SPIEL in Essen is the world largest boardgame fair. Each year in October, publishers and fans meet around everything related to boardgames. From family games over tabletop role-playing games and miniature games to strategy games, SPIEL is nine huge indoor areas full of fun. Play games, buy games, pitch games.
I had promised my kids to one day bring them and this year it happened.
We drove down to Essen by car from Stockholm. It’s 1500 km through Denmark so we took an overnight stay and stopped for sightseeing along the way. On the return journey we took the ferry from Travemünde in Germany to Malmö in Sweden and replaced 500 km of driving with a nine hour ferry ride.
Lot’s of driving! I’m not sure I will ever get used to the free speed limits on the German Autobahn.
I had booked a dog friendly Airbnb near Essen for three nights and two full days. As tickets had sold out for Saturday, we ended up with one day of sightseeing in Bochum and Sunday at SPIEL. Which was good, it’s quite exhausting to be in a crowd of 50 000 people all day and having a less intense day after driving was nice.
Exploring SPIEL
I had prepared the kids that SPIEL is huge. Last year we attended Dreamhack in Stockholm, SPIEL is at least 3-4 times that.
New since last time I visited, there is an app with a map of the fair and lists of exhibitors and new releases. Highly recommended to download the app and spend a little time flagging your favourites before going. You can then ask the app to generate a route through the fair. But forget about seeing everything! It’s impossible!
Instead, we agreed on a base camp in an outdoor food court where we would meet up every two hours. Then we would dive into the crowds, with a goal to see like a game or a stand, and let the convention gods lead our step. It was like a dungeon crawl! Never really sure what we would find, but always returning back with more insight and experience, and often with extra treasures in our backpack! It would easily take twenty minutes to get back to the “surface” after diving into the deep end of the caves!
Pompeii
My trophy of the fair was Pompeii, a beautifully produced game about competing trading families in Pompeii that must cooperate to appease the gods lest the volcano erupts and everyone loses.
I visited Pompeii 30 years ago and it’s one place I want to return to and show my kids.
I had scouted out the game in advance and had it as my must see, so this was our first stop. We sat down for a sample few rounds of the game, learning the game and enjoying the amazing production value of the components. I would love Gotlandia to be published in a similar quality!
I had some concerns from a game design point of view, like how to avoid a king making end of the game, if one player decides that he cannot win. The person teaching us the game gave sufficiently good answers that I had no concerns bagging a copy of the game for 50 EUR. Looking forward to play a full game soon!
Red North
Viking themed games was clearly a trend this year. My youngest and I sat down for a game of Red North, a card game of viking earls competing for control of outposts. Nice design, simple enough to learn to play competitively in your first game. With enough variation in the setup and how cards are drawn that it is a good challenge to read the information on the table and playing to win for many games. This also ended up in our loot bag.
Happy and tired
While SPIEL is also a commercial event, it is great to experience all the joy and love for everything related to games.
SPIEL is a great testament to the creativity, playfulness and inventiveness of humans. Old as well as young. With so much to see and explore, you can never get away with more than a small sample. We had fun with what we saw, the people we met and the games we played. Kids were happy and tired when we left.
Maybe one day we will return. Until then, we enjoy playing and creating games. Our own designs as well as the new additions to our collection that made it with us out of the SPIEL dungeon.
Frighteningly huge event!
They release 55 000 tickets per day, I guess that is on top of exhibitors and staff. This year they sold out three days out of four. Yes, it’s huge.
Everything runs smooth though and there is plenty of opportunity to get into games. The largest publishers have like ten tables per game they are bringing just for people to learn and play the game.
We parked in a gigantic parking lot a couple of km away and jumped on a shuttle bus to the fair. Once we got to the entrance, we had our tickets scanned in no time and were free to roam the halls of plenty.