Well, it is late October – must be time for Spiel!  I have again made the trip to Germany to see ALL the games.  I’ve been in the country for a few days now, but really all of the gaming activity starts on late Tuesday night.   I have a wonderful tradition of kicking off my week in Essen with a nice evening of games with Frank Kulkmann.

Frank is one of the main people behind the Gamebox at boardgame.de, and I highly recommend that you check out his site.   He is pretty much the champ at daily reports from the fair and has been for at least the last 20 years.

We started off the week with a great game of Bohemians – a new release from Portal. We quickly learned the game and jumped right in.  It is an interesting take on the deckbuilding genre, where you draw a hand each round and then try to match icons on the sides of the cards in your tableau.  You score points for each such match, and you can also add other cards (muses) to your deck which are played such that they augment the scoring abilities of the cards in your tableau.  Our learning 3p game only took an hour or so, so this should be a fairly quick game once we’re comfortable with the rules.  There are a few steps to setup which should ensure that each game plays out differently.  I spoke with the designer this afternoon and he also explained the robust solo game that also comes in the box.

Then, onto the Novelties show on Wednesday – this is a great opportunity for the press to get a good look at a lot of new games in a single location.  Over the years, the format of this event have changed a bit, and I prefer the new setup.

An entire hall of the Spiel is reserved for the new display tables, and for a few hours, we get a chance to see the new games and talk to the demonstrators in a much less crowded atmosphere than the halls of the Messe.

Ventopia is a new Knizia from Ravensburger. It has a speaker built into the board, and I think it is going to talk to you.

Wispwood is one of the new releases from CGE – I got to play it at the Gathering, and I’m going to have a full report on it soon.

Fair Enough is the “official” game of SPIEL 2025, designed by Friedemann Friese.  No one was there to explain it, so this picture is all I know for the moment.

I really like the art style of Gzhel, a game from Hobby World.  It is very similar to Mezen which was red/black.  I have a meeting with them later in the week.

Umm, I’m still a whole box behind because I haven’t even cracked open the Snowy Andor – but there is more to come in the series!  I have really liked this one since playing through the first three boxes during COVID.

Pinched is a game about art theivery from Mighty Boards – the art production really looks great, and I’m hoping to get a copy to play tomorrow night.

The boards here in Catan Connect are just on folded pieces of paper – it looks like you can add on players by getting another board/sheet and placing it to the left or right of the existing board(s).  The fair is also advertising the world’s largest game of Catan, so there should be a lot of copies of this floating around…

Boss Fighters QR has a lot of buzz about it from some of my colleagues, and I snatched up a copy to try.

I’m always a sucker for dexterity games; here are a few flicking games from Japan.  Planepita on the left is similar to Crokinole, but with magnetic pieces that you can stick in place when you flip the discs over.

For veterans of the blog, here is the first official Doner Pide of the fair.  The local restaurant is definitely my favorite – and we’ll be back here a number of times during the week.

After lunch, came back for a few more demos.  We learned all about Dewan, coming soon from Space Cowboys.   They are looking at worldwide* release in 1st qtr 2026 – as long as your country name doesn’t end in “States of America”.   Unclear when it will make it here, but maybe I’ll be ordering from Le Valet d’Coeur come next February…  It has a great pedigree, coming from the same mind that designed Faraway.

Here is a pile of games sitting quietly on a bench in a hotel room.

I had another chance to play Map Masters, the new release from Captain Games.  I had played this earlier in the year at the Gathering, and the final version is as good as I can remember.  In each of the 6 rounds, you build a 5 card dungeon and then trace your way through it with a dry-erase marker.  You have to overcome obstacles in your path (i.e. find a key before going through a lock, find a sword to go through a dragon), trying to collect treasures and coins.  You use the coins to but new cards to your deck (mini-deck building) or to get spell cards that give you benefits each round.

You score points for passing through certain icons each round – one item you know ahead of time and one that is flipped up at random.  The game plays quite quickly as it is only 6 rounds, and each could take as little as 2-3 minutes.  The game can also be played in a cooperative fashion and there are multiple different scenarios in the box.  I had thought that this would be a keeper for me back in April when I played the proto, and tonight’s play does nothing to change my mind on that.

We then finished with a game of Movie Tricks – from Chilifox.  Though it is called a trick-taker, I think it is really more a set collection game that uses trick-taking as a side mechanism to determing drafting order (think Honshu).  You have four categories in your movie (the four suits) and you draft cards from the market in each round based on the “strength” of the card you played in the trick.

You score for a multitude of things: the highest summing row in your tableau, the worst summing column in your tableau, and then each of the four columns has its own scoring rule.   We also had fun reading off the movie quotes on each card and guessing what movie it came from.

And with that, it’s late at night and time to hit the sack so I’m bright eyed and bushy tailed for the first official day of the show!

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor