I had some significant technological issues while in Essen this year… First off, the wifi signal in my hotel was sketchy at best, so it was hard to consistently post from the hotel.  Second, my camera seemed like it was malfunctioning.  I think that the big problem was that my SD card has somehow become corrupted.  It looks like I’ve lost about a third of my pictures to this – the recovery utility that I found got the rest off the card though!

To start – a McToast from the DUS McDonalds.  I’d never heard of this before, so I had to try one. Anyways, it’s on the German Dollar Menu, so it wasn’t too costly.  It’s essentially a breakfast quesadilla.  Eggs, cheese and bacon are put inside a folded flatbread and then the whole thing is warmed/toasted in a panini grill.  Pretty tasty, I must admit.  It also happens to be the only picture I took in Europe before going to the show…

First things first – here is one of the schematics showing the new layout.  The halls that we are using this year are 1,2, and 3 – they are all connected in the lower left side of the diagram. You can see that the square footage is larger than the old layout which used 4,5,6,9,10,11,12 (and about a third of 7).

Setup on Tuesday… Here is the ginormous Asmodee booth in early setup.  There are still many partner banners that need to be hung from the rafters.

Fast forward to Saturday when you can see the finished (and crowded) layout.

I took two pictures hoping to get the same vantage point as the Tuesday picture, but I obviously failed at that… As my SD card had gone bad, I had no way to look back at the pictures I had previously taken.

While I was wandering around on Tuesday, I ran into an old friend, Johann – who runs Swan PanAsia.  He showed me Mission: Combat, and this became my first acquired game of Essen 2013.

I think I have already posted this, but the world can’t get enough pictures of spread eagled ostriches, right?

The guys at Artipia are setting up, this corner of their booth was the “store”.  This was one of the few places where I saw long lines on Thursday and Friday.  The line wrapped abour the counter here for most of the first two days.

This is the demo space for Artipia… The bookcases from the last picture are just off to the left of what you see here. Look at how many cases of product that they brought to the show!  What you see here isn’t even all their games as I caught them early on Tuesday before their remaining pallets were delivered.  The size of the Artipia stand probably tripled in area from last year.

Close up of the shelves at Mattel… What can I say, I’m proud of my brother and his two new games out this year.  Sadly, they are available only in Germany. It does not appear that they will be sold in the US.  At least they are already available at Amazon.de and other online retailers.

I don’t remember ever seeing a Spiel des Jahres booth before at Essen.  During the week, they had a few small tables where people were playing the SdJ, KedJ and KdJ award winners.  What I don’t know is whether or not this was also being used as a depot for the judges to receive sample games for consideration for next year.  In years previous, I have seen different SdJ jury members walking the halls on their own picking up games that interested them.  Having a central location might make that an easier process?

One of the new novelties at the DoW booth. 6 player Small World! It does not come with the disembodied hand holding it, however,

My first haul.  Had to make a run back just after the press show as my shoulder was killing me… this was when I discovered that it was an extra 5 minutes each way to get back, and that distance was excruciating with fully laden bags.  The end result of this discovery is that I made trips back more often with slightly lighter loads, even if it took longer to make each individual trip.