There, SPIEL Essen 2024 is behind us, and it was another great edition. It was slightly awkward when we saw “by the way, the 4-day tickets are sold out” before we got ours; thankfully we managed to get daily tickets before they ran out as well. This is the first year that they have contingents, and they hit them every day, so it was, well, a busy fair. Anyway, let’s go for the (by now) traditional back-from-Essen post! I counted 37 games in this post, so brace yourselves, it’s a long one 😉

Floral

Floral is a game where you try to make a pretty garden and, more importantly, a prettier garden than your opponents. It plays with a deck of cards that are divided in 6 sections with different flower patterns; an additional pictogram tells what the scoring flower for this card is and how much it scores. On your turn, you lay a card in your garden, you get the opportunity to score one of the goal cards, and you put a goal card in the common area. The tension between “do I use this card in the garden or do I hope to score it next round, hoping that nobody will do so before me” is pretty fun. First game we tried and already one in the bag!

Bus & Stop

In Bus&Stop, you collect cards into sets of people who want to reach a destination and you drop them there – the more people you drop at a time, the more points you get. With some constraints though: when you get a card of a given color you need to get all of them on the board (and the colors of the cards are independent of the destination of the people), you’re limited to 10 passengers on the bus at all times, and the amount of scoring cards for each passenger category is limited. Overall though, it felt like it lacked depth for our own taste (might be a good one to play with kids though!).

kCaloria

In kCaloria, you create food chains – every tile has a cost that can be paid with cubes from neighboring tiles, but every non-consumed cube also counts at points. More icons give placement bonuses and maluses.
Players start as different ecosystems which eventually form a large one as it connects at the center of the table; under certain conditions you end up getting resources (and thus points) from your adversary. The game ends when someone has played two of their human tiles.
It is actually a very cool game; but to play with four players you actually need four boxes, and that feels a bit awkward (and a somewhat high price point). They currently have two different ecosystems and are developing two more; I have a vague hope they might make a four-ecosystem box at some point and that might be a better fit for us. Maybe next year, who knows!

Speculaas

Playing Speculaas was definitely theme (and cookies!) motivated. Apparently speculaas (the cookies) are very popular in Croatia (and their spice mix seems more clove-forward but pretty good 🙂 )
Speculaas-the-game is a draft game where you alternate placing recipes and ingredients and try to make a grid that fulfills the most recipes. Lovely theme, and the draft with two decks is a nice idea, but we played just the both of us (it plays up to 5), and two-player draft can get a bit messy, which maybe didn’t give Speculaas a chance to shine for us.

Cascadia Rolling Rivers

Cascadia Rolling Rivers (and its twin Rolling Hills) is a roll&write in the Cascadia extended universe. You roll dice (from both a common pool and a personal pool) to get resources (animals) which are then used to score ecosystems. We played the family fast version whereas we probably should have at least played the regular version (where you need to get only one type of resource instead of all of them – more interesting choices probably); as it is, Pierre is not fond of roll&writes and this one wasn’t one of the rare exceptions 🙂

Cities

Cities is a very tight worker placement game – at each round, you get to pick one city tile, one objective card, one bonus tile and some building blocks, which you combine to create the most impressive neighborhood. It flows incredibly well and might be on the shallow end of depth, but it was very enjoyable and we picked a copy.

Xylotar

Xylotar is a trick-taking game where you only know the color of your card and the relative position of the cards in your hand. Additionally, the color of the card matches a range of values for the card.
At some point during the game, you also get to predict/bet how many tricks you will have won by the end of the game.
I can’t say I grasped all of the game (the physical setup of the demo didn’t help) but it felt interesting enough that we got a copy.

Seers Catalog

Seers Catalogue is another trick-taking game, where your goal is to get rid of your cards fast enough, but not too fast: your end score is the value of your highest card minus the number of cards you still have in hand. Tricks are a set of cards of the same value or a set of consecutive cards of the same color; you can play if you have the same combination with higher values. Add a few power cards in the mix and you get Seers Catalog.
It’s working well, but both of us found it similar enough to Krass Kariert (which also has hand card order mechanics) that we didn’t pick it.

Sandbag

Sandbag was the third trick-taking game in demo by Bézier Games this year. Your goal is to do the least number of tricks – every card you pick is a point and you try to minimize points; there’s a few deck manipulation operations at the beginning of the game (put some cards aside, give cards to your neighbors), which also determine what color is trump.
I was very confused by that game, because it feels very hard to be the starter player if you don’t have low enough cards to not pick all the cards of the game in one go (did I lose this game dramatically? maaaaybe.)

Summit

In Summit (which is actually a 2017 game), players try to reach the top of a mountain despite weather conditions that mean you probably shouldn’t have started climbing in the first place 😁 You build a path with triangular tiles that have ropes and you move up (hopefully) while managing oxygen, food, equipment and weight.
This may be the first time that I see a weight mechanic that makes sense and that’s easy to use, so kudos on that; the triangular tiles are also cool.
The game plays either collaboratively or competitively; we played the former. The event cards are BRUTAL and really stressed me out, so I’m passing on this game (apparently I react more strongly on things that impact my imaginary survival than when I play with more abstract concepts than a personal avatar!)

Happy Home

In Happy Home, players try to make pretty homes by adding furniture tiles to their house. You get points by sets of furniture in a room (in the bathroom you want a bathtub, a sink and a toilet seat, for instance) and by colors of furniture that appear in different rooms.
You can also add potted plants for additional bonuses and you need to hide scratches of the floor to avoid maluses.
Very reminiscent of a Patchwork with more constraints and we have quite a few of that type of games already.

Duck & Cover

Duck & Cover is a silly game where players start with a grid of cards and try to minimize the number of points they have on the grid by the end of the game. The cards are called on a random order; when you still have a card with that number, you move it by either covering a neighbor or by moving it to an empty space. If you don’t (i.e. if it’s already covered), you say “quack” (or, if you play with French people, “coin”.)
It’s a quick game that can fit the same kind of niche as 6 nimmt (“waiting for food delivery to arrive”), but with ducks. Yes, we bought a copy (and got a free rubber duck!)

Oranges & Lemons

Oranges & Lemons is a worker placement game about commerce in London in the 18th century. Solid mechanic, great graphical design, wonderful explanation at the booth, but it didn’t quite click as something that would complete or replace something in our collection.

Codetalk

Codetalk is a 2018 take on tic-tac-toe: players play on a 9×9 grid, divided in 3×3 subgrids. The twist is that where you play on a subgrid constraints the move of the next player to a given subgrid (eg if you play in the middle of a subgrid, the next player has to play on the middle subgrid). Neat, but it felt like it didn’t necessarily warrant such fancy material.

Tower Up

In Tower Up, players are building skyscrapers of various colors on a map. Every time they start a new building, they have to grow the adjacent buildings, and they get to place a roof of their color on one of said buildings. Roofs can also get built on top of, as soon as the skyscrapers still has an empty neighbor spot!
Cool mechanic, pretty original, and we got a copy. (That and Cities are two games with stackable building blocks 🙂 )

Dungeon Exit

Dungeon Exit is a maze game. It can be played solo, as a race between players, or by starting a path and exchanging boards in the middle of the game.
The maze is a puzzle where the start, end, and a number of checkpoints are fixed on a grid; the board and path pieces are magnetic and players need to find a path with the provided pieces.
Well made and good use of magnets, but mazes are my nemesis :p

Temple Code

Temple Code is a deduction game where players race to find the combination of 3 symbols that is assigned to them at the beginning of the game. It has clever combinatorics that enable it to automate a tiny version of MasterMind (so that players can solve grids at the same time), but that’s essentially it.

Out of Sock

Out of sock is a (sock) set collection game with a couple of twists: there are cards to double, zero or negate a set, and more importantly the choices you get are determined by how well you throw some, but not all, dice from a plastic container with a single fast move. Not really our thing (but we did get a few laughs still).

Whoforwat

In Whoforwat, players try to cooperate to decide which of the weird characters depicted on the cards is more likely to do this or that (“to wear that hat” “to have a green thumb” “to be friends with this other character”). Vaguely reminiscent of Dixit (but as a collaborative game). It probably works best with people who each other/share jokes, but as it is it was pretty fun. Possibly the reason we didn’t get it was that we didn’t know in which language we wanted it!

Pixies

In Pixies, players take turns to pick cards to build a scoring tableau. They need to place a given card at the right spot (numbered 1 to 9); if there is already a card, they can choose which one to keep and which one to put as “validating” the other one. If there’s already two cards, they must put it in a free space. Points are counted by value of the validated cards, number of spirals (positive), number of crosses (negative), and largest area of the same color (whose value increases with the rounds, of which there are three). We tested this game on day 2, and on the morning of day 3 we were both thinking “… we should have gotten a copy of Pixies yesterday”, so we did 🙂

Inori

Inori is a worker placement game where the goals change at every round, because the cards giving positions change every round (to the same or a different color, which also changes what’s available on the card). Players collect tokens that they can use to pay for other actions or to score. Quite nice, and very pretty; it did feel like a few mechanics (like the eggs) could have been adjusted to make the rule set a bit tighter.

Stickers

Stickers is a sticker collecting game: players compete to get the best collection of stickers. They do that by adding stickers to their collections, and by manipulating the global sticker market to make sticker types more or less valuable. Cute art, but we were not convinced by the game play.

Castle Builder

We dubbed Castle Builder “Pascal’s Triangle, the game”: you build a castle with tiles that have numbers on them, and the base rule is that you can play a tile on top of the castle if it’s the sum of the two tiles below it. You then score points depending on the height of the new tile. There are exceptions and ways to continue building while staying at reasonable numbers, but that’s the gist of it; the game is a race between players – the first one passing 7 gold coins on the score track wins the game.

It was one of our “unexpected plays” for this fair: getting a table at Fryxgames (of Terraforming Mars fame) typically requires a fair bit of luck. We did like the game, but not enthusiastically so – I’d be happy to replay it, though.

Pan T’es Mort

Pan T’es Mort is a mix of a trick-taking and push-your-luck game: you first do a trick-taking game that gives you cards to help you play russian roulette – the more cards you get, the more luck you have. It might have worked looking at the rules, but the explanation we got were hazy on said rules, and we were not convinced.

Undergrove

Undergrove was another “no way we’re going to be able to play that… oh look a table just spawned!” moment. In Undergrove, you play a tree. Well, a network of trees with a symbiosis to mushrooms. You get to spawn saplings, to absorb carbon, and to use mushrooms to get the nutrients you need. Part resource management, part area control, part engine building – exactly the type of game I enjoy in that weight category. Also kudos to the person at the AEG booth for the explanation, and at the small “here are your first turns” tutorial sheets that really give a great intro to the game. Of course we got a copy.

Monkey Palace

It had been a while since LEGO had tried its hand at board games, and the previous attempts were not necessarily that successful (we have good memories of Creationary, though.) Monkey Palace is a game where players add bricks (arches and pillars) to a shared palace structure, and score points depending on the number of arches they placed. These points can be used to buy cards that give more bricks for the following turn. It’s a decent board game (although the brick placement rules could be clearer), and the result of the game does feel like building a structure with your co-players. I did like it, but Pierre was far less convinced.

Looot

In Looot, players are tribes of vikings who conquer a territory: stealing resources and occupying buildings. Part path-finding, part resource-contesting, mostly tile-placing: I enjoyed it quite a lot. It might be the game I will regret not picking up during the fair.

Link City

In Link City, players (try to) cooperate to build a city that makes some kind of sense. Given a set of tiles representing locations (as diverse as a circus, a co-working place and a boxing studio), a player secretly decides where he would put them, and the other players need to discuss and guess where they think these places are, considering the tiles already placed on the board. The tiles are only placed if the mayor and the rest of the players agree. It’s a really neat idea! and we got some conversations such as “this would make sense around here, in the tourist district” “it’s news to me that we have a tourist district”. We looked for an English version and failed… and got a German version instead (this is how we get some vocabulary, I guess 😛 )

Dicy Cards

Dicy Cards is a dice game where players roll dice and can either use them directly to score or re-roll them – at the cost of blocking a card. There’s a nice tension between wanting better scores and being able to score more cards (because you need to pass if you want to unlock your cards to play them again). It was sold out when we played, so we didn’t ponder buying it or not.

Umbrellas

In Umbrella, player try to match patterns of colored umbrellas to goal cards (every card shows a pattern of 4 umbrellas that must be of the same color to score it). Patterns are made by sliding tokens up, down, left and right; points are scored by making patterns and by using umbrellas of the right color to do so (so that the player’s color score cards can be met too). I liked it (I may have said “it’s like Labyrinth, but not boring!” (possibly because players have individual boards and can plan, compared to Labyrinth chaos)), but maybe not enough to warrant a buy.

Captain Flip

In Captain Flip, players are pirate captains that hire shipmates for their ship. At every turn, they pick a tile in a bag and must decide if they want to keep that mate or flip the tile and get another one (maybe worse, but not going back!). They score points during the game and at the end depending on placement on the ship. Nice game, but it may have lacked a bit of spark for us.

Ninjan

Ninjan is a take on rock-paper-scissors. Every round, cards are displayed on the table; players choose a card secretly and resolve from high to low. On resolving, they check if their card beats one from the display (with rock-paper-scissors rules); if so they exchange both cards and get the display one as score. There are negative-score cards, and the resolving order means that there’s a domino effect on the cards that actually gets picked. It was fun and inexpensive, we got a deck.

Alpina

In Alpina, players build a shared tableau of cards and choose to put a meeple on some of them. At the end of the game, the meeples score according to the symbols on the cards, which typically count the number of cards of a given type (landscape of animal) on lines, adjacent or making a connected component. Pretty neat, but we were more enthusiastic at Ninjan on the same booth, and we ended up picking only that one.

Theme Park Mania

In Theme Park Mania, players build a common theme park (where the rides still stay player-owned) and have their meeples visit the park. A deck of cards give them either movement points or various events (which may be beneficial or not). It felt kind of fun – the theme helps – and we even had a tiny bit of emerging story-telling happening, which was fun :D. I have a bit of a doubt now on the later phase of the game, where there’s probably less building and more meeple visits, but we didn’t get to play in that phase much (we had a time limit on the demo). Still, we got a box, we’ll see 🙂

Landmarks

Landmarks is cooperative word game where one player has a map and tries to navigate his team mates through various dangers by means of word associations. A map starts with three words, and the guide needs to make the team guess where to put the next hexagon, while avoiding traps and probably get water (which give more hexagons to put on the map). Players win when they have found at least one treasure and the exit without dying first. It feels like a more constrained version of Codenames that can also be played with two players and/or with more inexperienced players. We picked a box (possibly because the game was explained to us by the game designer too 😉 ).

Roaring 20s

Roaring 20s is a bidding game: at each turn, players can either bid for a dinosaur to add to their board or get a resource card that will allow them to bid higher in later turns. We’re not super fond of bidding games in general, but this was kind of nice and the art is really pretty.

Linx

Linx is a multiplayer mash-up between tic-tac-toe and rock-paper-scissors. Players win by either having a line of face-up symbols of their color or a line of face-down symbols of their color. To get face-down symbols, they have to cover a tile that shows the element that is beaten by the tile they want to place. Cute mechanism (but it was the end of the fair and the booth was already empty when we played).