Lwaxy
Cute but dangerous
Essen is really not much of a city for tourists. It is only really notable, at least in the gaming world, for the yearly game fair in October, the largest in the world. Some gaming maps and boards have it on for just that reason. The exhibition was laughed at when it started 30 years ago in a school building. The gaming companies mostly thought that there was no interest in an exhibition for the public, to test and play games and toys.
A year later they already needed to move to a bigger building, and soon it turned into a full fair. We never missed a year since we started going back in the 90s. By now, we are lucky to live close by, and we are always there for all 4 days.
The cats aren't always happy about us not being home all day.
This year was a bit of a different experience. In former years, there had been problems with the lines, both outside to get in so you had to be there early and push your way past ticket buyers even if you already had a ticket, and inside in front of the two bathrooms which never had the capacity for the masses of people. Security was also barely existing.
In its 30th year, the booths selling tickets were away from the entrances, security was much much better and there was a 3rd bathroom! If you think that's a typical issue for a female – yeah but the lines for the men's rooms weren't that much shorter in all the years, and blocking the corridor of the main crossing point from one hall to the other badly. Another good thing was that the LARPers have their own con now, so the more annoying exhibitors (show fighting where people want to walk, singing loudly and wrongly, blaring noises from endless loops of event promotion video material etc) were not present. There was also a little more room between exhibitors, so it was a very relaxed event this time.
When we get there Thursdays, we usually do our "mad dash" for anything rare or badly wanted. For my better half, this was Magic cards this year. For me, as usual, it was RPG stuff, mainly Paizo map packs and flip mats. Got quite a selection, too, and didn't get anything I didn't need despite the printout with our have and want lists missing the maps! I know what we have for the most part.
In the RPG/wargame area, mad dashes aren't so bad to do, but beware if you want to find a rare or cheap board game. The hall with the sellers of used games will be flooded upon the opening of the gates by mad dashers who carry large backpacks and pull or push carts for additional board game space. And they don't only want in, they also want out again as soon as everything is full, just to empty their stash and come back yet again. It's the battle of gamers and usually someone ends up with some minor injuries.
It is also important to be able to find each other if you split up. Cell phones are of little help in there, bad reception and too much noise. So we decided to wear different colored tie-dyed shirts each day. Too bad some groups wore orange shirts on our orange day and blue shirts on our blue day. But it worked ok anyway. Lots of people wear dark on such events it seems.
Once done with the priority buys, Thursdays are the best days to actually get to play games, as it has the fewest visitors. The waiting time to find an empty table or usable floor space is not too bad, and the volunteers are still relaxed and happy to be there. Compared to almost falling apart with splitting headaches on the evening of the last day while knowing they still have to clean up their space.
One of the LARP stores before business really sets in.
Quiet before the storm on Thursday.
As usual, you meet a lot of costumed people, like this friendly Klingon and the cuddly cat and tiger.
You could, of course, also test out several meads and beers made for that special tavern called RPG room. Not always cheap, but good. We didn't buy any though.
One thing that never gets old for us is buying dice for our collection. Every event like this has plenty of dice sellers, we usually buy from Chessex.
Can you imagine all those dice coming down when the table doesn't hold? Almost happened at one point.
Those were my favorites, but my other half didn't like them that much....
....so we got a lot of those instead.
Books, books and yet more books. Thursday before the chaos.
This didn't come out so well, but behind the M:TG single card sellers you can see into the next hall where the used and rare board game area is, with mad dashers filling in with large bags.
Terrain displays were as impressive as usual. The LOTR display.
D&D display – really would like to have this but of course would have no place to store it.
Relatively new miniature game called Warpath – nothing out of the ordinary though, as far as I could find out.
New miniature RPG from Poland, now also in English. The rulesbook is so thick you could probably kill someone with it. It has flair though.
There's also a new pirate related miniature game I don't recall having seen before.
Unfortunately lost the flyer for this horror themed RPG... still trying to find it.
Several of the large companies had more than one area this time, usually one dedicated for the demo of new games only, with each table dedicated to a game, and the other for you to grab a table and borrow games however long you liked. We only tried one of the demos, as it would have meant to wait for every new game at the next table separately. Waiting times for tables can be quite long in any case.
There wasn't so much new in the card game world (ignoring several cloned looking SW games), save a nice little Amigo game called Dragons, where the objective is to put the cards which show differing numbers of dragon pictures next to each other to get 7 of one dragon color in adjacent spaces.
This was also fun. It's called "Auf die Nüsse," something like grab the nuts. And that's what the squirrels need to be doing. You collect nut cards of different types to place in your storage for points while your squirels make it up the tree. But you need to be careful placing them because only one can be on each starting field. If you throw the dice too often to place them, you might have to collect them all back!
Caro requires you to get combos of stones, while trying to prevent your opponent from getting the better ones. Of course, you don't need the wooden stones for it, you can just cut out cardboard for it, too.
If you happen to know the online version of Krosmaster, you might like the board game plans for it. Right now, they only have this arena for battle, but more is planned. You will be able to use the characters and other stuff you buy online as well, as they will come with codes to use.
One of my favorite new games is Indigo. The objective is to get stones in different colors with different point values from the middle into your zone by connecting the patterns. I'm not yet very good at it. You can also play it as a puzzle if you want, which isn't easy either. The game sold out quickly and we had to get it at the toy store after the fair.
Some games look nice but are just a repeat of old things and not really worth buying. Reminds you of something? Yup, me, too.
Then there are those games (and there were plenty of them this year) which might be cool to play but are bad to try out at such events. The can take a long time to explain and to resolve, some of them several hours. Those tables tend to stay empty eventually. This game seems to be fun enough to do at home, from what people who tried it told me. We had no time to try it out.
Not a board game, but really cool. You need to bring your pips from your side to the other, but beware if the scale goes out of whack and touches ground you lose. You can vary the balance a bit for more difficulty as well. It's simply called Balance.
This one requires some dex as well. From the company that brought us Gemblo and Pyramids comes GemStone. You need to carefully hack at the stones to knock them off but you don't want the grey base stone. Be sure to have a large table, the ones at the event were too small for flying pieces.
Another non-board game is Castellan. It's still in the beta testing and expected to be out in two sets in spring. You are to connect walls and towers to courtyards and you get points based on how many towers are around it and how big it is. Not that easy. I really want this because the walls and towers would also be great with large RPG maps to denote larger fortifications.
This could technically qualify as a card game. Briefcase is all about business and resource management and takes up quite some time and space on the table. Not quite my type of thing though.
Of course we also had some new additions for Catan. Which reminds me we forgot to pick up the new map for one of Germany's regions. We only got 2 of them as we couldn't transport the other at the time, the rest was already sold out. There are such weird variants now as Star Trek Catan and Madagaskar Catan for the kids. Definitely not for me.
Here is a game that has caused some discussion among the RPGers at the event. Is this a new board game, or is it really just D&D in another color? I could not try it out as there was no space. Very likely it would have taken long, too.
Flying Buffalo has reprinted all the Grimtooth books – we already had them but I guess a lot of people were missing them still. Unfortunately for us, the City Books we are missing weren't reprinted yet. Maybe next year. They also had a bunch of new adventures, but I still have lots of hand-me-downs to try out so I passed.
If you are into terrain building, ProFantasy's CC3, has a really nice feature to make your own terrain, with your own textures if needed, too. Print, cut, fold and glue and there's your dungeon, cave, temple...
There are some cool news related to Pathfinder, specifically, another adventure set up. Maybe some of you remember The Grande Temple of Jing, first part of what was to be a large adventure. It was never published in full. I remember getting a copy of a copy of a copy etc in super bad quality some years back – and always thought that if I'd come across a copy of the never finished story, I might get it anyway. A large temple, a weird god, sounds like fun.
Well, the Hammerdog team – including Monte Cook for this - is doing it right now. It looks like it is going to be a large project suitable for all levels and all worlds if the GMs handle it right. You'll have different missions for different levels, and it won't get old because things keep changing in whatever way you need them to change. I can't wait for it to come out as it is just the perfect set up for on of my larger groups. The kickstarter will hit EN World eventually, look out for it.
Talking of Hammerdog – they have nice all purpose GM screens, too. Only reason I didn't get one was me needing more space to stick pictures and info in. It seems the next generation of screens will solve this little issue by being magnetic.
And if you like chess variants, Hammerdog also has a 4 player chess that looked interesting enough. Check their websites for details.
This is most of the loot we came away with. It's missing some maps, a CD and some other minor things we couldn't find when we took this picture. Sorting everything in afterwards is always taking time.
The binders with the ST and SW CCG cards were really cheap and contained lots of rares. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the same deal on the M:TG cards because a certain large not-quite-store was being greedy and stubborn. If you've been to Essen before and collect CCGs you probably know who I mean.
Been to any cool event recently? Tell us about it. We'll be back to Essen next year.
A year later they already needed to move to a bigger building, and soon it turned into a full fair. We never missed a year since we started going back in the 90s. By now, we are lucky to live close by, and we are always there for all 4 days.
The cats aren't always happy about us not being home all day.
This year was a bit of a different experience. In former years, there had been problems with the lines, both outside to get in so you had to be there early and push your way past ticket buyers even if you already had a ticket, and inside in front of the two bathrooms which never had the capacity for the masses of people. Security was also barely existing.
In its 30th year, the booths selling tickets were away from the entrances, security was much much better and there was a 3rd bathroom! If you think that's a typical issue for a female – yeah but the lines for the men's rooms weren't that much shorter in all the years, and blocking the corridor of the main crossing point from one hall to the other badly. Another good thing was that the LARPers have their own con now, so the more annoying exhibitors (show fighting where people want to walk, singing loudly and wrongly, blaring noises from endless loops of event promotion video material etc) were not present. There was also a little more room between exhibitors, so it was a very relaxed event this time.
When we get there Thursdays, we usually do our "mad dash" for anything rare or badly wanted. For my better half, this was Magic cards this year. For me, as usual, it was RPG stuff, mainly Paizo map packs and flip mats. Got quite a selection, too, and didn't get anything I didn't need despite the printout with our have and want lists missing the maps! I know what we have for the most part.
In the RPG/wargame area, mad dashes aren't so bad to do, but beware if you want to find a rare or cheap board game. The hall with the sellers of used games will be flooded upon the opening of the gates by mad dashers who carry large backpacks and pull or push carts for additional board game space. And they don't only want in, they also want out again as soon as everything is full, just to empty their stash and come back yet again. It's the battle of gamers and usually someone ends up with some minor injuries.
It is also important to be able to find each other if you split up. Cell phones are of little help in there, bad reception and too much noise. So we decided to wear different colored tie-dyed shirts each day. Too bad some groups wore orange shirts on our orange day and blue shirts on our blue day. But it worked ok anyway. Lots of people wear dark on such events it seems.
Once done with the priority buys, Thursdays are the best days to actually get to play games, as it has the fewest visitors. The waiting time to find an empty table or usable floor space is not too bad, and the volunteers are still relaxed and happy to be there. Compared to almost falling apart with splitting headaches on the evening of the last day while knowing they still have to clean up their space.
One of the LARP stores before business really sets in.
Quiet before the storm on Thursday.
As usual, you meet a lot of costumed people, like this friendly Klingon and the cuddly cat and tiger.
You could, of course, also test out several meads and beers made for that special tavern called RPG room. Not always cheap, but good. We didn't buy any though.
One thing that never gets old for us is buying dice for our collection. Every event like this has plenty of dice sellers, we usually buy from Chessex.
Can you imagine all those dice coming down when the table doesn't hold? Almost happened at one point.
Those were my favorites, but my other half didn't like them that much....
....so we got a lot of those instead.
Books, books and yet more books. Thursday before the chaos.
This didn't come out so well, but behind the M:TG single card sellers you can see into the next hall where the used and rare board game area is, with mad dashers filling in with large bags.
Terrain displays were as impressive as usual. The LOTR display.
D&D display – really would like to have this but of course would have no place to store it.
Relatively new miniature game called Warpath – nothing out of the ordinary though, as far as I could find out.
New miniature RPG from Poland, now also in English. The rulesbook is so thick you could probably kill someone with it. It has flair though.
There's also a new pirate related miniature game I don't recall having seen before.
Unfortunately lost the flyer for this horror themed RPG... still trying to find it.
Several of the large companies had more than one area this time, usually one dedicated for the demo of new games only, with each table dedicated to a game, and the other for you to grab a table and borrow games however long you liked. We only tried one of the demos, as it would have meant to wait for every new game at the next table separately. Waiting times for tables can be quite long in any case.
There wasn't so much new in the card game world (ignoring several cloned looking SW games), save a nice little Amigo game called Dragons, where the objective is to put the cards which show differing numbers of dragon pictures next to each other to get 7 of one dragon color in adjacent spaces.
This was also fun. It's called "Auf die Nüsse," something like grab the nuts. And that's what the squirrels need to be doing. You collect nut cards of different types to place in your storage for points while your squirels make it up the tree. But you need to be careful placing them because only one can be on each starting field. If you throw the dice too often to place them, you might have to collect them all back!
Caro requires you to get combos of stones, while trying to prevent your opponent from getting the better ones. Of course, you don't need the wooden stones for it, you can just cut out cardboard for it, too.
If you happen to know the online version of Krosmaster, you might like the board game plans for it. Right now, they only have this arena for battle, but more is planned. You will be able to use the characters and other stuff you buy online as well, as they will come with codes to use.
One of my favorite new games is Indigo. The objective is to get stones in different colors with different point values from the middle into your zone by connecting the patterns. I'm not yet very good at it. You can also play it as a puzzle if you want, which isn't easy either. The game sold out quickly and we had to get it at the toy store after the fair.
Some games look nice but are just a repeat of old things and not really worth buying. Reminds you of something? Yup, me, too.
Then there are those games (and there were plenty of them this year) which might be cool to play but are bad to try out at such events. The can take a long time to explain and to resolve, some of them several hours. Those tables tend to stay empty eventually. This game seems to be fun enough to do at home, from what people who tried it told me. We had no time to try it out.
Not a board game, but really cool. You need to bring your pips from your side to the other, but beware if the scale goes out of whack and touches ground you lose. You can vary the balance a bit for more difficulty as well. It's simply called Balance.
This one requires some dex as well. From the company that brought us Gemblo and Pyramids comes GemStone. You need to carefully hack at the stones to knock them off but you don't want the grey base stone. Be sure to have a large table, the ones at the event were too small for flying pieces.
Another non-board game is Castellan. It's still in the beta testing and expected to be out in two sets in spring. You are to connect walls and towers to courtyards and you get points based on how many towers are around it and how big it is. Not that easy. I really want this because the walls and towers would also be great with large RPG maps to denote larger fortifications.
This could technically qualify as a card game. Briefcase is all about business and resource management and takes up quite some time and space on the table. Not quite my type of thing though.
Of course we also had some new additions for Catan. Which reminds me we forgot to pick up the new map for one of Germany's regions. We only got 2 of them as we couldn't transport the other at the time, the rest was already sold out. There are such weird variants now as Star Trek Catan and Madagaskar Catan for the kids. Definitely not for me.
Here is a game that has caused some discussion among the RPGers at the event. Is this a new board game, or is it really just D&D in another color? I could not try it out as there was no space. Very likely it would have taken long, too.
Flying Buffalo has reprinted all the Grimtooth books – we already had them but I guess a lot of people were missing them still. Unfortunately for us, the City Books we are missing weren't reprinted yet. Maybe next year. They also had a bunch of new adventures, but I still have lots of hand-me-downs to try out so I passed.
If you are into terrain building, ProFantasy's CC3, has a really nice feature to make your own terrain, with your own textures if needed, too. Print, cut, fold and glue and there's your dungeon, cave, temple...
There are some cool news related to Pathfinder, specifically, another adventure set up. Maybe some of you remember The Grande Temple of Jing, first part of what was to be a large adventure. It was never published in full. I remember getting a copy of a copy of a copy etc in super bad quality some years back – and always thought that if I'd come across a copy of the never finished story, I might get it anyway. A large temple, a weird god, sounds like fun.
Well, the Hammerdog team – including Monte Cook for this - is doing it right now. It looks like it is going to be a large project suitable for all levels and all worlds if the GMs handle it right. You'll have different missions for different levels, and it won't get old because things keep changing in whatever way you need them to change. I can't wait for it to come out as it is just the perfect set up for on of my larger groups. The kickstarter will hit EN World eventually, look out for it.
Talking of Hammerdog – they have nice all purpose GM screens, too. Only reason I didn't get one was me needing more space to stick pictures and info in. It seems the next generation of screens will solve this little issue by being magnetic.
And if you like chess variants, Hammerdog also has a 4 player chess that looked interesting enough. Check their websites for details.
This is most of the loot we came away with. It's missing some maps, a CD and some other minor things we couldn't find when we took this picture. Sorting everything in afterwards is always taking time.
The binders with the ST and SW CCG cards were really cheap and contained lots of rares. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the same deal on the M:TG cards because a certain large not-quite-store was being greedy and stubborn. If you've been to Essen before and collect CCGs you probably know who I mean.
Been to any cool event recently? Tell us about it. We'll be back to Essen next year.
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