colin Le Sueur and George Bickers, here’s a little look behind the curtain on UKGE 2026, from the point of view of a really itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny TTRPG studio.

WHO ARE WE?

Ex Stasis Games is so small. Nobody knows about us. Despite being at UKGE for our fourth year running, we are a pleasant surprise to many of the folks who find our stall. We make horror and dark fantasy games – from solos to supplements to full games.

If you know us at all, it’s probably for Perfectly Normal Animal Village Simulator, our system-neutral scenario about adorable animals moving into new homes on a paradise island just in time for the annual summer sacrifice. Animal Crossing x Wicker Man.

This year, we were mostly at UKGE to show off our two quickstarts, one newish and one so new the ink was barely dry. The first was for Disposable Bags of Meat, an action horror game where average joes survive through Grit and Luck (until the plot armour runs out). The other was for Feral, a game about anthropomorphic animals surviving horrors in their forest home and their own psyches. Fun!

A CATALOGUE OF QUESTIONABLE DECISIONS

We’ve increased our booth size every UKGE, because we keep making books. There are always more, and apparently haphazardly piling them up and waving at them is not a professional approach to sales. This year we tried for an 8x2m premium space, but there were none available. We got a 12x2m corner at a small discount instead, which sounded great at the time but, when the print run I expected to finish in March was delayed, became a problem.

We were at the back end of Hall 3. Not a prime pitch, especially now UKGE takes up five entire halls and it takes several days and good hiking boots to see the whole thing, but we were next to our friends Tabletop Tinkering and opposite the lovely folks from Bookwyrm, so at least we had good company.

I also decided we needed to upgrade the stall décor this year. Time for some nicer shelves, and a big old stretch banner. I’m not counting those against our expenses, because they’ll benefit us for years and it’s hard to quantify how they pay for themselves. They made me feel good.

Once again, I remembered to print a batch of bookmarks for customers (this time with a little “failing forward” table on the back); once again I forgot to print business cards for retailers, international translators, and other fellow professionals. Learn from my mistakes, folks.

COSTS

As well as excluding the marketing/décor/promo, I don’t count incidentals like food into the convention costs. We’d eat if we were at home, and since on Saturday I forgot to consume anything more than a single Peperami and a brownie, I’d probably spend just as much. I also don’t count the boarding fees for our four beautiful spaniels because they don’t come out of the business bank account.

So here are the costs I can’t find an excuse to exclude:

Pitch (inc. furniture and VAT*)	£934
Accommodation**	£365
Petrol	£60
Payment processing fees	£27.55
TOTAL	£1,386.55

* We’re small enough we’re not VAT registered, so the ~£180 VAT is money I will never see again.

** Our original accommodation was about £250, but cancelled the booking just as we finished setup on Thursday. WHICH WAS COOL.

REVENUE

Friday was a rough day, reader. Sales were slow. We ended up 35% down on 2025, and I was concerned. It took three or four hours for a meaningful number of people to filter back to our position, and I think the con was big enough that a lot of people finished their info-gathering/recon walk on Friday, but didn’t come back to start buying things.

That evening, when I started comparing data, it turned out that the afternoon was good enough we only had two fewer sales than in 2025 – but the fact that our key products were the quickstarts at £8 each, or £10 for both, rather than the £20 books we were leading with last year, depressed revenue. Who could have possibly foreseen this? (Us. We knew this was coming, we were just very sad about it. See earlier note about how there was supposed to be a shiny new hardback, but the printing’s still in progress.)

Saturday, now? Saturday was great. Steady stream of customers, including people who’d seen us on Friday and come back. This was also the day our regular customers started showing up and their excitement about the new stuff buoyed us up significantly. Saturday ended up marginally better than last year (about +£50). This really validated our decision to get the Feral quickstart ready for UKGE: lots of compliments on how beautiful it looked, and lots of people excited for the full game.

I was worried about Sunday, because the trains were buggered up. This is pretty standard for UKGE weekend, but considering how rough Friday had been, I had my hopes pinned on a good Sunday to pull it back. In the end it was… not bad. Lots of people coming back for things they’d spotted on previous days, and lots of time to actually chat – which is my favourite part of selling at conventions.

Even so, the final sales numbers would have looked significantly worse if I hadn’t loaded up a cardboard box with books and hawked them around some retailers’ booths. If you’re a small studio and you can get over the innate awkwardness of this, I fully recommend it: nothing sells TTRPGs like seeing the books, and presenting a gorgeous hardback with a die-cut cover tends to break the ice fairly quickly. We also handed some stock to our distributor Compose Dreams, and those will turn into money at some point.

Friday	£365
Saturday	£858
Sunday	£466
TOTAL	£1,689
Profit/Loss	+£302.45
Change from 2025	-£296

We had 15 different SKUs with us this year (more than you can see here: there are 3 solo zines and 3 one-page games that I’ve grouped together), which is pretty typical for us. On average, they had a much lower MSRP than previous years’ stock. In 2023-2024, we had some 5e D&D books (£15-£60), and in 2025 we had two additional £20 books (Midwinter Ghost Stories and Death Throes) that were out of stock this year.

One More Song (hardback)	22
One More Song (softback)	19
These Wretched Tales	12
Feral quickstart	44
Meatbags quickstart	30
Do Not Adjust Your Set	9
One-page RPGs	19
Last Night On Earth	5
Apparition	4
Solo game zines	12
Midwinter Ghost Stories	1*

* we only had one copy with us. For various reasons, I need to use a new printer for the reprint, and since it’s a hardback that means carefully checking paper weight/bulk, changing spine width, and generally faffing about: I did not have time.

Not having Midwinter was an obvious problem. It’s been one of our bestsellers for the last couple of years and I am confident we would have made at least another £100, probably closer to £200, if we’d had it in stock.

We also didn’t have Perfectly Normal Animal Village Simulator or its associated minis. This was deliberate: it doesn’t look like anything else on the stall, it attracts curious children whose parents we then have to urgently warn about the mature content, and most importantly I think it’s reaching the end of its lifespan and another print run would probably leave us with dozens of copies we will never sell.

Every convention, I say it’s time to retire the zines. The three solo games are all collected in These Wretched Tales, and Apparition and Last Night On Earth could do with a layout upgrade. But they take up so little space that I bring them just in case, and they always do OK. Plus, I think the solo zines really help the sales of These Wretched Tales: you like two of these? Get them and the third one, plus some alternative rules, for the same price.

THOUGHTS

Would I have liked more money? Yes.

Can I see where we went wrong? Also yes. Next year we’ll have Disposable Bags of Meat in its full glory, we’ll have Midwinter and maybe even Death Throes (if I get around to overhauling it) back in stock, and we will reduce our square footage and thereby bring our costs down quite significantly.

Am I happy despite that? Definitely. The quickstarts went over really, really well, retailers were really excited about the die-cut One More Song hardback, and we had a lot of repeat customers. UKGE is our biggest event of the year: it dwarfs entire months, sometimes entire quarters, of our sales. Even on a difficult year, which this one was, I think we made the most of the opportunity. We made good connections, including a possible new distributor and a tentative connection with an Italian translator and publisher. Most importantly, we’re in profit.

But there’s another qualitative benefit to being at UKGE. The two of us (Chant and Lore – hi) both have day jobs we love, and that we spend a lot of time thinking about. UKGE gives us most of a week, including setup, travel, and recovery, where all we’re thinking about is Ex Stasis. It’s also time with our friend Amelia, who is increasingly central to what we do. This year, between us, we’ve devised two new games and half-written one. We’ve discovered that actually, while very few people know us, those who do seem to really like us and they’re mostly lovely people we’re enthusiastic about making games for. So while I wouldn’t be happy if we lost money on a UKGE, I don’t think I need it to turn a massive profit. It shapes our future, reups our passion for the work… and we get to spend time in the same physical space as literally hundreds of creators we love and admire.

See you next year, Birmingham.