WE DID IT.

What a weekend it was, thanks for coming to the party. Love to everyone who joined in to play, chat, share, and make games together.

We’re still unpacking and rolling out back to normal life but wow. Magical. Nothing but love and gratitude always to all our presenters, workshoppers, supporters, and attendees.

Just one more UGE left this year. Mark your calendars for Sunday October 11!

Photographic highlights bove and below thanks to Chris Chen, Darya Andijan, and Puck Verras.

You can also follow and gossip about us on Instagram and Bluesky. Feedback keeps UGE vital, so if you have any thoughts, we would really, truly appreciate hearing from you.

Works featured

Friday at the Rijksakademie

• Bub, by Paperfrog (thank you Case and Cassandra for joining us for the whole weekend!)
• procuring estrogen for your toxic slime girlfriend, by NB Spiders
• Coyote Time, by Alice Bucknell
• Game Poems Magazine
  • After Rilke: A Game Poem Diptych by Jordan Magnuson.
• Fantasy Lane, by Lotte Louise de Jong
• Grinding Choices, by Nestor Sire and Steffen Köhn
• In Mortua Manu / In a Dead Hand, by Bahar Noorizadeh
• PASSPHRASE, by Dmytro Tentiuk, Demi van Kuijk, Erwin Hoogerwoord, Emily W. Bernstein, and Anneke ter Schure
• Ghost Rococó, by Lucas Lugarinho
• Welcome to Spring Flounder Cove, by BigBeefySharkBaby
• Dissenting Decisions, by amy pickles

Saturday Workshop DLC

• Hybrid Puppeteering: Collaborative NPC Design”, hosted by Arash Hosseini, Yuxuan Zhao and Pablo San Gregorio

• Game Poems workshop, hosted by Jordan Magnuson

  • Check out the amazing game poems made during this workshop! We encourage you to rate, comment and share :)

Sunday edition #9 “dreams and disquiet”

• I’M YOUR HOST, by Calligram Studio

  • Check out their 2024 masterpiece Phoenix Springs

• The Goose and Machine: Dutch Board Games in the Industrial Revolution, by Celine Zaepffel
• The Wareware game engine, by NB Spiders with the RipRip collective
• Welcome to Spring Flounder Cove, by BigBeefySharkBaby
• Diluvium, by Barbara Mathijssen and Max Kuilman
• All Will Rise, by Speculative Agency
• Paketown, by Nestor Sire
• Thank you to Rin for sharing a prototype of Lineate, a command-line exploration game!

Community updates

• OVERKILL FESTIVAL 2026 | Our friends at Sickhouse Enschede are back with their iconic annual festival of games and playful arts. Get your tickets now now now. Many familiar names on the lineup so far, including Time Flies (UGE #4).
• Speaking of, Sickhouse’s Pablo San Gregorio (UGE #4 and #9), as part of studio Glitch Cauldron, released Ambushed, a new tactical stealth gameboy action game.
• Homebrewer Nomad Studio (UGE #5, Wyvern Tales) announced AstraBurst, a new schmup for the Sega Dreamcast!

• The first episode of Radio WORM’s Be Our Quest radio show airs October 8! Hosted by Thijs van Loenhout (UGE #2) and Alessia Vadacca, and featuring Samuel Baidoo (UGE #2, Plum Road Tea Dream)

  • Huge congrats to Samuel for winning the Ontwerpersprijs at the 2026 Netherlands Theater Festival!

• GRAIL is out, with character art and backgrounds by Celine Veltman (UGE #4, Curiosmos)
• Paolo Pedercini’s Future? No Thanks! (UGE #8) is out after a wrestling match with Steam. He won.
• Joanna and Eszter from Outer Plays (UGE #3) have a new game poem, which was shouted out by Jordan Magnuson on Saturday!
• Evita’s Brand Nacht (UGE #8) has a release date: 16 October!
• Puck Verras (UGE #6) and Celestína Minichová will be doing a two-day workshop as part of tranzit in Slovakia.
• There is now an updated version of Fanaar’s Potluck (UGE #6, and it recently won an HKU Award!)
• Yuha’s Nightmares (UGE #5) now has a release date: 10 November!

Recommendations

• Here’s the poem we read out before the All Will Rise talk on Sunday:

The river no longer sings to me; and I know,
in the basin of my throat, what holds it back.

• Lori Emerson’s beautiful Other Networks explores the many forms distributed networks have taken across time and geography.
• Spiders recommends the work of thecatamites - start with Anthology of the Killer, and don’t miss 10 beautiful postcards

• BigBeefySharkBaby recommends:

  • Down bad back down at beaver creek - Prologue, by lauraleyy
  • Warme Sonne, kalter Wind, by grecat

• EMUUROM, a “creature-scanning metroidvania”

Alright, we’re going to go to sleep for a few weeks. Love you all.

Until October 11,

[uge]