The day started off with a play of Cardia Tide and Storm, the new standalone expansion for Duel for Cardia, – for which I had the honour of presenting the International Gamers Award for best two-player game 2025. Tide and Storm consists of 2 new decks to play with – an Island deck and a Storm deck! These decks can be played standalone or mixed with the original game, and I gather involved a lot of work to ensure that the game still functions well with the different cards played. As with the original game, each player simultaneously reveals their played card; the higher card wins a victory point while the lower card can enact its action – which can lead to all kinds of interesting effects on the opponent, on cards already played in previous rounds, etc. One feature of the new game is the increase of the number of points needed to win from 5 to 6. In the Island decks, the game features 3 island cards and 3 ships which may be moved by players. Should you move a ship onto the island nearest you, you will gain a VP – if the ship stays there! Moving onto the middle island forces a player to lose a card from they deck or allows you to draw an extra card. Indeed the deck features a number of cards which move the ships and which invite you to reduce your hand size for a benefit or occasionally to increase your hand size. Plenty to think about here! The second deck uses a new resource called “Phials” and involves abilities in which you place  the phials onto cards to trigger their abilities. Such abilities can modify the value of other cards already played, for example, to switch around who actually won a previous round. The deck is more complex and requires more planning than the Island deck. I really enjoyed playing the new expansion and I’m excited to get it back to the table soon; and really admire the depth of development and the ideas that I saw in the game!

Essen Friday was as busy as yesterday and by now I am used to once again the Essen shuffle through the aisles and the huge number of small steps taken – I think I walked 5 miles today! Anyway, not all of it was walking around, but I did enjoy wandering through the art gallery, buying some components at Spielmaterial, who always have an excellent selection at Spiel, and walking oast the enormous queues for Lorcana, the Asmodée store, Gaudi from Devir, the queues for Queen Alice by Combo games which is this year’s hottest game (I don’t know if that is justified….let’ see), and the various other madnesses of Essen such as queuing for lunch food (which is definitely getting better these days). There was also a break in the rain and wind for a bit of sunshine which was pleasant when you are walking outside to avoid the, well, long Essen shuffle down Hall 3.