April at the Seoul Board Game Festa

On Saturday, April 11, the Board Game Festa opened at SETEC, near Hangnyeoul Station in Seoul. People filed in under the banner above the entrance. The event filled three halls over two days. In one part of the venue, visitors were choosing games to buy. In another, they sat down to learn how to play.

From the shelf to the table

Korea Boardgames took over Hall 2. Boxed games stood on shelves, with copies laid out on tables in the demo area. A box tells you how many people can play and roughly how long it takes. At a table you can see how much you actually do on a turn, or how long you have to wait between turns. Here you could try a game and go straight back to the shelves.

Some of the games on display fit in one hand. Others would take up most of a dining table. An open copy gives you a better sense of what that space buys you. A big game can have fairly simple turns, while a little box may depend a great deal on how the people around the table play.

Korea Boardgames advertised around 700 titles for Hall 2. Its event report says the shop took up about two-thirds of the hall, with shopping carts by the entrance. Excluding special offers, the Wingspan Americas expansion sold the most copies there, ahead of two new releases. Visitors could come for an expansion to a game they already knew and discover something new on the same floor.

There were two ways to try a game. Some tables had a published start time, with an instructor explaining the rules before everyone played. In one of those card games, the highest card takes the trick, but cards that form consecutive runs lose their scoring value. Winning cards and scoring points are two different things. Other tables offered games visitors could start on their own, and children had a separate area for solo puzzles.

Tournament play on Saturday

Hall 3 hosted a one-game Coffee Rush event and a qualifying round for the Ubongo Championship on Saturday morning. In Coffee Rush, players collect ingredients to fulfil orders. In Ubongo, they race to fit pieces into a shape. Both games give someone watching from across the table a good idea of what the players are trying to do.

Coffee Rush started once a table had four players. The Ubongo event was a championship qualifier. In the same hall, one game wrapped up in a single sitting and the other offered a place in the next round.

The games still taking shape

The designers’ area in Hall 3 ranged from a word-association party game to a historical strategy game about Japan’s invasions of Korea in the 1590s. With the prototypes opened up on the tables, you could see which decisions went into the cards and which depended on the people playing.

Touch & Feel’s Imjin War used a map of the Korean peninsula, wooden cubes for forces and a separate track for public sentiment. That last detail raised a question about how the design handles the parts of the war that a map of captured territory cannot show. The prototype gets a closer look in our Imjin War article.

Games in development give you a different reason to linger at a table. You can see the rules the designer has settled on, and come back to see what changed the next time the game is shown.

The second Board Game Festa of 2026 runs on November 21 and 22 in Halls 1 and 2 at SETEC. The photographs and programmes above are from April. November opening hours and ticket information are below.