TOY FAIR 2020

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TOY FAIR 2020

After breaking down just outside of Winchester services at 5:30AM on the morning of the Toy Fair 2019, you’ll be delighted to know that I took the train to this year’s event, Toy Fair 2020, and managed to arrive there without too many hiccups! This year I was working for Ravensburger on their stand as the Adult Tabletop Games demonstrator. Now, I know that the term Adult Games sounds slightly risqué but I promise it’s not. Honestly. Trust me.

Toy Fair 2020 was at London Olympia this year and our stand was HUGE. Colossal. I had an amazing time, talked to lots of people about the tabletop games, drank a lot of coffee and on the evenings I spent the majority of my time out at pubs and then stayed with friends Alice and Laura in an air BnB that would have put cockroaches off. If you saw my face on Instagram Stories each morning, I felt like I’d partied wayyy more than I actually did. Let’s just say it wasn’t pleasant – but it was next door to the Co-Op [for croissants in the morning] and two doors up from Costa [I drank a few hot chocolates].

I’ll admit I was more worried than usual because normally I have Gav with me who knows every single detail of each and every game and ALWAYS has the right Tabletop Gaming lingo at his disposal – but he was working [IBM apparently needed him more than me] and so I made up for it with boundless enthusiasm, and a very in depth telephone call about the various elements of Minecraft I was wondering about.

DISNEY VILLAINOUS at TOY FAIR 2020

As you know, we demonstrated Disney Villainous and the available expandalones at the Board Games Expo and Tabletop Gaming live in 2019, and we LOVE them. There’s so much to say about the game, the game play, the design – and Ravensburger have sold over 500,000 copies of the game already.

So now there are not one, two but THREE expandalones – the third being revealed day before the Toy Fair and featuring Cruella de Vil [who we all thought would be out in earlier expandalones], Steamboat Pete [with a playing piece that received many comments] and Mother Gothel [who I personally voted for]. I managed to take a few minutes to read through the new Villainous objectives and familiarise myself with them, and they look AMAZING.

JAWS

Jaws is possibly the most 80’s board game we own and even if I didn’t play it, I’d still have so much love for the game because of the theming. It follows the film brilliantly and everything – including the teeny beach closure signage – is EXACTLY the same as the film. So many people had so much love for this game too and I did a few over animated interviews with people for YouTube about this one.

MINECRAFT

Yes, Minecraft has been translated to a board game and it’s pretty neat! I didn’t expect to enjoy this one but it’s WAY more fun than the video game [which I suck at horribly].

WORKING WITH CHILDREN

Upstairs at the Toy Fair is a demo zone where children from the local stage school are employed to test the toys and give them the thumbs up or down with the help of a presenter. I managed to have three chances in the demo zone with various groups of children from 6 to 10, and thankfully they all gave the products thumbs up – one even gave me 18 double triple thumbs. I was impressed.

The last night of the Toy Fair was filled with various parties here and there – and as much as I’d have loved to have stayed up all night, I just couldn’t. Boo. So, I partied a little bit and then went back for my final day on the stand before back to reality…but here’s a little shot of us partying [sort of – we were just heading off home] You might recognise Hero’s favourite CBeebies presenter too…Haha. Hero wanted to know why I went to a party with Nigel from Baby Club without him. Er…

There are so many exciting things coming to Ravensburger this year – I’m bursting thinking about the UK Games Expo in May – and already looking forward to Toy Fair 2021!