An incredible four days at Essen 2017
Wow.
Just wow.
It's taken me a couple of days to fully come down from the experience that is Essen. From meeting publishers to the smorgasbord of hundreds (thousands?) of games, Essen Spiel is a four-day story of awesome.
The story starts at the Essen Hauptbahnhof (the German word for 'main train station'), which has some of the most fun mood lighting I've seen in a train station ever.
Start with just one of the many play areas available for anyone....
Or try out a ginormous version of any number of games... The 'Ice Cool' version seen above was one of the more popular ones, and could easily hold 7-8 people standing around the table.
For the more serious gamers, a few booths offered up hundreds of different dice to roll in any number of games.
As a game designer, you're always trying to come up with new, interesting concepts to add to your games. Oh, and themes to make those games come alive. Events like this are a reminder of just HOW MANY GAMES there are out there (!!!) — and this doesn't include all the games being Kickstarted, already published, seen at Gen Con but not Essen... Yes, this game is about making cheese fly... and I could easily see this being the sort of fun game that families play or gets made into a drinking game...
One of the more interesting themes I've seen: Redneck Madness, an upcoming Kickstarter project by Apa Board Games. The gameplay didn't make perfect sense, but I did love seeing the theme come alive...
Always nice to meet online friends in the offline world. Shoutout to Bez and the awesome games like Wibbell++ and Blether (that white panel? That's the entire title of the game.)
I didn't note the name of this one, but the act of making your head do the work instead of your hands was interesting... Kinda silly, definitely, but I think that was the point.
I'll take this moment to mention the wonderful diverseness of gamers present at Essen. Old, young, families, male, female.. the whole nine yards.
Now comes the most time-consuming 'game' at this fair... a 40,320 piece puzzle takes up a lot of room, far more than the average kitchen table (about 6.8 meters wide by 1.9 meters tall). Bound to keep the kids busy for weeks, and it is a Guinness Book of World Records holder....
One of those 'I've got nothing' moments... At least ET's getting a good case of what we humans do for fun...
Now for something genuinely interesting... Presenting the Wunju gamebag, where the board is also the bag for the game. Coming to Kickstarter soon.
Because we all need a Grumpy Cat deck box, right? Right? Well, maybe this was in the clearance box for a reason...
OK, I can explain... The Stone Age Junior woolly mammoth and I were just talking when it gave me a funny look... I was afraid for my life for a few moments there...
The final day had a lot of people in some awesome costumes — not sure if there was some sort of cosplay event or it was just the day to come dressed up.
Did you play lots of games? Quite a few, yes. A lot of demos, and of course there are plenty of sneak peeks of games that will be announced... but the most popular games were almost always full when I passed by... and with appointment scheduled throughout all four days, I couldn't easily sit down to any long games...
Did you meet publishers? I had over a dozen pre-scheduled appointments, and several other more impromptu meetings across the four days. Some of them were of the 'hey, I'm a game designer, are you looking at games here?', however. Lots of promise in those meet-ups, and many asked for print and play versions or prototypes... There were some 'no's', of course, but even in those there is feedback to consider...
Would you go again? Absolutely, but as a designer, I'd try to schedule even more interviews as early as possible (a couple of months beforehand, or just after Gen Con finished). The information I had accumulated didn't tell the whole story of who was attending — not by a longshot.
What about as a player? Yes, but only if you're already in Europe. If you've been to Gen Con, any of the Protospiels, or another major convention, you might find the games-to-player ratio better there.
What's next? As a designer, a few tweaks to games based on some playtesting... and a couple things to think about changing... Some more development of new games, to be sure, so stay tuned!