Day 1 of Essen Spiele
First impressions: the new owners of the convention have changed the traditional logo, and rearranged the halls completely – I don’t have any issue with any of that. I rather like the new arrangements of the halls, where it seems that corridors are wider and publishers are grouped together in some kind of logical way – heavier games in Hall 3, the big publishers in Hall 6…it all seems rather good. The Business lounges for pitching games and so on are also rather nice. The only thing I don’t like is the long trek through empty halls 7 and 8 from the car park!
Spiel was hugely busy today and the old “spiel shuffle” was back – kind of nice to see so many people after the days of Covid!
Plenty of games to see, plenty of games on my list to check out; but so far here is a brief report of what I saw and judged…
– Djinn by H@ll Games – we had a 15 minutes walkthrough of this as tables to play were very limited. I’m a fan of Benjamin Schwer (Crown of Amara, Hadara) and Djinn is a beautifully thought out and produced game where the components are sophisticated without being over the top. The game itself, one of fighting evil Djinns and aiming for objectives with an engine building element, looks smooth and elegant with lots of meaningful choices and Simon Neale and I both bought a copy on the strength of gut feeling and liking the look and feel of the game.
– Accuse – Small fast deduction card game from La Mame – played and definitely not the kind of game I will get to my gaming table but a decent enough 15 min bluffing game
– Amalfi: The Resistance – played two rounds kindly taught by Simmy – this is a neatly made worker placement game with some fiddly iconography. Once that was overcome it has echoes of many other WP games without offering anything that new in my view. I would not refuse to play it again however as it was pleasant enough.
– some automatic buy games: Nucleum, Annukusi and Rats of Wistar are three games co-authored by Simon Luciano and on his current form I didn’t hesitate to get them without playing them.
– other buys: the Waterworld expansion for Ark Nova, because I’m a big fan, Delta from Game Brewer which looks nice (and I edited the rules so I should know); 5 Towers from Deep Print because I’m intrigued by the mechanic
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White Castle which while highly hyped seems to pack a lot of game into a teeny box; and Douc in Danger which is an interesting Trick taking game variant with great art and for which money goes to a charity to save Douc monkeys.
– games checked and rejected (your mileage may vary):
Zapp ‘Em which was like a card version of Battleships;
Ninja Master (speed game) and Viking See-Saw (dexterity game), two neat Knizia games done by Itten in tiny little boxes, because neither of the game’s mechanics appealed to me;
similarly Big Top and Pollen both from AllPlay Games – great looking games, stuffed into tiny boxes at a good price but the mechanics weren’t original enough for me to buy them (still: very impressed with the AllPlay Games stand and products).
More tomorrow!
