Essen – Balise's Blog

SPIEL 2025 in Essen

Published on 26 October 202527 October 2025 by Balise1 Comment

It has become a tradition: in October, we go to Essen in Germany for SPIEL. We have our habits, we know how things work, and we have a grand, if exhausting time. And it’s a great way to test a lot of things and to make opinions and quick reviews! And to come back with, well, a bunch of loot to enjoy between two editions of SPIEL 😉

A bunch of board games and associated misc elements - Ink, Bohemians, Railroad Tiles, Wispwood, a book "Boardgames that tell stories", expansions for Pixies and Sea Salt & Paper, RAVEL, Furchtloss, Kingdom Legacy expansions, A Carnivore Did it, Les Derniers Droïdes, Weave, Kingdom Crossing, Just 3 folds, Floral and Similo are set on a table.

The loot doesn’t reflect everything we played (and there’s a few things in there that are not a direct consequence of what we played in this edition), so here’s everything we saw!

Azul Duel

A two-player game; two boards with slots and tokens, a score board in the middle of the table, and 5 circles (four small, one large) with various colored tokens on them.

Azul is a classic, declined in many versions, and this version goes back to the idea of the first game, but in a 2-player version. The original Azul already plays pretty well with two players, but I still appreciated the adjustments to the rules that make it more tactical – a bit more choices that depend on the exact timing (and not only on the opportunity to deny something to your opponent), and I liked the idea of building your grid as you go. We’re not really on the market for 2-player games these days, but if we had been, it would have been under consideration for a buy (especially since we don’t own the original version).

Take Time

A round abstract clock face with white and dark blue numbered cards around it in six piles. The sum of the piles is ascending clockwise starting from 1.

A cooperative game where players try to solve constraints of a round clock with the cards that they are given – but they can only discuss strategy before looking at said cards. Pretty neat, probably has the potential to get very difficult challenges – but it felt like, for us, it would fit the same niche as The Crew (which we both preferred). Very pretty, though, and probably shorter games than The Crew too.

Locus

A sheet of paper divided into multiple colored areas with grids and a few boxes of the grid crossed. There are also a few cards with colored polyominos, and a stack of LOCUS boxes in the background.

Locus has a very clear (and acknowledged) inspiration from Ganz Schön Clever, except that instead of dice, you get cards with polyominoes – players take turn choosing one and crossing the corresponding patterns in the different grids, with a significant chance to have combos that yield more crossings on the sheet (and hence more points). I liked it well enough, I think it’s also less fiddly than Ganz Schön Clever, which has a few iffy corner cases that require going back to the rules a bit too often, but it wasn’t enough of a wow factor to get a copy.

Bohemians

A lot of colorful cards that evoke artistry and Paris

Bohemians is a deck building game where the currency that you have to get new cards depends on the half-symbols that you manage to combine into full symbols when you get your cards, with additional actions on the better cards (and bad things happening to you if you forget to work to support your artist ways). Cool mechanics (I had previously enjoyed the symbol combination mechanic in After Us), pretty theme, and made by Portal Games, for which I have a personal fondness – we got a box. And with the box I also got the third book of Ignacy Trzewiczek “Boardgames that tell stories” (I had enjoyed the first two) and got it signed since he was around when I got it 🙂

Postcards

I liked the theme of Postcards – traveling through France and sending postcards – that sounded nice; and the first random postcard that I started the game with depicted Carbonnade Flamande (a personal favorite); but the mechanics of the game (filling in a few tasks, getting the opportunistic bonus and some set collection) fell a bit flat for us.

A Carnivore Did It!

A Carnivore Dit It! is a cooperative deduction game where you try to solve series of puzzles where you get cards with animals, some statements where you know that a number of them are true (and the rest are false) and try to deduct as a group who’s the culprit. Fun times, a lot of scenarios to go through, and my love of logical puzzles made me grab a copy.

Railroad Tiles

Tiles with railroads and streets, in a common market and placed in front of players as the start of a transport network.

I enjoyed Railroad Ink (a series of roll&writes where you make a rail and road network), so I was very curious about the tile version of it. Players get a set of tiles to add to their network. During the game, they also get to add trains, cars and commuters to their network and score points accordingly; a few bonus tiles and the largest rectangular area of the board round up the final score. This sort of things tickles my brain exactly right, so we got a copy, even if Pierre was less convinced than I was (but then: it has a solo mode!)

Sanibel

A market of tiles representing seashells on a beach, and two player boards showing said shells organized on a hex-and-diamonds grid.

Sanibel is a set collection game with a placement on a board and a seashell theme. I liked the theme and the different shapes of the tiles (diamonds and hexagons made of three diamonds), but again not enthusiastically so. And the table was a bit too small, which led to an incident of board flipping that was not very pleasant 😛 (Not the fault of the game, though 🙂 )

Wispwood

A wheel with square tiles representing firs on the back and various colorful wisps/spirits on the front side, with polyominos on the wheel between each pair of tiles. Players assemble these tiles in front of them in a grid.

Wispwood is a tile laying game where, at each turn, players choose a colored tile from a common reserve and one of the polyominoes next to it to build an increasingly large grid that eventually gets scored along multiple axes. We didn’t get to play it, only got the explanation, but I’m curious about the feel of the game and we’ll try to find an open table in the next few days.

EDIT and we did find a table, and it was indeed delightful, and we bought a box.

7 Wonders Dice

In the 7 Wonders Extended Universe, we know have: the dice game! This is a roll and write – at every round, a set of dice is rolled, of which each player chooses one (at the same time) and adds it to their player board for various effects. We could only play for a few numbers of rounds since it was the very end of the day, but again the overall feeling wasn’t enthusiastic.

The Hanging Gardens

A market with tiles containing arched windows, and a player tableau showing a line of 4 of these tiles and a line of 2 above it. Other tokens and coins on the table too.

The Hanging Gardens is a tile laying game where you try to make gardens irrigated in the same way as your objective card while adding animals, plants, humans, and try to optimize the associated points. Pretty neat, but lacked a bit of a “wow” factor.

Castle Combo

Two tableaux of 3x3 cards with cartoon characters, with gold coins on top of them, and a market from which players would pick said cards.

Castle Combo is a tableau-building game where players build a 3×3 grid of characters that interact in various ways to yield points. It was released last year, but there was an extension this year, which gave us the opportunity to play it; the publisher wasn’t selling the base box today, but it’s going to get on my next shopping list because I really enjoyed it – it’s fast, every decision matters, and it’s tight and well made.

City Tour

A colorful and very curvy road being built with tiles containing roads, markers and traveler. On the road, there's a plastic bus with two blue passengers in it.

City Tour may well have been designed as “what if Tsuro, but cooperative” – all the players are driving the same bus by adding tiles at the end of its path, gathering passengers and dropping them at various points. Cute, and the box seems to have more options than the basic version we played, but not much more than that for us.

Ladybugs

Ladybugs was the unexpected territory control game of the day – you play as a colony of ladybugs that try to control fields of daisies. When putting a ladybug on the field, you get to place it at a distance equal to the numbers of dots on one of the previous ladybugs you have placed, orthogonally; this yields a nice puzzle to be able to place your bugs while planning your next moves. Pretty cool, not a buy.

Restart

Colored plastic tiles numbered from 1 to 16, in ascending order.

Restart was the most puzzling game we played on Friday. It presents itself as a riff between Rummikub and Uno; players place numbered tiles in increasing rows, with a few special tiles allowing them to manipulate the board a bit. Whether it was because we were only two players or because we weren’t playing aggressively enough, neither of us got the point of the game (which doesn’t happen often!)

INK

Tiles with multiple colors (purple / cyan / dark blue / yellow / red), installed in front of players; a lot of small tokens in the shape of adorable ink bottles.

In INK, players try to get rid of their ink bottles by placing them on a tiled board that they build during the game – when an area is large enough, you get to place ink bottles on the few places in that area that welcome them. Larger areas yield bonuses that can create small combos. It was a very pleasant game and the ink bottles were adorable and I’m looking forward to playing it again with the box we bought.

Cosmolancer

A 6x5 grid filled with colorful tiles with numbers on them, as well as yellow and blue camera tokens.

Cosmolancer is the new edition of a 1994 game (something we learnt after playing it 🙂 ). Players take turns placing score tiles and scoring tokens on a board to maximize their own score and minimize their opponent’s. Good design, tight game, a couple of things that we didn’t necessarily fully understand/score correctly during our game. But also not something we’d expect to put on the table.

Dying Message

Abstract cards trying to represent a crime scene, and a set of cards with faces and text associated to letters.

The accidental social game of the day. In Dying Message, one player plays the murder victim and the others the detectives. The murder victim has a set of abstract cards to communicate who killed them from beyond the grave, and the detectives must decide, given a list of suspects, who the victim may be talking about. I took the role of the murder victim, and all my detectives failed at understanding me 😦 This might be fun with the right group, but we don’t think we’re necessarily part of that type of group 🙂

TRND

8 cards around a deck and a discard, representing chairs of three different shapes and three different colors.

Trnd is a game where you try to collect the largest possible set of a certain type of chairs while discarding the rest. And you can only discard identical cards that have a common characteristic (color or shape) with the current discard. Intriguing, but not quite enough to make us get a box.

Knitting Circle

Boards with buttons and yarn, a wheel with two cat tokens and yarn samples around them, and knitting pattern-describing cards.

In Knitting Circle, players create clothes from squares of wool that their cats bring them. There’s two phases in each round: moving cats around a wheel to get wool pieces, and assembling said wool pieces to clothes, with various bonuses for specific colors, patterns or shape. Cute, and the switch between player-interaction phases to get materials and more solitaire puzzle during assembly is pleasant. Didn’t click quite enough to get a box though.

Scribble City

Cards with polyominos and sheets of paper with a lot of roads and polyominos drawn on them. There's a set of colored pencils next to the sheet of paper.

Scribble City is a game where you draft cards to add roads and polyomino buildings to a map. A few objectives and additional bonuses make it a bit more strategic, and overall this would have been a buy… if their shipment had arrived in time for Essen! As it is, I’ll probably try to get a copy at some point still.

R.A.V.E.L.

A grid of 8 colored dice (3x3 without a center) with cards with various dice-symbols on each side of the square.

Ravel is a solo (or “two people working the problem together”) game where you have a set of dice, constraints on how you can move/change them, and objective to fill. It’s a very nice puzzle, it has a few ways to adjust the difficulty (we were either very lucky or very good at it today), and it’s delightful. I got a box.

Hues and Cues

A board containing a large amount of colors going from brown to green vertically and from brown to purple horizontally (and then some), with a bunch of conic tokens all in the same area around red/orange hues.

Hues and Cues is a party game where someone tries to give clues for the other players to guess a color. The closer people are from the color to be guessed, the more points the clue giver and the guessers get. We had a few laughs in the couple of rounds that we played – including with someone who was very colorblind but evidently surprisingly good at color games 😀 Fun to play, but not a fit for our usual games.

Just 3 Folds

Round cards with colorful patterns, a 90° mirror, and some heavily folded yellow, pink and blue origami paper.

Just 3 Folds is an origami game. You get a picture and a piece of colored paper, and you have to re-create the picture by folding the piece of paper only three times. The additional twist is that you’re actually creating only a quarter of the image, and check your work by putting it against an angle mirror. Cute concept, and we got a copy – it may work for us under some circumstances.

Flip 7

We hadn’t played Flip 7 yet, which is now fixed! It’s a push your luck game, described as “a mix of black jack and Uno”. You can continue getting cards as long as you wish, but if you get two identical ones, you lose (and the winner is the one with the largest score). Pretty fun and the Deluxe edition (which we played) is gorgeous, but the game itself doesn’t necessarily warrant the price point of said deluxe edition. That said, might get a deck of the regular edition at some point – looks like an easy filler game.

The Last Droids

A central tray containing two columns of cards, and player boards with resources (oil, cogs, circuits, batteries). There are a lot of colorful cards with robots on the table.

In The Last Droids, you get cards that you can either buy for their effects or recycle to get resources to buy said cards. It’s a post-apocalyptic theme where you try to rebuild houses, and the cards are defunct robots (that you can either repair for actions or recycle). The originality comes from the four-player game, in which players team up in two teams, and draft cards, giving the other one, depending on the turn, to their adversary or to their partner. I really really enjoyed it and I got a box. I’m curious to see how it plays with other numbers of players too!

Vantage

A large box containing a very (very) large number of cards, behind a player mat with dice and tokens.

We only got a table explanation of this game and we have very little chance of getting a table, but it looks quite fascinating. It’s an open world exploration game where players are (in game) physically separated but can communicate to achieve a common mission; there’s a metric ton of cards and it’s NOT a campaign game, just a game with a lot of randomization of the starting conditions. I’m VERY curious and I’d love to give it a try (but it’s also sold out, so even the leap of faith is not an option).

Propolis

A player board with resources an a couple of cards; a bunch of colored cards with bee tokens on them.

Propolis is a game with bees (and you get a bunch of beeples) where you collect resources to build cards that give you discounts for future buys. It is very reminiscent of Splendor, with a few more strategic elements, and it’s really nice, but not distinct enough niche-wise from Splendor to my taste to warrant a buy.

Carnival of Sins

Black, white and gold playing cards showing masks on the back and sin representations on the front, and a set of black and golden dice.

Carnival of Sins looks pretty neat, concept-wise – each player has a hand of 7 cards that they will play entirely to get dice that are rolled at the beginning of the round, with various cards effects (get the highest die, get an odd and even die, that sort of things), with a few backstabby effects too. The cards are also very pretty. But we did run in at least 3 corner cases that were not mentioned in the rulebook during our game, which made it feel a bit incomplete, rule-wise.

Into the Machine

A colorful board with various symbols, a track on top, and multiple colored tokens on the different symbols of the board.

Into the Machine is a very efficient combination of racing game (you want to move your markers as fast as possible to the end) and worker placement (by making actions on a board where space is limited). Very very enjoyable, good iconography – it was a prototype so no copies to buy but it may be in next year’s list.

Skybridge

A central board with cards of different colors, a player board with resources and cards on top; a board representing a large bridge/tower being built.

Table demo only for Skybridge, a game where players try to build a bridge in the sky with the hell of various characters and gods. It did look interesting, but not enough to try to fight for a table on our last, shorter day.

Weave

A 4x4 grid with squared colored tiles and a bunch of gems on the tiles. The colors of the gems are the same as the one from the tiles, but they do not necessarily match where they are.

We played Weave at two players, and we suspect it’s best for two players – but it was very good at two players. You’re both playing on the same grid, trying to make alignments of gems on the correct color of tile with three actions: pick a gem, place a gem, flip a tile (to get another, known color). If you place a gem on a tile of the same color, you get an extra action depending on said color leading to fun combos. First player to three points (which happens when an action creates a line) wins the game. Very pleasant, and we got a copy (and I’ll update the BoardGameGeek link when it’s out of the processing queue 🙂 ).

Five Families

A map of New York split in different colorred areas, an impressive amount of money tokens, some cards and meeples.

In Five Families, players play mafia families trying to control boroughs of New York in the 1930s. They try to claim territory and, if they manage to transform their claim, control it, usually at the cost of people (canonically “injured”) and/or money. Areas are grouped into sets of threes on which majority of control is computed for extra points. I liked it a lot for the first half of the game, and then it felt like it was getting quite long. I suspect that we were not playing the game aggressively enough for it to quite work.

Kingdom Crossing

A board showing islands joined by bridges; player boards show variousresources. The bridges have little paw tokens on them, and there's a bunch of cards on in piles on the board. The design is very cute.

Kingdom Crossing was high on my list of games I wanted to look at this year, and it almost didn’t work out (but we found a table as the last thing we played this year!). There’s no way I’m going to resist “we took the 7 bridges of Königsberg and made a board game with that”. Add to that cute animals, a solid engine building mechanism and action selection, and you get a box I’m happy to have in my collection 🙂

Essen SPIEL 2024

Published on 10 October 2024 by BaliseLeave a comment

A table with board game boxes, three t-shirts, a bottle of wine and a yellow rubber duck

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 😉

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Essen SPIEL 2023

Published on 10 October 202310 October 2023 by BaliseLeave a comment

16 game boxes organized int two piles, with miscellaneous goodies in front of it, and a bottle of wine on the right side.

Another year, another SPIEL, and it keeps delivering, as an event. A lot of games played, a lot of games bought, a lot of fun 🙂 And, if you’re wondering about the bottle of wine on the loot: we went to a restaurant (Fischerei) and got their fixed menu with wine pairing, and got treated with a bottle on our way out! (Food was delicious, by the way – highly recommended if you’re in the area. And like fish.)

So, let’s talk about games and, like last year, let’s do that in order of games played, because that’s actually easier to narrate. We’ve tried really hard this year to not buy games we weren’t sure about (“maybe is no”), but we may have failed a few times as the fair went on.

Papertown

Papertown is a tile-laying game, where you try to make geometric combinations of tiles to place your buildings/objectives and the corresponding meeples. The twist is that the tiles are in isometric 3D, which makes it a bit harder to fit in one’s head! That twist might have been enough to make it a pick later during the Messe, but we still had enough self-control at that time to not get it.

Balloon Pop

In Balloon Pop, you get a row of colored cubes, representing balloons, that float on top of your board, and they pop (making points) when they reach a certain threshold. The cards are used to define both the priority order and what you’re allowed to do with the balloons (place them horizontally, vertically, discard some of them). Pretty clever, and that may be the one I’m regretting not getting right now.

Menhirs dans le brouillard

“Menhirs dans le brouillard” was a buy, and it was honestly half because of the title (which means “Menhirs in the fog”, which we both found hilarious) and quarter because of the people explaining the game (who were super friendly and passionate). And the game is actually interesting, even if it’s not our typical fare! You have an hex grid of forest tiles, in which a few menhirs are hidden. There’s initially some fog covering them, and there’s a game of adding fog, removing fog and moving fog so that you are the one to uncover the last menhir (or you’re preventing your adversary to uncover the last menhir).

Robo Factory

Robo factory is a deduction game where players try to match a secret combination of color elements to create a robot. It’s essentially a multi-player, simpler, version of MasterMind, with all the players playing at the same time, and we were not convinced.

Mind Up!

The explanation for Mind Up! started with “Do you know 6 Nimmt?”. And it is indeed very reminiscent 😉 Players play a card from their hand, which allows them to pick another card, depending on the order of their card in the overall sequence, which they then organize in piles according to the color. It feels like a welcome update to the concept of “trying to get the right position in a sequence of cards”, and we got a copy (the first of multiple “X copies of N colored cards with numbers” games we got this year 😀 ).

Nautilus Island

Nautilus Island is a set collecting game: you’re on a desert island with a crashed submarine and you’re trying to collect stuff to survive. It’s a pretty neat combination of set collection, race for bonuses, and push your luck, and I’d be happy to re-play it, but it didn’t feel special enough to warrant a buy.

Line It

Line It is another “numbered cards with colors” game, where you build a line of value-increasing or value-decreasing cards in front of you, and try to time fetching “jackpots” that build up as a side effect. Considering our other buys, it’s possible that the only reason we didn’t get that one is because we had gotten Mind Up! half an hour before, despite the games not being that similar in the end.

Battle Fries

Battle Fries is a very silly card game where you try to dip your fries in various sauces… and preferably other sauces than your opponents, by yelling the name of the sauce all at the same time. The theme is hilarious, but we’re not much for yelling games 😀

Black Friday

Black Friday is a market manipulation game: you’re trying to make the most money possible by timing your share buys and sells between the different market crashes. Interesting mechanics that do yield “large tendencies and small variations” around the share prices, but it felt a bit dry to be able to sell it on a game night.

Stamp Collection

Stamp Collection is a reimplementation/re-theming of an older game called California, where the players try to make pretty stamp collections to attract fans that bring chocolate when they visit/appreciate said collection. I kind of liked it, and the theme was cute, but the component quality felt pretty low compared to modern standards.

Isle of Trains

In Isle of Trains, you build a train to deliver goods and people to places. The twist is that the goods and people can be put there by your opponents, because you get bonuses and resources when you add things to your opponent’s train, but not to your own – making your train appealing is consequently a good idea! We both liked the game, which also had excellent iconography, but were a bit worried at having to check other player’s boards from across the table to be able to make decisions (checking what others players are doing are not necessarily our strong suit, and this requires a fairly detailed view of that).

Fit to Print

Fit to Print is very reminiscent of Galaxy Trucker, but instead of creating a ship, you create a journal layout, with a bunch of constraints. Also, you score directly without making your journal layout explode first. I kind of like the frenzy of ship building in Galaxy Trucker, but I was never convinced by the “race” second half of the game, so Fit to Print plays into that. Add to that an adorable “forest newspaper” theme, and that’s a box that went home with us.

Footprints

Footprints is probably the game I got most excited about while playing it. You’re playing as a clan of stone age people who move through the terrain, gathering resources and leaving footprints (and cave paintings) around. Each card you have can either move your pawn or increase the amount of movement you get in one or two terrain types, and you unlock more powers as you go. It was really enjoyable and we also got a box for home – good thing that we did, because it did sell out later during the Messe!

Color Flush

In Color Flush, players have colored cards that may or may not have the same color on both sides. They’re trying to get a hand in front of them that has only one color of cards, and they do that by picking cards, removing cards and turning cards. We explored this 3+-player game on our own with the German rule, and it felt like it could be fun, so we got a box; but a subsequent attempt at play proved disappointing. Possibly the buying mistake for this year :p

Sixto

Sixto is a roll&write game where you decide, on each roll, whether you want to cross the cell corresponding to a number and a color on your sheet. Crossing a cell prevents you from crossing cells to the left of it; scores depend on the number of crossed cells on each row and each column (and can be negative if there’s only a single cell crossed on a given line!). Could probably replace Yahtzee for most use cases, but we don’t play Yahtzee much 😉

Whale Street

Whale Street is a stock exchange game where you try to invest your and your companies monies wisely (in order to maximize your final profit), while trying to be the “best operated company”. Honestly kind of neat, and clicked well together; playing it during the demo only the two of us may have removed a bit from the desired feeling of the game (as it was, we probably weren’t competitive enough with each other!), which may have been more fun otherwise.

Trio

Trio was a “colored number card game”, so obviously we had to give it a try 😉 Cards are split between players and a third deck that gets laid faced down on the table. Players are trying to create three triples of identical cards by asking their opponents for their lowest or highest card, playing their own lowest or highest card, or flipping a card from the middle. requires quite some memory, but we had more than a few good laughs, it’s quick to play and… well, fun – so that’s another deck of numbered colored cards in the collection 😉

Bites

Bites has an unfortunate title for French-speaking gamers, but a cute theme where ants are trying to gobble picnic leftovers. All players control all the ants, and can get a piece of food on each round; the order in which the ants arrive at the end of the path determine which food is worth how many points. Modifier cards for each game round up the box. It’s well-designed and a fun casual game; we played it in the evening at the hotel bar and not during the Messe itself, so we didn’t get a copy then 😉

On The Road

On the Road lets players take the role of a group on their road to success, from their grandma’s farm to a large festival. They collect tickets that gives them fans which should eventually attend the festival… if you’re lucky, that is. Kind of nice, very cute components (the band vans are adorable), but it didn’t quite click enough for it to be a buy.

Garden Guests

Garden Guests is a distant cousin of Hex: players (or teams of players) want to connect one side of the hexagon to the other with their tokens. For that, they can build bases, and then build paths connecting these bases, depending on the cards they have in their hand. Lovely components, but too abstract for our usual fare. I’m a bit curious about the team play, though (players of different teams play alternatively, are not allowed to communicate but can pass cards between each other).

Sunrise Lane

In Sunrise Lane, you build houses of different levels on marked spots to get points depending on the height of the buildings and the exact spot where you put them. You can continue building adjacently in a chain as long as you have the cards to do so. It felt more abstract that it looked, which is not a surprise as we learnt later that it was a reimplementation of Rondo, except on a square grid.

After Us

In After Us, players are trying to recruit a band of primates to be the first to evolve to intelligence. The primates cards typically give you some actions or half-actions that can be combined with other half-actions from other cards, allowing you to build resources to get more better faster stronger primates. I liked it a lot, so we got a copy; other players at the table bemoaned the lack of interaction, which is a fair question (but not one that particularly bothers us.)

Apocalipsocks

Apocalypsocks: A bunch of cards with cartoony socks on them

In Apocalipsocks, you try to pair similar-looking socks into identical pairs of socks and, when you do that, your opponents get to do something silly like turning on themselves or playing with one eye closed. It probably works for its audience, but that’s not us 😉 The cards are neat and the details to take care of are fun!

Rome In A Day

Rome In A Day is pretty similar to The Great Split, which we liked a lot last year: you split tiles behind a screen in two groups, and your neighbor player decides which group of tiles they want to add to their board. Compared to The Great Split, though, it felt like there was a bit more strategy involved in choosing groupings, because the other player’s boards are much more visible/readable; the “getting points” part of it also requires a bit more thinking. Long story short, we got a copy of this one.

Belgian Beers Race Dice

Belgian Beer Race: a few dice, some objective cards, and writing sheets that look like the map of Belgium

Belgian Beers Race Dice is a roll&write version of Belgian Beers Race. The theme is similar: trying to visit as many breweries as possible while filling in objectives, not get too drunk, and come back to Brussels early enough. The marking sheet makes it kind of hard to follow what’s happening, and it’s quite easy to forget to cross something, which is a bit sad, because the rest of the game feels like a decent roll&write.

Moon River

Moon River is a clear riff on Kingdomino, but where players get to build their own dominoes. Also, there’s cows. Kingdomino still has my heart, but I liked this specific take (while I was not necessarily convinced by other variants of it), which felt different enough and enjoyable enough to get a box for that “I’d play Kingdomino, but I’d like something just a tiny bit more complex” mood 😀 (yes, it’s a pretty specific mood.)

Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik is a cooperative game, adapted from the video game of the same name. I love the video game, I was excited to see the board game adaptation, then a bit skeptical because it didn’t sound that fun, then it got the Spiel des Jahres award, then I watched it played and was still not convinced, and then I played it myself… and it was super fun. We got a copy, I’m not sure how/with whom we’re going to play the campaign (you get to “unlock” more tiles depending on your score :)) but… worst case I’ll play solo 😛 The above picture is a giant version of it – the box version has much smaller tiles! (Which is a good thing for my table estate.)

Deep Dive

In Deep Dive, you have a colony of penguins looking for food. The deeper you go, the better the fish – but the higher the chance of getting trapped by a predator (No worries, though, you’ll get back eventually!). It’s a pretty fun push-your-luck game, it plays 6, we know who may appreciate that one, so that was a buy.

ArcheOlogic

ArcheOlogic is a puzzle game that uses the same kind of mechanic as Turing Machine, but to make players guess the layout of an ancient temple. You get to ask questions such as “what are the parts of this piece that are on column C” or “how many empty spaces is there on line 2”, with various associated costs, and the “most efficient” player normally wins the game. It’s well-designed and actually far more accessible than it looks, but we feared not having the audience for it to be played multiple times.

Mytikas

In Mytikas, players try to build houses and temples on the Mount Olympus, while trying to gain the favors of the gods. It’s a resource-managing game, with light worker placement, and generally pleasant, but (for us) not enthusiastically so.

Essen SPIEL 2022

Published on 10 October 2022 by BaliseLeave a comment

Loot from Essen SPIEL - multiple game boxes (Coral Reef, The Book of Dragons, Maui, Cascadia, Akropolis,All Roads, Maglev Metro, Project L, The Great Split, Flourish), a couple of jigsaw puzzles, a tshirt and a dark green meeple cushion.

It had been three years: last time we were in Essen was in October 2019. 2020 was a fully virtual edition; 2021 still felt too unsafe to go. This year, it felt OK enough, especially since there was a full mask mandate on the fair – we’ll see in the next few days if indeed it was! But in the meantime, it was SO GOOD to be back in Essen for SPIEL. We played a lot, we were ALMOST reasonable on our loot, we’re exhausted – but super happy to have gone 🙂

Now we’re back home… time for a few quick notes of all the games we saw! In order of play, because that’s approximately as arbitrary as I could make it anyway. I’ve been too lazy to add publishers/authors – but I’ve provided BGG links on the titles where available. Also, credit where credit’s due: many of these pictures are my husband’s 🙂 I kept these notes very short because it’s already a very long post; but I’m happy to give more details if you have specific questions!

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SPIEL’19

Published on 31 October 2019 by Balise1 Comment

For the fifth year in a row, we went last week to Essen for the SPIEL board game fair. Four days of wandering in the halls, of playing a fair amount of games, of shopping… and a few very nice restaurants and cocktails in the evening, because why not 😉

This year felt somewhat less crowded than the previous years, to the point that I got slightly worried – but they did announce a 10% increase in visitors compared to last year (reaching 209K visitors); I guess the increase in surface compensated for that. But let’s talk games!

Myraclia, Rudy3 – a game where players draft cube ressources from a randomly-chosen pool, and use these cubes to terraform tiles that may give bonuses for the following turns. Very pretty and interesting mechanics; the game is on late pledge/pre-order on Kickstarter, and we ordered it.

Copenhagen, Queen Games – I liked the box art, and that’s probably the main reason why this game ended up on my list of “things I’d like to have a look at”. It’s a game where players gather cards to buy polyomino tiles to build a building facade and gather victory points as they go. It’s not a bad game, but it didn’t really click with any of us.

Imperial Settlers Roll&Write, Portal Games – a common dice roll is used as number of actions and resources to build a civilization over 10 rounds. I quite liked it, and I think I would like the solo/adventure mode, but as it is it’s a bit annoying to remember how many actions you did (and you can probably end up going to do 6 or 7 on one turn, depending on bonuses) and the resources you’ve used. Not convinced enough.

Periodic, Genius Games – I think we both really wanted to like that one, because how cool/nerdy is a game where you move around the periodic table? And where, when you ask if there’s a way to get more energy to move around the periodic table, the person at the demo explains to you that “well, no, because energy is never created or destroyed, duh”? And it is indeed pretty cool to zoom around the periodic table, but the mechanics themselves felt pretty flat. Let’s put it that way – as an educational game, it’s probably a good one; as a themed game, it was a bit disappointing.

De Stijl, Quick Simple Fun Games – this one caught my eye because of its Mondrian aesthetics. Players add cards displaying 9 colored squares to the game, covering between 2 and 5 existing squares; at the end of the game, the score is computed both on the number of distinct areas and on the size of the largest area. Quite pretty, and probably takes a few games to master, but not necessarily our type of game.

Welcome to New Las Vegas, Blue Cocker – a roll&write without dice 🙂 Players need to build casinos on their sheet, and to achieve that there is three decks of cards that give a number (that yields constraints on its placement on the sheet) and actions (that allows to eventually win points). Actually quite fun, although we messed up a rule that made our scores explode compared to the typical score 😉 However, it’s not available yet! Buuut it’s a new take on another game, Welcome to Your Perfect Home, where players build houses instead of casinos – so we got that one instead. The “Las Vegas” version is slightly more complex, but Perfect Home has another interesting set of constraints and goals – where most of the player interaction happens, since there’s a race to reach these goals first.

Empire of the North, Portal Games – a close cousin of Imperial Settlers, which I like a lot. Players also get to build their civilization and engine by adding cards to their board, and there’s a few additional mechanics, such as the possibility to go explore distant islands that yield extra bonuses. The food tokens still look like tomatoes (although they’re officially apples), and there’s also get fish as well in this version 😉 Pierre says it’s the game Imperial Settlers should have been; I might agree. We bought it as well as the Japanese Islands expansion.

Paranormal Detectives, Lucky Duck – we didn’t play that one, we only watched the explanation and the beginning of the game. Someone has been killed, and their ghost is haunting the detectives in charge of the case in order to make them understand what/where/how everything happened. And for that, they have a number of means at their disposal, that go from miming to a ouija board or even trying to assemble a hangman rope to give clues. That actually looked pretty fun, but probably not a good fit for us 🙂

Century: A New World, Plan B Games – the third game of the Century set of games, which can all be played individually or combined. The base mechanics is the same for all three: players can gather resources that they can upgrade via different actions. In the first game, the actions are given by cards that can be bought; in the second game, the actions involve moving on a map; in the third game, we get worker placement mechanics. We both like the first game and its simplicity – it has the same feeling as Splendor, and a bit more complexity, and the Golem edition is very pretty; New World is kind of nice, but not necessarily the one we’d buy in this collection.

Azul: Summer Pavilion, Next Move Games – we also didn’t play this one, only got a vague idea by watching people play for a few minutes. It’s the third Azul game, with the same mechanics of picking tiles as the first two (except now there’s also wildcard tiles). Here, the tiles are put on stars, where each branch of the star needs a different number of tiles. The mechanics of placement are slightly different from the other two Azul, but not necessarily enough of a different game to justify a buy, considering we already have (and enjoy) the Stained Glass version. It still looks very pretty, though.

Deep Blue, Days of Wonder – the Days of Wonder of the year. This time it’s a push-your-luck game, with a diving theme, where players try to get the largest amount of treasures (and hence monies, and hence points) without getting hit by the lack of oxygen or harpoons. They start with a hand of cards that allows different actions and, to help them, they can recruit more people (get more cards) that will get them bonuses or additional actions. I liked it way more than I thought I would (it’s fun!), the production quality is at the usual very high Days of Wonder standards, it plays up to 5, and we ended up grabbing a copy (finding a non-German copy in the Asmodee shops ended up being a fail; we ended up finding a French copy directly at Days of Wonder where they had a few French boxes behind the desk.)

Amul, Lautapelit – we had played a prototype of that one last year under the name Silk Road, and it was a pleasure to see the final version and to play it again (with a group of people coming from Singapore!) At every turn, players get a new card, choose a card to put on the common market, pick a card from said common market, and play a card on their board, trying to gather sets and get actions that will eventually build points for the end of the game. The extra twist is that some cards only score when they are kept them in hand, and some cards only score when they are put on the table, yielding agonizing decision-making about what to do since it IS mandatory to put a card on the table 😀 Really liked it, and it plays up to 8 with mostly simultaneous playing; we grabbed a copy, and I’m looking forward to play it again.

Minecraft: Builders and Biomes, Ravensburger – a board game adaptation of, well, Minecraft. Players can gather resources by mining them in a cube of resources, discover tiles, reconfigure their board, fight monsters, and score points doing all that. It is actually a very good adaptation of the video game, it’s not very deep but I could see that one working well in a family with kids – both simple enough and strategic enough for everyone to have fun. It’s a bit sad that the cardboard bits feel very flimsy (and that the scoring markers are larger than the scoring tracks! Infuriating 😉 ) Not a buy for us, but I’m keeping it in mind as a gift idea for that kind of situation 🙂

Glenmore Chronicles, Funtalis – a game full of Scotsmen and Scotland places and whisky, where players build their settlements by getting tiles on a track, producing resources, using resources, and trying to optimize the placement of their tiles to be able to activate them at all. One of the twists is that players get negative points at the end depending on the size of their settlements (the more tiles, the less points), so they need to get “as large as necessary, but not larger”. I lost that game SUPER BADLY, but I still enjoyed it a lot, and we came home with a box. On top of that, there’s 8 mini-expansions within the game, that all come with their little box that looks like a book, and that’s completely adorable (and no, I don’t have a picture, but believe me, it’s adorable.)

Project L, Boardcubator – players start with small polyomino pieces that they can upgrade, downgrade or change to other ones, and objective cards for which they need to gather a set of polyominos making the shape of the card (a bit like a tangram). They keep their polyominos and typically get new ones, which allows them to build more and more complex objective cards – and hopefully get more and more victory points. It’s quite pleasant and the material is really nice; I think it might have been a buy if it had been available on the booth (but it’s not out yet).

Petrichor, Mighty Boards – a wonderful theme, since players get to play CLOUDS! They need to move around and strategize to rain at the right time on the right crops to get victory points. It’s quite brain-intensive because most of the actions have a delayed effect, but it looks really interesting, although I’ll definitely get an extra game or two to really get the feel for the game. We were on the fence for a while about getting it, but we ended up grabbing a copy at the end of the fair.

Dune, Gale Force Nine – yes, THAT Dune. I think this was the largest surprise for me this year. I tend to shy away from that kind of game that has diplomacy and alliances and mind games as a selling point. But we had a short talk with someone at the booth one of the evenings who was actually quite enthusiastic and selling it very well, so we ended up grabbing a demo game when we saw a table was getting free (while we were mulling over the Petrichor decision at the next booth). I was very, VERY lost at the beginning of the game because the explanations were somewhat confusing (to a very unpleasant point), but I finally got somewhat of a feel for the game and I ended up liking it a lot. The theme is strong, I played Harkonnen and I really enjoyed it, and it ended up being a game I reaaaally wanted to play again. They were out of stock on site, but they apparently had a bit of stock in an external warehouse; we ordered a copy, and it will hopefully arrive in our shelves soon.

On the Underground: London/Berlin, LudiCreations – a transport network construction game where players try to have passengers move to their destinations in an optimal way. We only got the 3-minute explanation, no demo game, and I must admit I phased out for most of it (I probably got tired at that moment), so… I kind of don’t know 🙂

Tiny Towns, AEG – a game where players gather resource cubes (via a common card mechanism) to build buildings on their own board using geometric constraints. I liked it a lot – we got a copy, which also unlocked THE GIGANTIC AEG BAG (people who ever went to Essen know what I’m talking about 😉 ). I don’t THINK it had anything to do with the fact that I nuked the rest of the table, score-wise, but it sure didn’t harm 😉

Curios, AEG – we usually don’t spend that much time on the AEG booth, and it may be a good thing, since we ended up buying this year the two games we tested by them! Curios is a game where players are trying to get the most value from artifacts that they can gather; the twist is that they do not know the exact value of said artifacts, they only have a few clues. It ends up being fun on a game theory level, and generally speaking quite enjoyable, short, and playing up to 5. We got a copy.

Little Town, Iello – players build a common city by adding tiles to a board and activating tiles around their player marker to gather resources (allowing to add more tiles). There’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s even a pretty good game I think, but it just didn’t click for me. I might have enjoyed it more at another moment, or, or, or (we’ll never know!)

Crusaders, TMG – I must admit the theme is not necessarily something that appeals to me, but I really liked that game. Players get to move, build or attack according to a wheel around which they move tokens to get actions that are more or less strong, and the building that they build make these actions stronger. The wheel mechanic is a mix between the one from Finca and the meeple handling of Five Tribes; the whole game does have a bit of a Terra Mystica feel, and we ended up getting a copy. And since they were out of the regular box, we got the Deluxe edition – which has metallic victory points and very cool minis 😉 (And a metal sword as a first player token!)

Wingspan, Stonemaier Games – I had been looking for an English demo of Wingspan to no avail on the fair – but thankfully a friend with whom we had shared a few cocktails in the evening found an English copy and we got to play it at the hotel bar in front of a couple of drinks 🙂 It’s a bird collection and engine building game, it’s gorgeous (THE EGGS!), it’s the Kennerspiel des Jahres for this year, and it’s absolutely deserved. We found another English copy by chance at one of the store booths, and we didn’t hesitate much before buying it.

Ganymede, Sorry We Are French – a racing game where players want to get their meeples from Earth to Mars to Ganymede, so that they can fly to galaxies far far away on their rocket ships. Quite pleasant, cool mechanics, but it apparently didn’t click enough to be a buy.

Bruxelles 1897, Geek Attitude Games – I was intrigued by the Art Nouveau art, so I was happy when we found a table. Players get cards on a grid that give them different advantages; the twist is that the scoring also depends on the placement on said grid, and more specifically on the majority of money spent by players in each scoring track (column of cards). I’m not sure why I didn’t like it more, because it had potential to tick a lot of boxes, and it’s objectively well made, but it really didn’t click for me.

Just One, Repos Production – the Spiel des Jahres for this year. As far as we could tell, there was only one English table (and a lot of German ones) – and, definitely, for a word game, English is better for us 🙂 It’s a light cooperative party game, somewhat akin to Concept (by the same publisher) – one player try to find words that the other players are trying to make them guess. All players get to write a clue, but if a clue is given by more than one player, it gets eliminated before the guesser has a chance to look at it! So clues need to be helpful but not obvious, and it’s generally speaking a lot of fun (and sometimes downright impressive). We got a box, because why not – it can be a nice change from Codenames 😉

Paris: New Eden, Matagot – in a post-apocalyptic Paris, players try to re-build settlements by finding a good mix of people to populate them. To do that, they get to choose actions associated to dice that help get said people – so they need to optimize the choice and order of the actions to get what they want. I liked it quite a lot, but Pierre wasn’t convinced, so we didn’t get a copy.

And for the other buys…

A copy of Prêt-à-Porter, at Portal Games – I had bought the Kickstarter on “theme + strong euro + Portal Games” and I got my copy delivered in Essen
Railroad Evolution, the expansion for Railroad Revolution, a game that we quite like – it seems to add a few mechanics, to “fix” what’s generally considered an overpowered track, and to be playable without much hassle on top of the original game.
Play Smart, a small book by Ignacy Trzewiczek (of Portal Games) about role-playing – I had enjoyed his previous two books, they’re funny (the guy knows how to tell an entertaining story – we went to see his seminar during the fair and it was both hilarious and touching) and that’s probably worth the read
Railroad Rivals – it was an Almost Buy last year, and it was on sale this year, so I didn’t resist 🙂
A couple of SPIEL t-shirts, because they had a design contest (based on their logo) and the result is actually quite nice 🙂

And that’s it for this year!

Essen SPIEL 2018

Published on 22 December 201822 December 2018 by Balise2 Comments

Ce billet a été publié en français ici : Essen SPIEL 2018 (en français)

We went, for the fourth time, to Essen in Germany for the SPIEL fair (and that was the 36th SPIEL fair, if I’m not mistaken). SPIEL (or, as we tend to call it, Essen, although Essen conference center hosts a lot more things than that… I hear they have a car fair as well :P) is THE fair for all board game players in Europe – 4 full days and, this year, 190 000 visitors – that’s quite a few people.

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	James on Scavenger Hunt round 45