The Strange Games Festival 2025
Aug. 28th, 2025 08:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisElectromagnetic Field, a camping festival with a focus towards makers and hackers, was the highlight of my summer 2024, as previously described at length. I'm not sure how I found out about the Strange Games Festival in lateish April, but I know that when I did, I thought "that might be a bit like a cross between Electromagnetic Field and a games convention, that could be spectacular". Now crossing two things I like may not result in the best of both worlds - a notorious vegetable curry, heavy on cabbage, still gets referenced almost three decades after the fact as demonstration of this - but it's surely a good starting-point.
I am also famously not outdoors-y at all, but the fact that there was a pre-pitched glamping option made the event rather more appealing. Accordingly, I put the word around, found a couple of other friends (Weaver and David) who were interested in going, and we all went over the past long weekend. Very happily, the Strange Games Fesival is very likely to be the highlight of my summer 2025... and at least one of my friends considered it, and the thoughts it raised, to be their highlight of a longer time period still.
The festival has been running for approaching ten years. It started as an event for a group of Werewolf (aka Mafia, etc.) players to meet to play around a camp fire and camp overnight, but it has grown over time, gained its wonderful branding and moved around a little over the years as it has outgrown its roots. Crucial to its ethos is a clear statement that "We don’t tolerate any discrimination, and the Festival particularly aims to be a safe and welcoming space for members of the LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent communities". This is a lofty and worthwhile ambition, and one that it appeared to me (from my point of privilege, so I note I'm not the best-placed to judge) to live up to its goal very successfully. If the combination of that ethos and "a camping festival themed around games" appeals, and if you can live with the realities of a camping festival, the event is very highly recommended indeed.
In the first decade of the 2000s, I was part of a gaming club in Middlesbrough that considered itself pretty varied and cosmopolitan because it hosted miniatures war games, RPGs, trading card games and board games. Some members crossed over two or three game types, many preferred to dig deep into one. While I get the impression that trading card games and miniatures war games are doing fine (the line "the UK makes three times as much money from Warhammer as it does from fishing" always makes me smile; while you can't eat miniatures, you can trade them, unless you're going fully down the autarky route) the core genres of the Strange Games Festival are board games, RPGs and social deduction games. Very happily, the event has sufficient attendees and resources that it is not limited to just those and can bloom by featuring other, more exotic attractions as well.
Other attractions on offer this time included:
The attendance was in the region of 500, maybe a little more; at a guess, perhaps 25% presented as cis female, but with the ethos being radically welcoming, considerably fewer than 75% presented as cis male. There were a dozen or two family units, some with youngish kids, otherwise I might hazard a guess of the age demographic as being primarily 15-55, with a peak around 25 and perhaps another around 40, with outliers in both directions. I cannot speak with authority on matters of accessibility, though I am glad to note that there appears to have been active thought put into this and that it seemed to me to be sufficient to the point where was active inclusion of people with physical accessibility needs.
It is hosted at the Bushy Wood Activity Centre, a permanent scout camp maybe about seven or eight miles from Eastbourne on England's south coast. There was a pretty permanent representation of scouts (and I use the term generically rather than specifically, from a lack of expertise; I was in the pinko hippie pacifist Woodcraft Folk instead) who represented their troupes extremely well, being as helpful, proactive, keen and eager to please as the stereotype might suggest. Why not sling a donation to their archery range crowdfunder?
It was not at all muddy - if anything, the going was firm, not even good-to-firm - but it was dusty, and that was enough to stress the toilet blocks a little. There were food vans and a bar on site. I found the food to be good rather than great, and charged at full commercial food van rates, but the scouts served up spectacular fruit smoothies that I will remember fondly. (You could self-cater, though it was too dry and too much of a fire risk for most home cooking.)
Camping does necessitate a certain degree of bare bones when it comes to creature comforts. That said, there were permanent toilet blocks and showers, with some of the shower cubicles being much more pleasant than you might imagine and well cleaned - though the atmosphere afterwards was very humid, so getting dried afterwards was a challenge. There was no shortage of marquees for the games and a number of indoor areas as well. Very happily, there were pre-pitched tent rental options available, and it would probably have been a deal-breaker for me if there hadn't been.
We went for the glamping option with a big bell tent with more than sufficient room for two, plus camp beds, linen and more. The camp bed frames were sadly hard, but I had brought an air mattress and a pump; the air mattress was enough for me and meant that the other bed could have two fabric mattresses instead. I'm happy to recommend the service, though unless you like your beds extremely firm, I would strongly recommend bringing an air mattress as well.
The weather was as much to my taste as I would ever be likely to get; it had been dry for the previous week or two, more cloudy than sunny, calm rather than windy and the temperatures over the weekend cooled down to peaking in the low twenties / seventies, which I considered ideal. (Chilly enough to need extra layers in the evenings, but not much.) This was distinctly fortunate; if it had been very wet and/or windy, then the indoor spaces would have got packed to the gills and I guess people would have stuck to playing within their tents.
Games I played included Blood on the Clocktower, Wingspan, The Gang, Ra, Innovation, Daybreak and a little game you might or might not have heard of called Settlers of Catan. Of those, only Innovation was completely new to me, though all but two of the rest were games I'd only played once or twice. Innovation is a game I'd heard a lot about and always wanted to get the chance to play, so I was delighted to have had that little dream made true. Playing it with five meant that it was very chaotic and also over very swiftly, with players needing only three achievements to win; I enjoyed my two games of it, managing to back into a win in the first game with the 1st and 2nd age achievements and a wonder when nobody blocked me. It's far too early to tell whether it's just the novelty and ambition of the thing that attracted me or whether there's a genuinely solid game under there, but I'd love to try again.
One hand of The Gang, which I won't explain other that it's co-operative Texas Hold 'Em -ish -ish, was worthy of note. The flop came down 494, the turn was a second 9 and the river an ace. We were playing six-handed. Four of us were disputing very severely over who had the worst hand, but eventually I think we accepted that the third to sixth best hands were all playing the board, and that wasn't a problem. There was an even stronger dispute over who had the best hand between the other two players. One of them had had two aces all along, so hit a ridiculous concealed full house on the river... but unfortunately the other player had the second nuts with their pair of fours making quads. And yet the fours were only the second nuts to a possible pair of nines, so the player with the fours eventually ceded the best-hand chip - wrongly, as it happened, but this was remarkably unlucky. What a cooler.
I also played two sessions of the UK Starship Bridge Simulator, a co-operative video game for a crew of six played over five touchscreens and a communal giant monitor, which was very probably the highlight for me. Each time, the crew were set a mission with too many orders and (almost?) too little time, but that wasn't a problem at all. The interface was a well-developed joy, the graphics and sound were gorgeous and evocative, the atmosphere was hilarious. This was run using the Artemis software, but the guy behind it (who has a serious, and seriously impressive, GM'ing hobby with a thriving community behind it) also sometimes runs Empty Epsilon as well, which you might have encountered at Bridge Command, with events often forming part of the Orion Sphere LRP. Take the fact that I went back for more as indicative of how much I liked it.
I am sleeping on a reflection that I have written about Blood on the Clocktower - not the particular game of it I played, but the game's place within the hobby at large and my relationship to it - which I may or may not think better of posting some day.
In terms of what I contributed, David and I were glad to rerun an old set of Puzzled Pint - specifically, the The Muppet Show set, which went down well. I had little idea how popular the Pint would be, and I scheduled the event against dinner and a lot of other exciting, time-constrained games; I printed out 12 sets of puzzles just in case, and thought that par would be to use two or three of them, but we had eight teams in the end for a total of 21 players. (One were a pair of regulars from Brighton who zoomed through apace, the rest were first-timers who largely caught on really fast.) If this inspires even a handful of them to take up the Puzzled Pint habit regularly then I shall award myself a tiny chair dance.
What else? Puzzle Party brought their big mechanical puzzle boxes down for a day; the craftwork and invention were excellent and it reminded me how different puzzle hobbies can be. I didn't play the The Genius Game campaign, but did take an interest; about half the games were new and the other half were adaptations of familiar ones, with the one original one I saw being a brilliant, simple and entirely thematic selection. It was run by Sam Eley, a name to watch out for. Sam's a busy bunny and has said he won't be able to run another campaign at next year's Festival but at least one of the players experessed an interest in doing so.
Despite everything I've said, I don't think I've given enough emphasis to how big a factor the camping nature of the event plays in the effect. Even though I'm not attracted to camping, the communal experience added a lot in terms of immersion and making it feel like a holiday to a distinctly other place, one where there's no need to interact with the outside world for long enough that you just start to forget it. Another huge part of the appeal was just the chance to wander around and explore a lovely little environment, especially at night, though this may be the novelty of getting to do something that I have done very little of over the years. The whole effect may be something that you can get from festivals at large and I am only feeling it for the second time... or maybe even the first as I didn't stay on-site at EMF last year and can see how I might have missed out.
A phrase that has stuck in my mind, over the years, is "it's fear and suffering that brings us together". This is a phrase where I have mangled the original phrasing so much so I cannot attribute it, other than non-specifically to someone I don't particularly like, but I suspect there may be more truth to it than I would like there to be. The camping experience brings people together through a degree of shared... not suffering as such but, perhaps, acceptance of discomfort.
I don't think it's going too far to say that I found the Strange Games Festival to be closer to being sexy than any games con I've ever been to before, despite it not doing anything at all to deliberately engender that vibe other than being an all-encompassing environment and so radically, proactively inclusive and welcoming - and that's enough by itself. Yes, I'm serious, but I have chosen my wording with care and I would suggest tempering your expectations; sexiness is usually in thoughts rather than in actions. (If you want something more explicit, Frolicon is thataway, and good luck to you.) Probably part of it was the degree of eye candy from the wonderful other attendees, notably the cool things that people wore, and it reminded me that sometimes I might want to find fun things to wear myself to proactively be attractive to others, which is not a feeling I often have.
If you've made it this far and not been put off, an obvious thing to wonder is whether the event might be right for you. I'll note that the weather, the pre-pitched tent and the company meant that I was doing this in close to as easy a mode as it is possible to do. It's possible that I might have had, near enough, the best Strange Games Festival experience that I might ever have and am buzzing from the novelty and the favourable conditions. (It's also relevant that for the last two years I've been to my favourite other games convention, the event has been at least as good as ever and the people as wonderful as usual, but I've absolutely just not felt it. Maybe some day I'll work out if it's just from a lack of novelty.)
As good as the glamping experience was, I do feel I got lucky with the conditions and that it could so easily have been much less to my taste. I am considering whether hiring a camper van for the weekend, for this is an option, might be the right degree of compromise for me in a future year. Maybe this is just a reflection on the fact that there might actually be good climatic reasons why the Garden of England could be an inherently better location for This Sort Of Thing than other parts of the country, which is not a realisation that comes naturally or pleasantly to a bluff Northerner.
There is so much going on that I feel confident that there are plenty of different Strange Games Festival experiences that people could have had that were so different to my own. I cannot speak about the RPGs on offer, about the social deduction games or much about the other big games that I did not get to try. It may be useful to consult the Discord to get a feel for what really was available, and why so many other people seem to keep coming back. (I note that this does presuppose comfort using Discord - or, for that matter, any other service that might need age verification in the UK, in this Online Safety Act age.)
The Strange Games Festival has a history of hosting unusual and unique games and has already shown that it is a great place to host such games and try them out, to the point where it seems logical and likely to expect even more extravagant games to be well-suited to happen there in the future. The name is a natural and brilliant and intuitive brand that sets expectations from word one and I love it. If this appeals to you, and the compromises you might have to make are not too off-putting for you, then I recommend it without hesitation. 40% of the appeal is "such things as gaming camping festivals actually do exist..."; 60% of it is "...and this one is actually done really well". Follow the web site and join the mailing list, prominently linked to at the bottom of the front page, to find out what's next for 2026.
It's easy for me to find two big reasons to get very excited about the Strange Games Festival as a movement. One is the vibe, the other is the potential. The Strange Games Festival movement is taking off; in previous years it was a single annual event, this year it has grown to be one festival plus an additional campout which is a little smaller and without big organised events, next year will celebrate a tenth anniversary and there will probably be one festival plus two campouts, one away in Bristol. So if the movement is not rooted to the spot, how far might it go? Bushy Wood is a very happy home, but could there be an even bigger, better one somewhere else, now that discussions in terms of "as well as" rather than "instead of" are on the table?
Dreaming bigger still, what could a Strange Games Festival with not five hundred but, say, three thousand people look like? If it looks at all like Electromagnetic Field, from which I got so much, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? (Some might dream yet bigger still, to the UK Games Expo, to Gen Con, to Glastonbury. That's an order of magnitude or two too big for even me... for now.) Maybe Strange Games Festival people might also like Electromagnetic Field; maybe Electromagnetic Field people might also like Strange Games Festival. I would feel comfortable saying that there are all sorts of cool camping festivals out there and you might like more of them than you knew about. I'm prepared to believe there could be others that I don't yet know about that I might like, in the same way.
Many, many thanks to everyone who worked with such dedication, expertise and talent to put on such a good event, whether running a game, volunteering or organising the whole show. How far you have already come, how late I am to the party, and how appealing it is to contribute in the future to something bigger and better still. If you can measure the effect that an event has by the number of smiles it raises, the Strange Games Festival scores a critical hit.
I am also famously not outdoors-y at all, but the fact that there was a pre-pitched glamping option made the event rather more appealing. Accordingly, I put the word around, found a couple of other friends (Weaver and David) who were interested in going, and we all went over the past long weekend. Very happily, the Strange Games Fesival is very likely to be the highlight of my summer 2025... and at least one of my friends considered it, and the thoughts it raised, to be their highlight of a longer time period still.
The festival has been running for approaching ten years. It started as an event for a group of Werewolf (aka Mafia, etc.) players to meet to play around a camp fire and camp overnight, but it has grown over time, gained its wonderful branding and moved around a little over the years as it has outgrown its roots. Crucial to its ethos is a clear statement that "We don’t tolerate any discrimination, and the Festival particularly aims to be a safe and welcoming space for members of the LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent communities". This is a lofty and worthwhile ambition, and one that it appeared to me (from my point of privilege, so I note I'm not the best-placed to judge) to live up to its goal very successfully. If the combination of that ethos and "a camping festival themed around games" appeals, and if you can live with the realities of a camping festival, the event is very highly recommended indeed.
In the first decade of the 2000s, I was part of a gaming club in Middlesbrough that considered itself pretty varied and cosmopolitan because it hosted miniatures war games, RPGs, trading card games and board games. Some members crossed over two or three game types, many preferred to dig deep into one. While I get the impression that trading card games and miniatures war games are doing fine (the line "the UK makes three times as much money from Warhammer as it does from fishing" always makes me smile; while you can't eat miniatures, you can trade them, unless you're going fully down the autarky route) the core genres of the Strange Games Festival are board games, RPGs and social deduction games. Very happily, the event has sufficient attendees and resources that it is not limited to just those and can bloom by featuring other, more exotic attractions as well.
Other attractions on offer this time included:
- mini-megagames for about twenty players at a time,
- a three-village, 60-player game of Werewolf that has claims (which I cannot substantiate) of being the largest ever,
- entire campaigns of The Traitors and The Genius Game compressed into several sessions over the one weekend,
- other large-scale social deduction games for double-digit groups that could not find a home elsewhere,
- the UK Starship Bridge Simulator,
- performative sessions: sea shanties, campfire storytelling, a D&D live play stage show and a movie night,
- an afternoon's jousting using pool noodles for lances and bikes for steeds, and I'm sure I'm missing loads more...
The attendance was in the region of 500, maybe a little more; at a guess, perhaps 25% presented as cis female, but with the ethos being radically welcoming, considerably fewer than 75% presented as cis male. There were a dozen or two family units, some with youngish kids, otherwise I might hazard a guess of the age demographic as being primarily 15-55, with a peak around 25 and perhaps another around 40, with outliers in both directions. I cannot speak with authority on matters of accessibility, though I am glad to note that there appears to have been active thought put into this and that it seemed to me to be sufficient to the point where was active inclusion of people with physical accessibility needs.
It is hosted at the Bushy Wood Activity Centre, a permanent scout camp maybe about seven or eight miles from Eastbourne on England's south coast. There was a pretty permanent representation of scouts (and I use the term generically rather than specifically, from a lack of expertise; I was in the pinko hippie pacifist Woodcraft Folk instead) who represented their troupes extremely well, being as helpful, proactive, keen and eager to please as the stereotype might suggest. Why not sling a donation to their archery range crowdfunder?
It was not at all muddy - if anything, the going was firm, not even good-to-firm - but it was dusty, and that was enough to stress the toilet blocks a little. There were food vans and a bar on site. I found the food to be good rather than great, and charged at full commercial food van rates, but the scouts served up spectacular fruit smoothies that I will remember fondly. (You could self-cater, though it was too dry and too much of a fire risk for most home cooking.)
Camping does necessitate a certain degree of bare bones when it comes to creature comforts. That said, there were permanent toilet blocks and showers, with some of the shower cubicles being much more pleasant than you might imagine and well cleaned - though the atmosphere afterwards was very humid, so getting dried afterwards was a challenge. There was no shortage of marquees for the games and a number of indoor areas as well. Very happily, there were pre-pitched tent rental options available, and it would probably have been a deal-breaker for me if there hadn't been.
We went for the glamping option with a big bell tent with more than sufficient room for two, plus camp beds, linen and more. The camp bed frames were sadly hard, but I had brought an air mattress and a pump; the air mattress was enough for me and meant that the other bed could have two fabric mattresses instead. I'm happy to recommend the service, though unless you like your beds extremely firm, I would strongly recommend bringing an air mattress as well.
The weather was as much to my taste as I would ever be likely to get; it had been dry for the previous week or two, more cloudy than sunny, calm rather than windy and the temperatures over the weekend cooled down to peaking in the low twenties / seventies, which I considered ideal. (Chilly enough to need extra layers in the evenings, but not much.) This was distinctly fortunate; if it had been very wet and/or windy, then the indoor spaces would have got packed to the gills and I guess people would have stuck to playing within their tents.
Games I played included Blood on the Clocktower, Wingspan, The Gang, Ra, Innovation, Daybreak and a little game you might or might not have heard of called Settlers of Catan. Of those, only Innovation was completely new to me, though all but two of the rest were games I'd only played once or twice. Innovation is a game I'd heard a lot about and always wanted to get the chance to play, so I was delighted to have had that little dream made true. Playing it with five meant that it was very chaotic and also over very swiftly, with players needing only three achievements to win; I enjoyed my two games of it, managing to back into a win in the first game with the 1st and 2nd age achievements and a wonder when nobody blocked me. It's far too early to tell whether it's just the novelty and ambition of the thing that attracted me or whether there's a genuinely solid game under there, but I'd love to try again.
One hand of The Gang, which I won't explain other that it's co-operative Texas Hold 'Em -ish -ish, was worthy of note. The flop came down 494, the turn was a second 9 and the river an ace. We were playing six-handed. Four of us were disputing very severely over who had the worst hand, but eventually I think we accepted that the third to sixth best hands were all playing the board, and that wasn't a problem. There was an even stronger dispute over who had the best hand between the other two players. One of them had had two aces all along, so hit a ridiculous concealed full house on the river... but unfortunately the other player had the second nuts with their pair of fours making quads. And yet the fours were only the second nuts to a possible pair of nines, so the player with the fours eventually ceded the best-hand chip - wrongly, as it happened, but this was remarkably unlucky. What a cooler.
I also played two sessions of the UK Starship Bridge Simulator, a co-operative video game for a crew of six played over five touchscreens and a communal giant monitor, which was very probably the highlight for me. Each time, the crew were set a mission with too many orders and (almost?) too little time, but that wasn't a problem at all. The interface was a well-developed joy, the graphics and sound were gorgeous and evocative, the atmosphere was hilarious. This was run using the Artemis software, but the guy behind it (who has a serious, and seriously impressive, GM'ing hobby with a thriving community behind it) also sometimes runs Empty Epsilon as well, which you might have encountered at Bridge Command, with events often forming part of the Orion Sphere LRP. Take the fact that I went back for more as indicative of how much I liked it.
I am sleeping on a reflection that I have written about Blood on the Clocktower - not the particular game of it I played, but the game's place within the hobby at large and my relationship to it - which I may or may not think better of posting some day.
In terms of what I contributed, David and I were glad to rerun an old set of Puzzled Pint - specifically, the The Muppet Show set, which went down well. I had little idea how popular the Pint would be, and I scheduled the event against dinner and a lot of other exciting, time-constrained games; I printed out 12 sets of puzzles just in case, and thought that par would be to use two or three of them, but we had eight teams in the end for a total of 21 players. (One were a pair of regulars from Brighton who zoomed through apace, the rest were first-timers who largely caught on really fast.) If this inspires even a handful of them to take up the Puzzled Pint habit regularly then I shall award myself a tiny chair dance.
What else? Puzzle Party brought their big mechanical puzzle boxes down for a day; the craftwork and invention were excellent and it reminded me how different puzzle hobbies can be. I didn't play the The Genius Game campaign, but did take an interest; about half the games were new and the other half were adaptations of familiar ones, with the one original one I saw being a brilliant, simple and entirely thematic selection. It was run by Sam Eley, a name to watch out for. Sam's a busy bunny and has said he won't be able to run another campaign at next year's Festival but at least one of the players experessed an interest in doing so.
Despite everything I've said, I don't think I've given enough emphasis to how big a factor the camping nature of the event plays in the effect. Even though I'm not attracted to camping, the communal experience added a lot in terms of immersion and making it feel like a holiday to a distinctly other place, one where there's no need to interact with the outside world for long enough that you just start to forget it. Another huge part of the appeal was just the chance to wander around and explore a lovely little environment, especially at night, though this may be the novelty of getting to do something that I have done very little of over the years. The whole effect may be something that you can get from festivals at large and I am only feeling it for the second time... or maybe even the first as I didn't stay on-site at EMF last year and can see how I might have missed out.
A phrase that has stuck in my mind, over the years, is "it's fear and suffering that brings us together". This is a phrase where I have mangled the original phrasing so much so I cannot attribute it, other than non-specifically to someone I don't particularly like, but I suspect there may be more truth to it than I would like there to be. The camping experience brings people together through a degree of shared... not suffering as such but, perhaps, acceptance of discomfort.
I don't think it's going too far to say that I found the Strange Games Festival to be closer to being sexy than any games con I've ever been to before, despite it not doing anything at all to deliberately engender that vibe other than being an all-encompassing environment and so radically, proactively inclusive and welcoming - and that's enough by itself. Yes, I'm serious, but I have chosen my wording with care and I would suggest tempering your expectations; sexiness is usually in thoughts rather than in actions. (If you want something more explicit, Frolicon is thataway, and good luck to you.) Probably part of it was the degree of eye candy from the wonderful other attendees, notably the cool things that people wore, and it reminded me that sometimes I might want to find fun things to wear myself to proactively be attractive to others, which is not a feeling I often have.
If you've made it this far and not been put off, an obvious thing to wonder is whether the event might be right for you. I'll note that the weather, the pre-pitched tent and the company meant that I was doing this in close to as easy a mode as it is possible to do. It's possible that I might have had, near enough, the best Strange Games Festival experience that I might ever have and am buzzing from the novelty and the favourable conditions. (It's also relevant that for the last two years I've been to my favourite other games convention, the event has been at least as good as ever and the people as wonderful as usual, but I've absolutely just not felt it. Maybe some day I'll work out if it's just from a lack of novelty.)
As good as the glamping experience was, I do feel I got lucky with the conditions and that it could so easily have been much less to my taste. I am considering whether hiring a camper van for the weekend, for this is an option, might be the right degree of compromise for me in a future year. Maybe this is just a reflection on the fact that there might actually be good climatic reasons why the Garden of England could be an inherently better location for This Sort Of Thing than other parts of the country, which is not a realisation that comes naturally or pleasantly to a bluff Northerner.
There is so much going on that I feel confident that there are plenty of different Strange Games Festival experiences that people could have had that were so different to my own. I cannot speak about the RPGs on offer, about the social deduction games or much about the other big games that I did not get to try. It may be useful to consult the Discord to get a feel for what really was available, and why so many other people seem to keep coming back. (I note that this does presuppose comfort using Discord - or, for that matter, any other service that might need age verification in the UK, in this Online Safety Act age.)
The Strange Games Festival has a history of hosting unusual and unique games and has already shown that it is a great place to host such games and try them out, to the point where it seems logical and likely to expect even more extravagant games to be well-suited to happen there in the future. The name is a natural and brilliant and intuitive brand that sets expectations from word one and I love it. If this appeals to you, and the compromises you might have to make are not too off-putting for you, then I recommend it without hesitation. 40% of the appeal is "such things as gaming camping festivals actually do exist..."; 60% of it is "...and this one is actually done really well". Follow the web site and join the mailing list, prominently linked to at the bottom of the front page, to find out what's next for 2026.
It's easy for me to find two big reasons to get very excited about the Strange Games Festival as a movement. One is the vibe, the other is the potential. The Strange Games Festival movement is taking off; in previous years it was a single annual event, this year it has grown to be one festival plus an additional campout which is a little smaller and without big organised events, next year will celebrate a tenth anniversary and there will probably be one festival plus two campouts, one away in Bristol. So if the movement is not rooted to the spot, how far might it go? Bushy Wood is a very happy home, but could there be an even bigger, better one somewhere else, now that discussions in terms of "as well as" rather than "instead of" are on the table?
Dreaming bigger still, what could a Strange Games Festival with not five hundred but, say, three thousand people look like? If it looks at all like Electromagnetic Field, from which I got so much, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? (Some might dream yet bigger still, to the UK Games Expo, to Gen Con, to Glastonbury. That's an order of magnitude or two too big for even me... for now.) Maybe Strange Games Festival people might also like Electromagnetic Field; maybe Electromagnetic Field people might also like Strange Games Festival. I would feel comfortable saying that there are all sorts of cool camping festivals out there and you might like more of them than you knew about. I'm prepared to believe there could be others that I don't yet know about that I might like, in the same way.
Many, many thanks to everyone who worked with such dedication, expertise and talent to put on such a good event, whether running a game, volunteering or organising the whole show. How far you have already come, how late I am to the party, and how appealing it is to contribute in the future to something bigger and better still. If you can measure the effect that an event has by the number of smiles it raises, the Strange Games Festival scores a critical hit.
