Essen Board Game Fair 2013

Guten Tag!

When we learned that we were moving to Germany one of the first things that Eric said was, 'we can go to Spiel!' For those of you that are unaware, Eric LOVES board games. I like them too but not in the same way that Eric does. We have a very extensive collection that we had to leave behind in Corvallis. When the time for Spiel finally came there was much excitement.

Spiel takes place in the city of Essen; there is not much in Essen tourist-wise but it is only a mere 5.5 hours of traveling to get there from Marburg. Spiel runs from Thursday to Sunday but it was decided that we would arrive in Essen Thursday night and leave Sunday evening (thereby only missing one day of the fair).

Our party included me, Eric, Tillmann (a graduate student who works with Eric), and Tillmann's dad Ulrich. We booked our hotel kind of late and we were lucky to get 2 rooms at the Holiday Inn Express. Every hotel was super booked up. When we arrived late on Thursday this is what the lobby looked like- tons of people playing board games!

It was past my bedtime so I was ready to jump into bed, I somehow convinced Eric that going to bed was a good idea too. The next morning we found out that Tillmann and Ulrich went downstairs to play games and stayed up until 3 am!!  Like all our hotels this one also had a nice breakfast buffet.

The conference didn't start until 10 am so we were able to sleep in a bit and take our time getting out the door. We had to catch the subway to get to the conference center. Here is Tillmann and me on the train being excited over the first day.

By the time we reached the conference center the train was ridiculously full!! So full that they needed one of those Japanese metro employees pushing people from the outside so the door would close. When we got off this was the stream of people from the train going to Spiel.

We are finally here! 

The fair was comprised of 3 huge exhibition rooms that pretty much looked like this; people playing games and people selling games. Game companies had booths set up where you could play their games. They all had employees on hand to teach you how to play. If you like the game you could buy it on the spot- lots of games for sale had a special discount or came with some kind of free giveaway as extra incentive to buy at the conference instead of waiting.
 

Our first real stop happened about 15 minutes in; I saw a game that looked interesting and we pulled over to give it a try. It is called 'CV'. Here are Eric, Tillmann and Ulrich strategizing.

It is a card based game based around life. The art on the game was really good and it was fun to discover the cards. Having a kid gives you experience but takes away money; you can only buy the sports car when you are retired etc. We had a helpful employee teach us the game and answer any questions we had.

The game was fun and after an hour of playing or so we moved on to other distractions. Here is a little finger game that I destroyed Eric in.

After some wandering and fondling of game bits we settled down for a longer game. At the fair you don't really pick out a specific game to play, if there is an open table somewhere you just kind of sit. The appeal of this table is there were chairs! We ended up playing 2 games here, the helpful guy in red sat with us the whole time and explained everything.

By this time it was pretty late in the afternoon so we took a break to eat lunch and then hit the fair again. Our wandering led us past a cute girl in Renaissance gear asking if we wanted a mead sample. Eric and I love mead so this was an easy decision. We had no idea that this was going to be a 40 minute mead tasting tour!

She kept on bringing out different bottles and filling our glasses. I think we all tried about 15 different meads. Here is a picture of their mead stand, you can kind of see the mead on the table.

I was pretty tipsy by the end- I am so glad we had just eaten lunch! I still can't believe how much free mead she handed out but at the end of our tasting party she sold 3 bottles so I think it was a good strategy. Eric and I bought the pine infused mead- it was delicious.

We were in the Renaissance / costume section of the fair and there were a lot of really cool high quality gear you could buy. We quickly went through this section but it was still fun to look at authentic hand made chain mail. It took this picture of the horn dealership.

After the costume section we made it back to games. We found this 'Settlers of Hesse' game board! We bought it- only 2 Euros! It has Marburg castle on it! Plus more wandering and game playing.

The fair only runs from 10am - 7pm each day. It was about closing time at this point so we left the fair in search of some dinner. We finally settled on this Italian place which ended up being quite pleasant.

We got back to the hotel late again so I went to bed but Eric, Tillmann, and Ulrich went downstairs with all the other crazy board gamers and played games until the wee hours of the morning.

Day 2 was much like the first. Lots of wandering and game playing. Tillmann's sister / Ulrich's daughter came to the fair for the day so we decided to split up. Mostly because with so many people at the fair staying in a large group was difficult. Especially since Saturday was the busiest day of the fair- it was extremely hard to move and keep track of one another.

We played a large group game in the morning which was fun (sorry- no picture of that one) and then we played a 2 player game which was really not fun. (Intentional no pictures of that one). Our big success of the day (and perhaps the weekend) came when we discovered 'Steam Park.'

The art on this game was done by an artist that we really like- she did the art for a game we play at home called 'Dixit'. We magically found an open table and played the game with another nice couple. The premise is you are running a theme park; you need to attract visitors to make money but the more visitors you have the dirtier your park is which is bad. Here is my theme park midway through the game.

Here is Eric's:

Eric ended up winning the game (no surprise there to anyone who has ever played a game with Eric) but I came in second! We ended up buying the game because... if you did you could get it signed by the artist!!!! Here is Marie signing our box lid. This was very exciting for both of us.

We also made her pose for a picture. I felt a little bad about this- she was very tired looking.

She drew a cute little robot. Here is Eric with our prize and then a close up of the illustration I took later at the hotel.

Bonus! They also gave us free Steam Park t-shirts when we bought the game. Overall a very successful game purchase. We got a snack for me at the fruit stand (a real find- there were like a million hot dog stands there...) and continued on our way.

We checked out the comic book section of the fair and found a good find: Catthulu! We ended up buying the poster- it was too cute!

The day was pretty much over at this point so we met back up with Tillmann and Ulrich and headed back to the hotel. We decided to play games in the breakfast area (surprise!) and ordered delivery from a local pizza place the hotel recommended.

In the background of the first photo you can see all the people playing board games. And pretty much everyone ordered food from the same place we did- we saw the poor delivery person like 10 times...

Last day of Spiel! We checked out of the hotel and took our luggage with us to the conference. We were able to leave it with coat check for a small fee. Today mostly consisted of checking out stands we never made it to and purchasing board games we wanted. There still was some time for playing new games though.

This is a fun little block placing game called 'Kippit'. We played a 2 player version (top) and 4 player version (below). I dominated Eric in this game so naturally I made us buy it.

This was one of the few games where we waited to play. (Stand around until someone leaves the table, then you swoop in before someone else does. Very similar to getting a table in a food court). This game is 'Kingdom Builder' and it won a prestigious game of the year award; one of the reasons we wanted to give it a test drive. I won! This is my victory photo. We had a nice time but are not sure this game deserves all the hype around it.

We also fit in time to play a dungeon exploring game VERY similar to HeroQuest. In fact, it is pretty much the exact same game but with less quests.

We did manage to find this 'Small World' photo stand.

We came across this super cute Japanese animal version of Shogi- Eric was instantly in love so we had to buy a copy. Tillmann did too! I was able to broker a slight discount since we bought 2 sets.

We also ran back and bought a copy of CV. The art was really great and it was a nice light, fun game. Here is Eric with our gaming haul right before we had to leave to catch our bus back to Frankfurt. When you buy a game lots of vendors will give you a custom over sized back so that you walk around as a giant advertisement. The large bags came in very handy for all the games. If you think Eric bought a lot of games- you should have seen Tillmann! He went crazy on the last day and bought a ton of games. He literally had a check list he carried around so that he could keep track of all the games he wanted to buy. The last hour of the conference was a group effort--we had to remember the location of, and then find, all of the booths where he wanted to buy games!

When we got back to Marburg we took this picture or all our amazing conference purchases:

Note the Steam Park t-shirts in the back, CV on the right, mead on the far left and a bunch of other cool stuff mixed in. Spiel was a lot of fun! I don't think we will be able to attend next year but we are already talking about going to other game conferences that take place in the US. Thanks for making it all the way to the end; especially if you are not a board gamer!

Auf Wiedersehen!