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Essen 2003

Day 1 - Thursday 23rd October

Well, having got back from my fifth trip to Essen, I thought I'd give a brief run-down on what I thought about this year's fair. This time, I spent two full days at the show, which was an improvement on last year's solitary Thursday when I felt I was too rushed buying stuff and not enjoying the general atmosphere. This time was just about right, with enough time to play a few games, chat with people who I've not seen since last year or who I met for the first time, and still spend about the same amount on new titles as I did last time. The bonus being avoiding the crush of people and smoke expected over the weekend.

As a general impression, it felt a little more expensive than last year, which was probably a function of the pound/euro exchange rate having deteriorated, but the games are way cheaper than the price they sell for in the UK. There seemed to be a good number of titles that would appeal to me and the family/ games club but nothing really outstanding. This is not necessarily a bad thing as there may well be one or two excellent games that stand a better chance than in a year when they are up against a 'Puerto Rico'.

Having flown out first thing on Thursday morning, I arrived at Messe Essen at around 10.20am to find a huge crowd waiting to enter the halls. Fortunately, the queues moved quite quickly and 20 minutes later, I was through the pay booths and stashing the suitcase (empty apart from toiletries and essential change of clothes) in the cloakroom. Then I hit the halls, passing through halls 12,11 and 10 quickly as these are filled mainly with the larger companies and I wanted to get to see if I could get hold of the more limited games of the smaller suppliers first. This meant a lot of time in halls 5 and 9. The bad news was all my preparatory notes were left in the cloakroom with the suitcase, so I decided to trust to memory and, thankfully, didn't do too bad. Although I was after a few not-new games, none was too rare so I left the second-hand area until the middle of the day. The one game that was very hard to get hold of seemed to be Dschinges Bohn. There was a long queue which I joined, only to be told five minutes later that their supplies for Thursday had run out and to try again tomorrow. Mental note to self, get to the Lookout stand early on Friday. I did manage to pick up most of the  other limited games I was after though. The exception was the Konig & Spaher expansion for Carcassonne. Although the Hans im Gluck stand indicated that a Knight was going to be handing them out as he wandered around, he was very conspicuous by his absence most of the time.

Hall 5 is where the Warfrog stand is and, as I was staying at their hotel overnight, I spent a bit of time there watching how their new releases were going down. And the answer was very well. Both the Age of Steam maps and Princes of the Renaissance seemed to be selling very well. The new maps look to be quite a bit tougher than the original and PotR was being played constantly throughout the day. I didn't play either as I trusted Warfrog to be putting out stuff I would like and I wanted to try out the German stuff instead. I did manage to meet Rick Thornquist there and was pleased to have a chat about his first experience of Essen. While in Hall 5, I got an explanation of Maka Bana, one of the new games from Tilsit. This looked quite nice with a bluffing element that appealed to me. I picked up this and the new multi-player version of Kahuna, called Kanaloa. Also in Hall 5, one of the retailers, Spielbar had a fewl things I was after: Too Many Cooks and Tin Soldiers from R&R Games as well as the Spiele aus Timbuktu box, in which I discovered a copy of last year's Banditos game from Timbuktu. They also threw in a free copy of Frog Juice by Gamewright so I was happy to have spent some time there. I also bumped into Greg Schloesser and, as he said he was going to be calling in at my hotel that night, we agreed to try and get a game or two in together.

Hall 9 was the other main destination for me on Thursday. I managed to meet (at last) Angela Gaalema from Plenary Games and Anye Sellers from Diet Evil Games, both of whom looked to be enjoying themselves demonstrating Fresh Fish and Nobody But Us Chickens respectively. I bumped into Rick again who was trying out Crazy Rally from Red Omega. It looked fun but he said there was a bit of a memory requirement so I shied away from it. The Penguin Ultimatum from Eight Foot Llama also looked interesting. The guy on the stand gave me a quick run through and I decided it was worth buying. Despite being unsuccessful in picking up Dschinges Bohn, I did buy Attribute from the Lookout Games stand, which someone described as Apples To Apples on steroids. As the family really enjoy AtoA, I knew this one would go down well.

The rest of Thursday was spent cruising round the other halls but I resisted the temptation to do some serious buying as I didn't want to cart the stuff to the Jung that night only to cart it all back again. I did, however, get a copy of Subulata, a fairly abstract 2 player game from Cwali, together with the Floriado game they were giving away with each purchase. I decided to wait and see what the reaction to Logistico was, before thinking about whether to add that to the shopping list. Late in the day, I bumped into David Blowers and Angela Caunce who I usually spend some time with at Essen and we all agreed that we needed to play more games on Friday so we agreed to hit the Kosmos stand first thing and see how many of their new releases we could fit in.

Back at the Hotel, I bumped into John Bohrer from Winsome Games who had literally sold out of his new games before the show opened. Although I'm not a big railway games fan, Michael Schacht's InterUrban sounded like the kind of game I would enjoy. Once the Warfrog crowd gathered together, a group of us went off to eat at a local German/Irish bar and we had a nice meal although the service was pretty slow and cut down on some valuable playing time. On arriving back at the Jung, several games were in progress but Greg Schloesser turned up and I joined a group including Ward Batty, Craig Berg, James Miller and Trond Braut to play Attribute. This was great fun with lots of laughs, although occasionally some of the decisions from the North American players made little sense to me - two nations divided by a common language, as they say. We then tried to work our way through the rules to Lucky Loop but I declined to play, not reading much into the game by its description, and decided to get some sleep instead. Greg reckons the game was ok though but I didn't buy it.

Day 2 - Friday 24th October

Feeling refreshed and raring to go, Angela, David and I walked to the exhibition halls just before 10.00 and joined the waiting crowd in anticipation of the doors opening. Once inside, I stashed the suitcase and headed straight for the Lookout stand to try and claim a Dschinges Bohn, only to find the queue stretching all the way into the next hall !!! That made my mind up to give that game a miss and I headed back to the Kosmos area and joined the others to try and grab a table. No such luck as all the tables were full but we managed to persuade one of the Kosmos reps to outline Anno 1503 to us while we sat on the floor. This looked like a mix between Settlers and Entdecker (no big surprise from Herr Teuber) but it looked interesting enough to secure itself on my list of purchases. We would have started to play it but our rep was informed that we weren't allowed to play on the floor, which was a shame but understandable as the likelihood of losing some of the components was greater. Luckily, after a few minutes, we spotted a group vacating one of the many tables in the same area and managed to grab it before anyone else.

The other big box game from Kosmos was Die Brucken von Shangrila by Leo Colivini. This was very abstract and had plenty to think about. The screw your opponent factor was high and we played the game in full, together with a German passer-by named Till. Angela started off pretty aggressively and David seemed to keep getting picked on by everyone else. As the game progressed, Till and I kept attacking one another and Angela, while David managed to spread his pieces widely enough without anyone realising that he had crept back into contention. I was a little surprised to find David had done enough to grab the win. I quite liked it and resolved to buy a copy.

Having done the big box games (except for Martin Wallace's Secrets of the Tombs, which had already appeared in the UK a month or so ago and looked a straight-forward family-type game), we tried a couple of the Kosmos two-player series. Till and I had a go at Dracula, while Angela and David chose Avalon. I already have Avalon but haven't managed to play it yet. I think it looks pretty interesting but David and Angela weren't terribly impressed. They weren't sure if they were playing it quite right but didn't think it was worth trying again. I must try it out soon to see for myself. Dracula, on the other hand, seemed quite a novel deduction/memory game, but the German on the action cards may have put some off. That's not a problem as Rio Grande will be releasing it in English. Till and I played about half a game to fully understand how it played but then decided to cut it short so that we could do other things. The game looked quite nice although I thought the Van Helsing cards were more powerful than the Dracula ones, but I could be wrong.

David and Angela decided to try Dracula for themselves but, as time was marching on, I thought I had better start wandering around buying a few things while I had the chance. Now, Nige and John from the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club had both asked me to look out for a couple of games. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any copies of I'm The Boss for Nige but there were plenty of copies of Im Zeichen Des Kreuzes for John. The good news for him was it was heavily discounted at 15 Euros but, due to the size and weight of the box, I wondered whether I ought to be adding a surcharge for shipping back to the UK :-) I also wanted to get some Geomag for my 9 year old, Chris, which was never going to be a problem as you couldn't miss their stand. It was huge and very noisy, as they were constantly running construction competitions, with loads of people milling around. I managed to pick up a new set with a variety of coloured panels - something I'd not seen in the UK before.

Wandering around Hall 11, I spotted Paul Evans and some others trying out Die Sieben Siegel, one of Amigo's new card games. This one is yet another prediction whist variant but with a couple of twists. Paul's group seemed to be enjoying it and thought there was enough of a difference about it for it to be worth buying. I then bumped into Martin Leathwood at the Adlung stand and we managed to get a number of their new games explained to us. For me, Die Fugger and Turbo were the pick of the bunch and I bought a copy of both. Nearby, Keith Thomasson was manning the Mayfair stand so I had a bit of a chat with him about life in general. I used to subscribe to his game-playing zine, For Whom The Die Rolls, and was amazed to learn that it had just reached its hundredth issue. With that issue, he had distributed a home-made game of his called Landfall and I was pleasently surprised when he let me have a copy. I also picked up a copy of King Me and the High Noon expansion to Bang!, although somehow I managed to acquire the German version rather than the English one (frustrating as the cards are very text-heavy).

Hall 11 was also where Friedemann Friese's stand was. This year's Finstere Flure was previewed by Mik Svellov on his website before the show and got a rave review, so I guessed it was likely to be pretty good. Produced in the same style and quality as last year's game, this looked very good and I soon parted with some more cash to acquire a copy. I usually purchase something from Zoch at Essen but this year's games didn't look too promising. However, wandering around the demo tables, I saw quite a few people enjoying Iglu Pop which is a game about shaking igloos and guessing how many beads there are inside. In the end, I succumbed and added it to the purchase pile. Finally, I went to my regular place to bulk buy the main games at the show, Spiel & Spass. There I chatted with them for a while and had to explain why Karl Bown from the Games Store wasn't able to be at Essen this year (Karl is another of their regular customers). At the same time I picked up all the remaining games on my list including the Kosmos games, Hans Im Gluck releases and Industria from Queen Games.

Then, it was time to grab the suitcase and a taxi back to the airport. Unfortunately the flight was delayed by an hour which meant I got home at about 10.30. Despite this, I had a great two days and brought back about 30 games in total. Now I've just got to find the time to play them all.