The first time you enter in the Messe is something you can’t forget. Something you know will change your life for ever like the first day of school, the first kiss or the first time you eat Tortellini (for people from Modena something usually will happen around the first year of life).

Francesco first time was, as usual, a big “wow”, just entering the hall, than games games and games and than another “wow” for the first twisted potato.

Caterina is now attending a language high school and she is able to understand english rules and catch a bit of German and french too. Francesco doesn’t speak english but knows almost all the usefull words like “tank”, “hit”, “score”, “move”, “resources”, “card” and so on … so we are really ready to dive into the most hard core euros despite the fact that most of the demonstrators are considering us a typical casual family …

Our first game was Great Western Trails. For the third year in a row we got the same demonstrator at Eggertspiele … a nice and well prepared lady … the game look great: the first impression is having something really hot in the hands … Something like Mombasa last year or Russian Railroads two years ago. We really like how the deck building mechanic of the cattles combine with the train’s advancement and the cow-boys/constructors/engineers engine.

Just a quick hello to Adrien from Days of Wonders to talk about the incoming Memoir 44 expansion (we really love that game) and take the last Small World expansion (actually is our most played game on iPad: just today we played 4 times).

Oceanos from Iello was a really nice surprise: top level graphics and materials for a little easy game. You have to explore the oceans looking for animals and treasure, going deeper round after round. You can score points in many different ways and you have to upgrade your submirine in the meanwhile. Every turn you have to choose the card to play and the mechanic governing how many cards is really good. A lot of little decision for a light game with really something more under the surface. I hope Asterion (Asmodee Italy) will make it available in Italy soon.

We were so lucky to win also a Iello’s battery recharger in the lottery thanks to some special cards we got playing the game!!!

Some relax with unicorns (Hop from Fun Forge), potatoes and an easy card game from queen before visiting Artipia Games, one of the publisher I prefer.

Dice City and The Pursuit of Happiness were two hits for me last year and I really love Project Elite. We played and enjoied Fields of Green, a multiplayer solitary with a good amount of pianiifcation, resource managment and bulidings. It was nice: probably a bit too much micromanagement in the last round but we liked.

Before going to the hotel we played Adrenaline from CGE: a well designed board game version of a typical videogame. You are fighting in arena getting points wounding and killing other players, spawning again on the map dead after dead. Me and Francesco really liked it: for Caterina was just OK. We played ot again in the hotel with Myriam and Surya, friends from Dutch we are used to meet year after year in the hotel and play with in the evening.

We finished the day with two X-nimnt! games. It was my first time with a 6 nimnt! clone and I really enjoyed it. The difference from the original is that the row of cards can be 3,4 and 5 long and you have a row in front of you where you can place some cards instead of getting.

See you tomorrow at the Messe!
Andrea, Caterina and Francesco