Essen Recap: The BoardGame Geek Convention – Part II

So you join us fresh from Essen Part I. If you have not been there first this may not make much sense.

FRIDAY

Day two of the fair started with another early morning tactical table grab. This time we went for Kohle & Kolonie. It looked like a heavy game we could sink our teeth into. All about coal mining. As soon as the rules started we knew it was going to be our kind of game. We only played a partial game but got a good feel for it. It is a complex and heavy game. Not in so much as the rules are very complex, but the interplay of mechanics makes it a nice challenge to see just how to best play. Reminded me a little of a classic by the name of Brass. I didn’t buy a copy immediately due to fear it might hurt my head just a little too much. Went top of my shortlist though.

We managed to get a couple of other quick games in before it was time to head over and demo for Portal Games. Two of us were on shift at once demoing the previously mentioned Theseus as well as their other new release Legacy: The Testament of Duke de Crecy. The latter is a fun family building card game where you all try and develop the most well renowned family by facilitating your family members having children, marrying of these children to different characters, buying property, holding social functions and so on. It is an enjoyable game with a strong narrative. When teaching I saw a number of players making little stories as they went. “We are poor so have to marry the shoemaker”, “the bakers daughter is very fertile and so we have an extra child”, “his wife dies in childbirth, no problem, he will get married again”. The character art also works well. It was always interesting to watch all the guys crane across to get a better look every time the attractive and mysterious “Pirates Daughter” was placed on the table. There would always be some disappointment when one of the other players took her as a bride.

It was a fairly intense but still enjoyable 4 hours of demoing running up until the doors closed for the day.

As it was Friday night we decided to go out for dinner. One of the traditional locations is The Mexican, no idea what it is actually called. After a couple of games of Donburiko we were ready to go. When we arrived it wasn’t looking good. It was very busy and we were 8 people. More importantly cocktail happy hour was about to end. We managed to shoehorn ourselves onto an undersized table some friends were leaving and maximised our cocktail order about 3 mins before half price cocktails was over. This meant two pint of cocktail per person. Excellent. Cocktails arrived and we placed our food order. Then disaster struck, the kitchen was too busy to take any more orders. We had about a litre of cocktail to drink each and no food. We could not leave, but it was almost 10pm, we needed food. In the end we managed to get two sharing platters between the 8 of us. There were some hungry tums after that.

As the evening went on the conversation deteriorated. After the great story of the friend who ordered a thousand chicken nuggets at McDonalds, we moved onto to the popular dinner table topic of “Most Embarrassing Shit”. This was not about the turd whose shape and consistency one was most ashamed of, but the most embarrassing circumstances in which one had laid a devil cigar. Favourites included the one that plopped out of the bottom of the bus while everyone was loading their luggage at the station, the chap out in the forest who knocked on the door of a nearby house to find it was a show home and so peeled the cellophane off the pan but discovered that there was no water plumbed in to dispose of his good work and had to simply re-wrap the toilet with a gift inside, and the turd that wouldn’t come in the airplane toilet so had to be sucked back into the gentleman’s body in time for landing after which his friends had to leave him at the airport to allow him the time needed to get the task completed. Next one of the larger gents in our group managed to convince pretty much all of us that he could beat two of the more lithe chaps in a 25m sprint. Sadly this was subsequently proved to be incorrect in a sprint across the wet central town square of Essen.

When we got back to the hotel it was late and we were not at our mental pinnacle. Two of us tried to master the fairly hefty Cornish Smuggler. We struggled through what was probably a very reasonable rulebook and played a few rounds. After a spell I realised I had backed myself into an untenable position with no way to sell the goods I had smuggled across half of Cornwall and no money left to make a different play. With our brains aching we decided to call it quits while we still could. Despite this the two of us decided to play Lost Legacy in the room. It is based on a game we know very well called Love Letter that plays in about 2 minutes. Reading through the rules it all sounded good, although the fact I fell asleep briefly and dropped my card as my companion drew his first card was a bad omen. Then, after scrutinising them for a while he declared that he could not legally play either card. Soundly beaten by the fatal alcohol+fatigue+Essen combo we gave up.

SATURDAY

The must play table dash this morning was Amerigo, designed by Stefan Feld, the man responsible for the classic that is In the Year of the Dragon. It had some clever mechanics and we all enjoyed it as a good solid effort, but nobody was totally wowed.

We had another good day getting in quite a few reasonable titles. Just after a game of L’Aéropostale we saw our 3rd chair-destruction-by-overweight-gamer. Comedy value was added by the fact that despite not actually being that massive they did a great beached whale number on the floor, I think more due to low IQ than high BMI. They need to get stronger chairs next year. Or scales at the door.

The highlight of Saturday at the fair was SOS Titanic. A co-operative game where you try and evacuate the passengers off the Titanic onto the lifeboats before it sinks. It has a Solitaire/Patience mechanic at it’s centre with each passenger represnted by a card that you have to line up on the deck of the Titanic. It has some really nice touches that make decisions tough but avoids the one player dictator problem some co-ops can have. It is also beautifully presented with a ring bound book representing the Titanic that sinks as you flip the pages with the progress of the game.

Back at the ranch we played Northern Pacific. A game we have had to class as Broken AND Genius at the same time. There is a map with a rail network across America and the train will make it’s way from one side of the board to the other without ever doubling back. On your turn you can do one of two things – place one of your cubes in a city the train has not yet been to, or chose which city the train goes to next from its current location. Every time it reaches a city with a cube in it each player gets their cube back and one more from the supply. The player with the most cubes when the train has completed its E to W journey wins. Unless no one has more cubes than they started with in which case the game wins! Crucially each city will accommodate one less cube than there are players. Consequently someone will always be left out. So if players 1, 2, and 3 load up a city that the train can go to next, player 4 will move the train to one of it’s other possible destinations, meaning all the other players have made a cube loss. So when player 1 places in A, player 2 might decide to join them or might decide place in city B. Player 3 must decide whether to join in the fun in A or B. Or maybe they will speculate on C, the common location the train could go to next after A or B. And so on. On the one hand it feels like there is no game and there will be a solvable “best move” each turn, on the other each situation seems different and one player can suddenly change the landscape completely with a single cube placement. Despite the concern that we were the ones being played, I have tabled this three times and it has been played 4-5 times in a row each time. The fact in plays in 10-15 minutes helps this, but it is very addictive.

We then had a game of what we call Wobbly Ship, officially know as Riff Raff. Why describe it when a video speaks a thousand words.

Finally we played the catchily titled Geistesblitz 5 vor 12. Place a selection of 8 wooden items on the table – a ghost, a mirror, an owl and so on. Flip a card. First player to grab the item from the card that matches one of those on the table, same item and same colour, wins the card. Get it wrong and you lose a card. Simple. But…

– If there is no exact match then you must grab the item which has neither it’s colour nor it’s likeness on the card.
And then add the advanced rules
– If there is a ghost with a clock grab nothing but shout the time on the clock
– If there is an item reflected in a mirror grab that item regardless of colour
– If there is an owl on the card shout the correct item rather than grabbing it
– If there is a mirror and an owl shout the colour of the item in the mirror
Stand back while your brain melts.

Need sleep.

SUNDAY

 As we entered the final day I still had a certain emptiness. While there had been some excellent filler and party type games I was still looking for my Game Of The Show. A classic 90-120 minute medium to heavy weight game that I might continue to play for years to come. Each Essen should have at least one.

Our last great hope was Nations. We had been too slow to get a table Saturday morning so got in extra early and sprinted right there. Having secured a table we were then lucky enough to be taught by one of the game designers.

This is an epic 40-60 mins per player civ game, a bit like Civilization the computer game. You build up your empire by buying different cards from a common board and placing them on your own board. There are the key commodities of grain, stone and money, which have different uses. There are also tracks for books (knowledge), military strength and stability. Each track has its own rewards and opens up various options. How much you have of any of these variables is determined by the cards you buy for your board and in some cases which cards you deploy workers to. And of course there are VPs, both earned during game and at end game scoring.

Initially it sounds pretty simple; the rules are pretty elegant, if a bit solitaire. But it’s not. Other player actions are crucial. You are frequently in direct competition on the three tracks, with absolute score on any track often much less important than position relative to other players. Also you frequently really want 2 or 3 cards from the common pool and will agonise over which one might still be there by the time it gets round to your turn again. One player’s move can often have a huge impact on your plans.

At last. Game of the Show. Several copies were bought and I felt satisfied. So far it has stood the test of time. Mission accomplished I felt free to wander the halls aimlessly. We then stumbled across a free table. It was a slightly odd setup being a shop booth, rather than a publisher booth, but it had a single gaming table tacked on to the edge. And what was laid out but Coal Baron. Or in German “Glück Auf”. Sounds a bit like “F**k Off”, which is enough to be mildy entertaining to our childish brains. More importatntly it was one of the few remaining games on my list to try. As icing on the cake a charming and pretty young lady was waiting to teach us.

It’s a game about mining. Expand your mine, mine your coal, obtain orders for different kinds of coal, fulfil you orders. After we had got over our excitement at the little lift in the middle of each player board that actually slides up and down, accessing different levels, we got stuck in. What a great game. Simple, intuitive, and fast paced but with plenty of interaction and tough choices. My number two big box game of the show. What a day!

As time was ruuning out it was important to complete the Essen experience by visiting the visiting the Geek section. Yes, even as a bunch of geeks travelling across Europe to a boardgame convention, there is a subsection even we find too Geek. The cosplayers and LARPers. In one part of the hall you can find massive arrays of weapons for sale, both foam and metal, stunning armour, booths selling mead for the drinking, pixie ears and so on. And some pretty intense costumes.

And so we played a couple more games before we exited the hall for the last time and made our way to the car for the long drive back to Paris.

Once again our journey took us through godforsaken Belgium where we bookended our weeks awful diet with another MacD’s. It did however bring us a sweet reward from the petrol station were we found some neat little limited edition Lego cars to bring home for the children. As we struggled to stay awake in the dark we had plenty of time for post match analysis of this year’s Essen.

It is always hard to judge the games in the bigger scheme of things until they have had time to settle in to their place in the wider pantheon of boardgames. Some years produce classics that still have a place many gamers all time top 10’s. For example 2007 gave us In the Year of the Dragon and 2008 Tinners’ Trail both of which still have a warm place in many of our hearts. Will Nations be viewed through rose tinted spectacles in the brave new world of 2019? Over all the impression was that, yes, this had been a good year for games. From fillers like Donburiko and Pick-a-Polar Bear to the bigger boxes of Nations and Coal Baron. We both felt satisfied that our games booty would get some good mileage in the future. The experience in the fair each day had also been good. The new halls worked fine and, with the exception of awkwardly placed toilets, the layout seemed to work. We also felt as though, unlike some previous years, we spent very little time wandering around unable to get a table when we wanted to. The group size worked out well too. Eight is a good number as two groups of 4 is the ideal split (a lot of games will not take 5 or more players). Although we got into a habit of sticking in the same 4s for the whole show, this was partly due to taste in games and beer-game priorities, and we did manage to mix it up a bit. Maybe most importantly the company was good and there was a lot of laughing. We laughed while playing games, laughed with good games, laughed at bad games, laughed between games and laughed at plenty of really bad chat. And there were some really embarrassing shit stories. Probably the only thing missing was sleep.

Within a few days of getting back I had already booked us 4 rooms for 2014…