Five days. Forty-six plays. Four prototypes plus thirty games that were new to me.

Unless otherwise noted, these are FIRST impressions… I only had the opportunity to play many of these games a single time with a physical copy.

If you’re interested in my Essen (well, post-Essen) impressions from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022, you can find them at the following links. (I’m not sure why I didn’t do one of these in 2021.)

• Mark’s Bundle of 2024 Essen Game Thoughts
• Mark’s Bundle of 2023 Essen Game Thoughts
• Mark’s Bundle of 2022 Essen Game Thoughts
• Mark’s Bundle of 2020 Essen Game Thoughts
• Mark’s Bundle of 2019 Essen Game Thoughts
• Mark’s Bundle of 2018 Essen Game Thoughts

For those of you who haven’t read a lot of my reviews, they may give you a better insight into my board game tastes and what I’m likely to enjoy. (Which, of course, may or may not line up with your choices. Your mileage may vary.) I’m also linking to OG articles about the games when they are available.

Revisiting My Thoughts/Rules from the past three years

I had some thoughts (well, rules) in response to the Essen 2022 extravaganza of games. In 2023 & 2024, I commented on those thoughts. So this is year four – and there have been some moves in the right direction.

• 2022: Publishers should have their rulebook and components blind playtested before approving for print.
  • 2023: Still true. I don’t care how desperate you are to make Essen, doing a substandard job of getting the game published may well keep us from enjoying your game.
  • 2024: 100x yes… whether it was badly organized rulebooks, misprinted components, tiny player aid cards that required a magnifying glass & a strong light, or even rulebooks that were printed too large to fit in the box without being rolled down, it’s still an issue.
    • 2025: Less games with issues like this (at least amongst the games I played this year)… and the ones that had errors already had errata in the box (Bohemians) or replacement components (Ice & Idols).
• 2022: Good iconography and clean presentation are more important than being artsy… not everyone has perfect eyesight and/or hi-tech lighting around their state of the art gaming table.
  • 2023: Yep.
  • 2024: My eyesight is not getting any better – and that’s particularly true when you’re using a dark-colored graphic against a black background… or a yellow wooden piece printed with a white font.
    • 2025: Again, seemed like less of an issue this year… with one notable exception (Lunar Skyline)
• 2022: If your game is going to take 2+ hours of my life, it needs to tell a story and/or help me tell a story. I do not want to do mechanical stuff over and over to harvest points for that long.
  • 2023: Evacuation did this brilliantly this year. Planta Nubo, not so much.
  • 2024: SETI has an excellent arc to it, as did Stephens.
    • 2025: Orloj… sigh. There’s a difference between veneer and theme.
• 2022: Stupid and fun is still worth playing. I will excuse a lot of weird design choices and even unclear rules if I’m having fun. If I’m not having fun, I don’t feel particularly charitable.
  • 2023: Yes. Yes. 1000 times yes.
  • 2024: Example: there’s a prototype of an upcoming game we played that almost had me in tears from laughter. I’m buying it as soon as it becomes available. (BTW, this was Hot Streak.)
    • 2025: Still true.

My Favorites

In each section, the games are listed in alphabetical order… and I’ve included how many times I had the chance to play the game as well if I played it multiple times.

• Barbecubes
  • I’d played Tinderblox before… but I think Barbecubes is even better for (a) using the tin as part of the game, and (b) the way that it perfectly captures how bad I am at grilling things in real-life. It’s a great tiny dexterity game (you use tweezers!) that is perfect for taking to restaurants to play while you wait for your food.
• Dewan
  • played 2 times in five days
  • My initial elevator pitch description of Dewan was “civ-building meets Ticket to Ride”… but with some more time to think about it, it’s actually closer to Web of Power/Kardinal & Konig with the combination of drafting cards and placing settlements on the map. This 40 minute game comes with five different scenarios (we only played the basic one) and has very nice production… and falls solidly in the well-done super-filler category.
• Fair Enough
  • played 2 times in five days
  • Let’s be clear – this is a game designed by Friedemann Friese to be the official Essen fair game, so it’s not the second coming of Power Grid. It’s a light 30 minute drafting game melded onto a push-your-luck showdown that mimics the process of making wishlists prior to Essen and then braving the halls and booths with limited time to get it back to your hotel room. There are a lot of Easter eggs for long-time gamers in the card art and both groups I taught the game to had a lot of fun with it. I do wonder if the best audience for the game is as a game night closer with folks who understand what game conventions are like.
• Natera: New Beginning
  • In what should be no surprise to us here in 2025, humans did something stupid and manage to kill themselves off… leaving behind animals getting smarter & smarter due to the “something stupid”. Which means that each of the players is part of an animal group (I played the Mole Band) trying to gain dominance by utilizing the stuff humans left behind. Natera is not that dark in its theme – it’s closer to Everdell than to Watership Down. It does remind me of Everdell in some ways – worker placement with resource management and tableau building – but with some interesting twists and its own rhythm. I’m actually looking for a personal copy of this now. (I didn’t play the solo system, but it looks easy to manage and enjoy.)
• Sanctuary
  • played 2 times in five days
  • played solo (1 play)
  • I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this is streamlined Ark Nova… and being an Ark Nova fan, I knew I was likely to enjoy this before I got it to the table. Even with that, I was impressed at how well-done this version was. The solo game of Sanctuary was great (incredibly simple to manage the system) and my two-player game was enjoyable as well. I do think that downtime could be an issue at the higher player counts (4 and 5) and would likely suggest something else with that many folks.

Games I’d Be More Than Happy to Play Again

• 7 Wonders Dice
  • played 4 times in five days
  • This is flat out the friendliest game in the 7 Wonders family – your attacks don’t actually hurt your neighbors (they just help you). Difficulty-wise, it’s more complicated than 7 Wonders: Architects due to the roll’n’write nature of the game… but it’s easier to teach than 7 Wonders due to the face-up nature of all the options. It’s an enjoyable 20-30 minutes with simultaneous play… but it isn’t going to set the gaming world on fire.
• Biddle
  • This is a smarter (and less-blingy) take on Last Chance/Yahtzee Deluxe Poker. Players bid “name that tune” style to attempt to roll a dice combination on six dice. Laughter and fun ensues. (Biddle’s bidding system is substantially better than Last Chance.)
• Bim Bam Bum
  • Flip a card, say the right words in the right way or take penalty cards. Those words are “bim”, “bam”, and “bum”. You already know if you’re the right person for this game with those two sentences.
• Bohemians
  • The artwork is gorgeous… but more importantly, this is a highly thematic deck-builder with some gamer-y elements that all worked together. The “day planning” portion of the game and the ability to spend banked points to negate bad cards or draw more cards are both interesting mechanics. And, to my amazement, the rulebook from Portal is actually pretty easy to learn from.
• Haunted Mouse
  • Currently on Kickstarter from Bezier Games… a shedding game with some clever bits that doesn’t overstay its welcome at the table.
• I Made You a Mixtape
  • A simple drafting game that works because (a) you are drafting not only for set-collecting purposes but also for “flow” and “balance”, and (b) because whoever worked with the theme definitely owned a boombox with two cassette bays and made mixtapes for their friends in the mid-80s.
• Ninety Nine
  • played 3 times in five days
  • I keep a running list of games that work for non-gamers/family that are “better than UNO”. This Skip-Bo-ish challenge to continually rid yourself of cards has jumped onto that list.
• Ruins
  • A redevelopment of one of the earlier card-crafting games (Custom Heroes) is successful. The new art coupled with some tightening of the screws in the game design makes for a much more enjoyable shedding game.

Games I’m Willing To Play

• Double Seven
  • A better version of Rummikub.
• Kilia
  • Clever resource management game that has a thematic veneer (Trading in the Not-Mediterranean) but is short enough that it didn’t bother me.
• Oddland
  • The fancy pieces from the Kickstarter version made it easier to see what was & wasn’t scoring. It’s a card placement game with Carcassonne-ish elements in the scoring system.
• OrthoGnomes
  • The theme is a joke… but the actual gameplay is cool. And it has a custom-printed lazy susan. At its heart, OrthoGnomes is a two-player version of Pueblo.
• Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers
  • Since I’ve never played Raja of the Ganges, I’m not sure how well this roll’n’write captures the feel of the original game… but it works well and rewards experience at the game.
• Skiwi
  • It’s a cooperative game about a skiing kiwi… which actually turns out to be an interesting press-your-luck card placement game for 1-2 players. (Note: this is a skiing kiwi fruit, not the unusual looking animal.)
• Tacta
  • Card placement game that hit here in the U.S. this summer – was enjoyable with 2 players but there are enough decks for six players in the box and I cannot imagine how large a table you would need to make that work.
• Team Quack
  • Cooperative clue-giving in the vein of Dixit… demands less creativity than Dixit but still works. And there are ducks and the ability to spend ducks to make sound clues.

Games I Didn’t Get a Full Play Of That I Want To Play Again

• Garden Lake
  • I sat in for another players last couple of turns – this is a tile-laying game with crazy shaped polynomial pieces and a unique drafting system that keeps it from being multiplayer solitaire. I’d like to try a whole game.
• Kingdom Crossing
  • Cute animals building a society seems to be a common theme… but this game is based on the classic “seven bridges” problem and has some really clever mechanics as well as nice variability. I only got to play the first round but would love to have a chance to play it out.

A Disappointment

• Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock
  • My one game of this lasted 3+ hours… and we not only discovered rules wrong as we played but also found out we’d made errors in setting up the game. With those caveats, I still was disappointed by Orloj for a couple of reasons. First, the theme is intriguing (I’d love to see the clock in real life) but it is simply a veneer for a worker placement game rather than having any meaningful connection to the actions players take. Second, the clock mechanic at the heart of the game limits your action choices in pretty meaningful ways – leading to roughly a third of your turns to be “compromise” moves. It may not be fair, but I kept mentally comparing it to Galactic Cruise (they share similar “place workers for a few turns, then have a ‘homecoming’ turn” and “you can bump other players workers” systems) where it is unusual to have a wasted action, let alone turn.
  • Your mileage may vary – a lot of folks really enjoyed the game. But not all of us.

Games I Wasn’t All That Excited About

• Ice and Idols
  • I really wanted to like this game – it looks amazing on the table and I’m a sucker for 3D pieces. But the gameplay is a little chaotic and the 3D pieces mean you really need to stand up and/or play on a low table to be able to see the idols and altars on the “underboard”. I’d play it again but I wouldn’t bother chasing down a copy for myself.
• LINKX
  • Connect 4 with polyominoes – some of you out there are the right audience for this well-made game. I am not.
• Mongoose
  • played 2 times in five days
  • I really shouldn’t play deduction games – they are not my cup of tea. That said, this is a solid deduction game that isn’t a brain-burner.

The Island of Misfit Toys Games

• Ghost Lift
  • Shedding game with nifty ghost pieces but very little control.
• Lunar Skyline
  • Trick-taking game that was under-developed and produced for flash rather than ease of play.
• Strange World Above the Clouds
  • played solo
  • Card placement into a 4×4 grid with odd rules and exceptions.
• The Royal Society of Archeology
  • Worker placement game with some interesting ideas but just didn’t feel fully finished. It made me want to play Thebes instead (similar theme).
• Zoology
  • played 2 times in five days
  • We played back to back games of this deduction-lite game… one competitive, one cooperative. The production is lovely, but the rules need serious tweaking and the game is very susceptible to voting based on gaming the clues.

Pictures at top of article…
Top row: Oddland, 7 Wonders: Dice, Natera: New Beginnings
Middle Row: Barbecubes, Dewan, Ninety-Nine
Bottom Row: Ice & Idols, Fair Enough, Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock