This year I went to Essen Spiel for the first time in 23 years. My first experience was a whirlwind 22 hour road trip there and back with my friend Graham. It was fantastic but overwhelming. This time my friends and I were attending as our mostly-belated 40th birthday presents as two of us passed that landmark during lockdown.

I wasn’t attending as press, but I decided to make some notes anyway, and thought I’d share some of the games I played at Spiel. Let’s start with the new games, as that’s what anyone looking for details on Essen Spiel would be after.

Hobbit: There and Back Again

By Reiner Knizia & Office Dog

My friend Alex was explaining the Lord of the Rings trick-taking game too close to Asmodee’s Lord of the Rings section when we were summoned to try a roll & write game based on The Hobbit. Good folks that we are, we obliged.

Hobbit: There and Back Again is a roll & write game presented in little books each player has and individual chapters which differ in the goals but use similar components. 

We played a shorter version of the first scenario, where we charted the paths of dwarves to where they mooched off Bilbo. The dice have path lines, but also bread as they’ll need to eat, wizard hats which allow you to select specific results and swords which help endgame scoring. As the dice are used in all scenarios, some elements may take the back seat like swords did here (you’re unlikely to need bread against Smaug unless you like really well-done toast). That said, as a sword lover, I ended up with quite a collection.

The game felt simple for a roll & write and enjoyable enough. It felt a bit basic compared to some, but for all I know, scenarios will get more complex as time goes on.

Bohemians

By Jasper de Lange & Portal Games

This was on my list of games to check out, even though all I knew was the theme: down and out artists in 1890’s Paris. I’d run a Paris campaign for The Yellow King which had me doing a ton of research into the era and field.

After a few flybys of the Portal Games stand, we finally got to sit down and play a shortened version of the game.

Bohemians is a deck-builder which sees you taking on a type of artist such as romantic or visionary, and a job such as journalist or beggar. You start out with a basic deck of activities and try to build up inspiration, but you also need to interrupt your day with (ugh) work or you start to get hindrances. Inspiration’s used to buy new habits, muses, trigger abilities on the atelier and eventually get objectives like “A mildly positive review in a paper”.

I have never felt so called out by a game, but I also loved it. Each day told a short story of bumming around Paris, hanging out with a muse, entering a manic episode, arguing politics in a coffee shop and writing like crazy through the night. Again, so very called out.

I think I bought four or five muses and only one actual card for my deck, but still did fairly well.

Afterwards I raced to get a copy of the game (and sadly missed out on a promo). I’m curious to see how it plays and I think my only concern is for the longevity of a fairly small deckbuilder, but I loved my experience with it.

Shall We Dance?

By Saashi & Saashi

I love the clean design and set collection ideas of Saashi & Saashi. This was another booth which we had to do several laps of and then awkwardly hover near in order to get a game in. My friend Steve and I played while Alex wandered off elsewhere as there were only two seats available in a demo.

Shall We Dance is a game of collecting pairs of dancers split up by colour and style. Each old man is paired with an old lady, the blondes are together and so on. You draft cards from a central wheel, picking from face up and face down piles, adding a number of a type to your dance floor. As an example, you might place three pink men and then if an opponent has any single pink women, you steal them. The pairs score and you’re trying to place them from your hand or nab others’ by summoning them to your dance.

There’s also a rarity of the dancers, which can make some plays easier or riskier as you go.

The game was fine, I had a good time with it, but remained on course to pick up Bus & Stop which I preferred the theme of and was there for.

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

By Kosch & Lookout Games

I love a good nature theme. Throw in a sheep on a moor on the cover and you’ve got my interest.

We managed to sit down with a couple from Florida to play the game and fortunately, none of us had played a Forest Shuffle game so we were all learning.

You plant trees, shrubs or moors which will be populated with all manner of flora and fauna which are on split cards, offering choices but also requirements about where they want to do. Dragonflies get points for having a variety of species while rabbits can burst into a tableau, scoring points off other cards. This is a point salad game, where most things will score you points, but you want the best way of getting them.

I found myself swarming my first trees with rabbits, forgetting I was aiming for somewhere for a badger and playing with birds on moors. Steve was going before me and harvesting dragonflies and bats. Alex was being Alex and had found a way to combo some moors and trees so that he would get a ton of points without having to deal with animals unless absolutely necessary. It was impressive to see every tactic have potential and if not for cost and encumbrance, I would have sought it out at the con.

7 Wonders Dice

By Antoine Bauza & Repos Production

I admit I came into this game with low expectations. Me and my partner watched a review of 7 Wonders Dice and didn’t really see much of a point. The boards looked very similar to each other and like a simpler Hadrian’s Wall.

Each turn someone shakes the box of dice which is where your resources, commerce, military and so on come from. There are ridges splitting them into sections making the dice cost 0, 1, 2 or 3 coin, plus whatever the dice would normally cost. Buying resources discounts things and there are progress chains like in a lot of roll and write games.

Pretty quickly a lot of us had most of the resources and were free to expand where we chose. A French man on the other side of the board and I were both celebrating whenever we’d expand the science track. The military track was alright, with full points given if your opponent didn’t have defences, or reduced ones if they did and no penalties for that player. Wonders themselves were fine, but easily overlooked and the leaders section took a little bit of understanding in the late game.

The full game with six players took 26 minutes after the teach, which is only a little shorter than 7 Wonders games I’ve played in the past. I don’t think it replaces the card game, but if you prefer a roll & write or a smaller box, this is a nice option.

Unmatched: The Witcher: Steel & Silver

By Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Brian Neff & Restoration Games

I’m not a very competitive person, but I like the Unmatched games. They’re short and pretty, pushing players together and giving an in-built time limit when your deck runs out.

Steve bought Unmatched: The Witcher: Steel & Silver as it had Gerald and Ciri in it, as well as a big monster in the Ancient Leshen.

Like the other Unmatched games, you move your character on a point-to-point map, playing attack cards on opponents, defending against them and playing scheme cards which change things up. It’s a simple mechanic, enhanced by the unique abilities each character has and the way they interact.

Gerry is a beast, with a selection of gear to pick from at the start of the game which feels in keeping for him. Whenever his equipment would come up, it was an interesting moment.

Ciri is a character who starts fine but gets better and better as the game goes on. A number of her cards have little bubble icons on them and when they’re in the discard pile, they make some of her cards much stronger. Eventually, the powerful ‘feint’ card in every character’s deck won’t even work on her. 

The Ancient Leshen is slow but has wolves to help kettle enemies. It also has the ability to heal and to teleport which make up for its weaknesses.

In the game we played, I was Ciri and starting in the middle of things, my unicorn perished and I was taken down by Alex’s Geralt before a slow duel between him and Steve’s Ancient Leshen. The expansion has ongoing schemes which are what caused the healing and were brutal to have to deal with.

I may have died first, but it was fun to watch even on the sidelines and Steve bought the Robin Hood Vs Bigfoot expansion later to give Geralt more things to hunt.

Peanuts Talent Show!

By Koudai Tateno, root & CMON Global Limited

We went past the sad-looking CMON booth on day one expecting just to see one person weeping given their recent financial problems. A few days later, it was packed with their little games. Yes, CMON do have little games they make. If they still exist this time next year, maybe that’s the main thing they’ll do.

I’m a big fan of Peanuts, so when I saw a trick taking game about the characters putting on a talent show, I had to drag Steve and Alex into it. You start with a small deck of numbered cards and if you win the trick you get points and the other players get money to spend adding more cards to their deck. The cards mostly go above the starting and have abilities which play off the cost but were to be ignored for the first game, causing a bit of an imbalance with one of them.

If you win a round you get a little Snoopy with a trumpet meeple, and that’s the best part of the game. The choice of characters didn’t really feel like it fit (Charlie Brown shouldn’t be as high as he was and Schroeder shouldn’t be as low). This felt pretty low effort as a licensed game and possibly my worst game of the con.

6 Nimmt: Baron Oxx

Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer & AMIGO

We all love 6 Nimmt and had played a bunch of it before the con in a coffee shop. There are a lot of variants which just add a number, but this one intrigued us by changing things up.

You have five rows of cards with numbers, coloured bull heads and an amount of points you score if you take them.

Players get a deck of 20 cards taken from the main stack and draw four which they’ll have to play through at a time. The numbers are just the order of placement for this version of the game, and then the card can go anywhere, as long as the colour of one bull head matches a colour on one of the tows. The sixth card placed will pick up the previous five cards and establish a new row, and the sixth bull head of a matching colour will do the same. This makes for a chaotic game of treading carefully or (often in my case) choosing violence.

This was great fun and we stayed in the Amigo area playing a few rounds. There were only German copies at the show and they were all sold out by the time we started hunting for them.

Miskatonic Tales: Journey to Innsmouth

By Eric Dubus, Olivier Melison & Chaosium Games

I generally consider myself as more someone who talks about and loves RPGs than board games, even though I really love board games. Any RPG stalls at Spiel had me hovering around them for a bit, and that included Chaosium.

I backed Horror on the Orient Express which had yet to see public release when they were promoting Journey into Innsmouth, so I steadfastly ignored it. Looking at the game at the con it felt like a more narrative Eldritch Horror or FFG Arkham Files game.

The game purports to be a 15 hour game, but not all in one sitting. This is split between three stories each with their own book. Characters have a prebuilt deck of cards with automatic successes for some skills or potential successes through die rolls.

It may have just been the demo, but it felt very much like we were pushed through the experience, stuck together in each room and moved through sometimes before we were done.

Alex, Steve and I had been playing Vantage and loved the experience, so unfavourable comparisons had to be drawn. I love Lovecraftian games, despite the daft old dead racist behind it, but this is one I think I’m fine passing on. I really hope this doesn’t reflect on what Horror on the Orient Express will be like.

Ink

By Kasper Lapp, Chris Quilliams & Final Score Games

Where I was taken in by Bohemians, Steve was entranced by Ink. We managed to find a time when Final Score were a little quieter to get a table.

Ink is an abstract game where you’re trying to use up your selection of inkpots, half of which are only able to place on two specific colours. Some of the tiles have spots with numbers on in a section, allowing you to place one or more inkpots when you reach that number of continuous tiles. So if I’ve got a light blue 4, then I need four tiles of light blue which connect. As well as locking in a pot on the numbered tile, I flip some others and put them on any non-numbered spots, clearing more of them from my set. The reason these are flipped is because there are ways of moving or removing them, making them open for re-use.

The rondel for tile selection allows people to enter the same space and to dart across the whole thing, but each time you complete a full circuit you pick up a random tile which blocks things off. There are randomised abilities which trigger when you complete longer groups of tiles and then the final rounds had a fun stand-off between the two players who were still going.

I really enjoyed this, and it’s a very pretty game.

Collect!

By Jérémy Ducret, Johannes Goupy & CMON Global Limited

Back to the CMON booth, as Steve wanted to try a card game which looked pretty nice.

Collect is a simple game of collecting animals, all of whom have abilities. You draw a card from one of two decks and if it’s your first one, you can return it to the top of a deck and pick again (after showing everyone).

If you have four of a kind in a row on your line then you win, which can be tricky as you’re placing any new cards on the ends of your line. The abilities manipulate this, with crabs moving cards, parrots predicting the next draw and so on. Chameleons are wild and there are even two types of card which add new victory conditions. Lions win the round if you have seven different cards and octopodes win if you have three pairs.

The first three wins grant half a crown and the fourth is a full crown. Either way, if you get a full crown then the game’s over. This way there’s always a time limit of that fourth round, but if someone dominates two rounds then that’s it.

This was a really enjoyable little game I could see being an opener or closer to a night of games.

As a post-Spiel report, Steve’s said that “The Derpy Game” has been a hit with his kids.

Use Up All Your Sick Days

By Dylan Coyle, Andrei Ebreo & Charming Games Collective

This was a prototype game about animals using up all their sick days without getting into any conflicts with colleagues trying to do the same.

There are two different game modes to this game, with a cooperative mode which is played using a kind of calendar frame. 

Dylan, Alex and I played the competitive party mode, where you’re trying to be sick on consecutive days to others, played in real time. You’re trying to follow either days or play a run of matching animals. If you don’t have a play, you can play a card face down and at a later point say, “I’m back!” and play a card. There are celebrations like Halloween, Labor Day and such which count as wild cards. Players are looking to get their hand empty and it’s some light fun in the style of games like Happy Salmon.

Like Bohemians, there was an amount of bleed and talking about former employers where this was a thing.

Use Up All Your Sick Days will be on Backerkit soon.

Elemystic

By Jamie Sabriel, Antonis Papantoniou & Wise Wizard Games

I was introduced to this game in the UK Games Expo press event and figured it’d be something fun to play with my partner, who’s a big Star Realms fan.

Elemystic is an interesting game which feels like it’ll be a grower.

You play wizards with 10 health each, trying to combine elements to knock lumps out of each other. Each round one card is set aside, then one is given to each player and kept secret. The remaining six cards are drafted so both players have four cards, one of which is a mystery to the other. 

Players one-by-one play their cards down to make a combination spell, with only the one in front providing the speed of the spell and special ability. Each spell has a top and bottom attack and defence stat, so once again, only the front one will get both, with the others only using what’s on the top. Spells really vary things up, so Shadow swaps one players’ attack or defence. If you’re losing then Water gains a massive attack as well as the damage. Earth has high stats but no ability. Some games put down tokens, like Thunder which once per game can cover the front of the opponents’ spell, ruining all but the numbers on the tops of the cards.

The game is short, and I’m curious to see how the replayability goes. We were discovering combinations and fun choices in our game, and I don’t know whether there’ll be a limit to that.

Propolis

By Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich, AEG & Flatout Games

Bees! In Cities!

This was a nice game about expanding your hives by placing bees on facedown tiles to get resources and more bees, then building new structures which often disposes of your bees which are represented with cute little ‘beeples’. I went heavy on bluebells and some wild resources. In the end I hadn’t noticed I was one building away from the truncated endgame and rushed to finish things before others could make their engines grow. I’m sure I wouldn’t have done as well if this was the full game, but had a good time anyway.

A quick rundown of older games we played:

Red 7: Or “Better Fluxx”, a great pregame game.

Lovecraft Letter: We love Love Letter, and this added some fun twists

6 Nimmt: I’ve mentioned this already, and again, it’s a wonderful game

Sniper Elite: I’m the one Etheridge who’s not a big World War II person, but this was enjoyable.

Cascadia: One of the games I really enjoy and am always perplexed about why I haven’t added it to my collection yet.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal: I did terribly, but had a fun time.

Vantage: I’ll review this properly in the future, but we played it twice and had a great time.

Lego: Monkey Palace: One of my few wins was this game for children which I thought I was doing terribly at. I don’t know what this says about me or the game.

Star Trek: Chrono Trek: I had to buy Star Trek Chrononauts. Each game ended a bit abruptly, I’m not sure if this fixes Chrononauts or makes it a bit too short.

Flip 7: I liked the gameplay loop but had the worst luck, only scoring two hands in this blackjack-style game.

Bohnanza: Dahlias: I last played the original Bohnanza with some random folks at a GenCon UK and didn’t really care for it. Putting some lovely Beth Sobel art on it definitely helps, compared to sentient beans who look like they should be on a list.

Things in Rings: The concept was cool, the categories felt like too much, and I’m pleased Alex roped me into a demo as it was really enjoyable.

Star Realms: I bought a full-art anniversary version of the game as I needed a second copy.

Carcassonne: I’m always up for Carcassonne and we were at the airport, so we played it on my iPad while waiting to board.

That’s it for me and board games of the show, both past and present. There was no way I’d get round everything, so if you went, what did you enjoy?