by Kirk W
Welcome to part two of my all too long delayed thoughts on Spiel ’19. In part one I ended up only covering the (first ever) Preview Night as I got a bit too verbose. I will try to be a bit more succinct here and finally finish this and move on to more esoteric gaming topics. (For example, “What’s up with those ugly meeples?” No really, I’m not kidding.)Essen proper (or die Spiel as the locals call it) begins Thursday morning at 10 o’clock local time, precisely. The staff at every door of the three main entrances are coordinated to open the gates at precisely the same time so that no one has an advantage of early entry by even a second. And as I witnessed there are typically thousands of people lined up for this moment, every day. This is the first year that I have done every day (and almost every minute) of Essen. In fact it is the first time I’ve done more than two days. It’s also the first time I didn’t just show up and see what I find. I did my research, I had a list, and I had map locations planned out.
Don’t tell anyone that I played full length heavy euro game* (And it was fantastic!)
If you’ve never attended Essen, what they don’t tell you is it is first and foremost about buying games; playing games is a secondary concern for the organisers. There are no open gaming rooms. Most publishers do allow you to play test all their new and hot games, but much like Starbucks, they don’t want you to linger too long. Play lighter, shorter games to your hearts content, but you’ll only be able to sample the mid to heavy weight games. Thus a full game of Paladins of the West Kingdom or Black Angel was not going to happen. (Both of these games were on my list to play. I sat down to play Paladins, and in the explanation was told that we would only be playing the first three rounds. What? (The game was fine, but after three rounds I had no clue if I wanted to buy this game. So many of these games live or die in the last third of the game when everything escalates. A partial game tells me nothing that I couldn’t get from reading the rule book. As the saying goes, “That’s why they play the game.”)) And the same should have been true for Circadians: First Light, which was not on my list, but I had a connection, Mandi Hutchinson of The Dice Tower. (Did you have to go back and reread this? Was my parenthetical comment just too long. Maybe a footnote format would be better stylistically. Thoughts?)
A little over a week earlier The Dice Tower had announced a lottery of sorts to play games at Essen with their big names. I immediately signed up, requesting Mandi H. based on her taste in games. A few days longer than they promised I received notification that it was going to happen. Three of us showed up first thing Friday morning and Mandi brought Circadians: First Light along with a game explainer from Renegade. This is probably the heaviest game I have played, not that that means much, and it was amazing. At its heart it’s a dice placement game with a bit of programming (love programming), and of course resource management. As a rule I don’t enjoy dice games, because I invariably roll poorly. (Don’t ever mention Kingsburg to me. Why does everyone love this game?) But Circadians offers so many ways to use or overcome your poor rolls, especially as the game develops. The tattoo style art isn’t exactly my thing, but everything else about this game clicked; best game of the sixteen I played at Spiel ’19. Maybe best game of the year for me.
Tour de Dice Tower
Because of my love of Flamme Rouge I was thrilled to find The Dice Tower had a set of promo cards. Tom, Zee, Mandi, and Suzanne are all immortalised here. Ironically Tom Vasel has never shown any love for this game, its elegant charm is lost on him. So why is he immortalised on a Flamme Rouge promo card? It is the fifth card that explains this, or so I assume - Buonocore Boulevard. Stephen Buonocore of Stronghold Games sense of humour is written all over this. With these cards in hand, I’m hoping to have a little Tour de Dice Tower over the holidays.
The Azul Killer
All I set out to do was meet Asger Harding Granerud the designer of Flamme Rouge, one of my favourite games. Dream of dreams I play him at his own game. So I did the obvious, (How often do people overlook or talk themselves out of doing the obvious?) and wrote him. In reply: there would be no game, but he invited me to stop by, say hello, and even check out his new game that he and partner Daniel Skjold Pedersen are self-publishing. I looked the game up here on BGG and what I saw, well, it didn’t really excite me. Fast forward to Spiel ’19, meeting Asger was truly a pleasure and he has to be one of the hobby’s foremost ambassadors, a palpable energy.
This is all lead up to how I came to learn about Bloom Town. His team did an excellent job of teaching the game and played a two player game with another unsuspecting victim of this charming game. But charming belies the subtle tactics in this seemingly simple game. The next day I brought my wife to play. Her verdict, “It’s better than Azul.” And at half the price of Azul of course it came home with us. A handful of plays later the game feels even more clever.
Azul, Azul, or Azul
Speaking of Azul, I did try out the new flavour Azul: Summer Pavilion. Just like its predecessors, Azul the First and Azul the Second, it was solid, clever, and fun. Each offering in this series has enough common mechanisms to know you are definitely playing Azul, and enough variation to feel like a new experience. I doubt I’ll buy a second Azul, but I’ll be looking forward to play testing Azul 2020, a.k.a. Azul the Fourth.
Expectations are sometimes everything
I really wanted to like Paris: New Eden, a lot. Its artwork and colour story were just so engaging. Even the name and theme; a post-apocalyptic rebuilding of Paris. (I know its cliché, but I have nothing but fond memories of Pars.) I skimmed a few reviews and quickly moved it to the top part of my “must play at Essen” list.
I arrived at the Matagot area to find a wall banner for the game as well as 6 foot cardboard Eiffel Towers. It was definitely their big game and a lot of people were playing it. It took about fifteen minutes but I found this really nice French couple to test play it with me. A game explainer set-up the board for us and (Cue ominous music) forced us to play the draft of the entire first round without having any clue what we were doing. It’s a dice drafting game: Should I have every colour? Lots of one colour? Any question was immediately blocked with, “Just pick something.” Only after the draft was finished did she start to explain the folly, or luck, of our choices. Not ideal for a strategy game.
The remainder of the game went well, was quite pleasant actually, mostly because of the French couple accompanying me. A few more rounds of collecting dice, battling for vague resources and anonymous goals, and then it was over. Just over.
I was expecting something grander.
Paris: New Eden is a nice game with beautiful art and great production value. Because of my expectations of a bigger game, my first play was a let down. Another factor was the stated theme of the game was not carried out in it’s components. Many games go so far with famous text, that it just gets ignored; the board gaming equivalent of tl;dr. Paris: New Eden, perhaps in an attempt at language independence, has none. But hopefully one day I will find this game again on my table top again, with my lowered expectations. It may be a nice little game.
Missing In Action, or what I didn’t get to play
In previous years at Essen I just played whatever games caught my eye. As mentioned in the intro this year I came with a well researched plan. And after four days of tracking (or trying to) down every one of these titles I was left wondering, “Are there always so many no shows?” Or is this year an anomaly (I hope)?
From my list: Parks was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Bosk. Tapestry was rumoured to have limited copies for sale, but I never saw one, and definitely no demo copies. There was only one copy of So, You’ve Been Eaten, hermetically sealed in a glass case to seemingly taunt us. Even my favourite game of Essen, Circadians: First Light, it did have demo copies, but none for sale. In a related note, I had plans to have Kwanchai Moriya sign my beautifully illustrated copy of Prêt-à-Porter, but he was a last minute cancellation. Maybe next year.
And then there is Inis. No this is not a new game, but it had its first expansion, Inis: Seasons of Inis, for sale at Essen. So I assumed that it would be available to play test and I would finally get to play it. Inis remains in a two-way tie atop my want to play list (At the time of Essen it was in a three way tie with Scythe and Brass: Birmingham. Thanks to Dave LuzaScythe has been taken off this list. And I really enjoyed it.) Not only was it unavailable to play test, the base game was all bit non-existent at Essen.
Running out of time
I really need to finish and get this posted. It’s December! and Essen was back in late October, as if I had to tell you that. So here are the last of the games games I played at Essen and (quickly) my thoughts.
That Victorian cover art from Nanty Narking kept popping up in front of me (sort of like in The Squire of Gothos as the Enterprise tried to escape the planet, literally) and I didn’t mind. The very friendly staff told me stories of Holmes and Moriarity and I had to play. Thanks to the four guys I played with and that they decided to beat up on each other (this game has a ton of take-that) while I quietly won. A nice, beautiful, enjoyable little game that feels like a few plays is enough. (How and I doing own time? Shorter, shorter.)
The new Ticket to Ride map is Japan (with Italy on the flip side, but we didn’t play). It plays fast with reduced fleets of trains, building bullet train routes that everyone completes routes with, but the macro/micro maps within a map feature created too much mental heavy lifting for such a simple game system.
The whole demo area and artwork of Nova Luna felt so calming and tranquil I just wanted to hang out there. Playing the game was nice, and just puzzley enough to pull you in. I would definitely like to play this one again. Why didn’t i bring it home for the very affordable Essen price of 25€? How many more medium weight family games do I need. We already get analysis paralysis selecting one, when we could just be playing, and maybe two.
My Haul (my largest ever, but incredibly meagre compared to what I see so many attendees walking out with)
First a caveat, I did take Prêt-à-Porter home from Essen. But thus was a Kickstarter edition that I had chosen Essen pick-up to save on shipping. Is this part of my haul? My wife says yes. I’m not sure. So the games that I genuinely purchased at Essen and took home: Bruxelles 1897, Sprawlopolis, Solenia, and Bloom Town. One other title caught my eye. As a someone who spent his childhood traversing his small town on his bike and a few years playing D&D, Kids on Bikes RPG hit multiple nostalgia buttons for me. I have not plans to jump back into role playing games, but should be a fun read, and who knows.
Okay that’s it, finally. Have a great holiday.
*Please don’t jump all over me and say this isn’t a heavy euro game. It’s the heaviest game I have played. I’m sure there are heavier games, but this is definitely a heavier game, and we had a two and half hour playing time.