It’s a good day if you unexpectedly meet people you don’t really know and they are happy to see you!
Welcome to day 2 of SPIEL Essen 2024. The doors of SPIEL have closed and I’m back at the laptop before doing a little bit more gaming in the hotel. Having booked a hotel room in Essen might be expansive (and gosh it is!), but having done so makes this feel almost like a gaming cruise. The city of Essen and its hotels have very much embraced SPIEL by now and even during check-in, my hotel let me know the bar and an adjacent room had been cleared/reserved for gaming which is awesome!
My day already started quite surreal. Waiting at the train station, I suddenly saw a familiar face: Derek from Heavy Cardboard who I don’t know at all but always enjoy watching on playthroughs. We chatted a bit and I have to say he’s as nice in person as he appears in the streams. At one point I asked his friend if I knew him from somewhere, he looked vaguely familiar. The answer was: “Hello, my name is Vincent Dutrait” … oh my gosh, completely hadn’t recognised him. Perhaps you know this from working remotely, but seeing people in person and only on pictures can create two very different perceptions of the same person. Funny thing was I had even messaged him 2-3 days ago asking if he would be interested to come on to my interview series Origin Stories 😀
When I entered the convention halls around 9:30, a good sizeable audience eagerly awaiting entrance had already assembled.
I used my early press entrance to quickly headed over to FrxyGames to get a copy of Kingdom Legacy: Feudal Kingdom for a friend, only to learn that they had sold out Thursday early afternoon. Apparently they had brought 300 copies and those went like hot cakes (they want me to let you know they are already working on new copies and they should be up on their website in time for Christmas). Luckily I had picked up a copy for myself among the first things on Thursday, so I’ll be able to write about it at some later point. Sitting here in the hotel bar, this small 140 card solo legacy game is probably the game I bought that I’m most eager to dive into after having played the first few turns during the novelty show on Wednesday!
On my way, I met Tobi from German YouTube channel Board Game Pirates and I was impressed by all the amount of work they are putting into their coverage of the convention. Me as a writer, I need 2-3h to get this post up and images ready, but them having to edit all that video footage … let me tell you that’s a tremendous amount of work each single evening!
My plan for the day was to start playing something heavier, meatier, and so I sat down at a table for Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon and waited for the convention to start … just to find out after 15min of already sitting there that all tables had been booked for the rest of the convention! I wasn’t the only person disappointed by this and there was no sign around.
So off I went to try out Martin Wallace’s new game Steam Power instead. Just to be sure, I asked if they had open tables without reservation, and yes, they did. In fact, they don’t do any reservations at all. Have to say I prefer it way more to have a chance to play something spontaneously if I wait for a previous group to finish rather than hearing “sorry, you weren’t here on Thursday morning”.
I had more or less blind-backed Steam Power after talking with Martin at SPIEL 2023 for Origin Stories: Brass – An Interview With Designer Martin Wallace and was curious to find out if I had backed the right horse or not. Turns out, it was quite a lot of fun. It looks lovely but somewhat unspectacular: you got hex tiles, a cloth map, some trains, some houses, cardboard money, contract cards, why should one want to play this? Well, to me it felt like a best of of Martin Wallace train mechanisms (alas, the patented Martin Wallace loans were absent), all mixed up and put into a form that is more approachable for a wider market. During the rules teach, it was described to us as somewhere between Ticket to Ride and an Age of Steam or name-your-other-heavier train game.
It’s a game where very much the rules get out of the way. Take two actions from a list of basic actions, like placing to hex tiles to lay tracks, build a factory, take new contracts, etc. It’s all straight forward and without a lot of limitations. E.g. laying most track doesn’t even cost money, building a factory doesn’t either. In the end, players want to fulfil contracts by accessing different colours of resources and they need to pay the owner of the factory as well as any rail links used that belong to opponents. So you can build long tracks to far away factories and if your’s is the only factory of that produces the resource needed, you can make a small fortune in transportation costs.
It’s difficult to describe what makes this appealing to play because everything about the rules and components is so unspectacular (although the acrylic tiles of the deluxe version do look quite lovely). I can best describe it this way: when we reached the end of our demo-version which only played to 6 contracts, everyone at the table said “I actually would have enjoyed it if we could continue”. It might not have any aspect to it that is standing out in particular, but it really does feel like something I’ll be playing in a few years time when many fancy Kickstarters with tons of plastic minis have already left my collection again. More on Steam Power in a short interview I did with Martin, just have to find time to transcribe it. Just as a teaser: Martin has long-term plans for Steam Power and he even teased he already has ideas how to bring stocks and 18xx elements in it.
Next on the gaming list was AI: 100% Human. For some reason, the visuals of this game had put this rather down on my list of interest, but it was on my way and I was curious to find out what the buzz is about. To put it simply, it’s a card drafting game where each player fills up their own 5×3 grid and scores cards one by one as they are slotted in. There is also an intermediate and an end game scoring for various criteria. All the cards have a number, colour and a scoring criteria: score 3VP anywhere on your board for each vertical neighbours which values sum up to 6, 2VP for every black card in one row, etc. The type of scoring in combination with the drafting made this fun to play, but when reading this you probably would expect a 20€ card game, right?
The asking price for the Deluxe box (there is no non-deluxe, I asked) was 49€. The “deluxe” part of the box seems to be primarily in foiling and such, even the playmate cost extra. In the end, I picked up a copy because I was curious to play it more but with all intend of re-selling it after I’m done. I was surprised when I saw a standee on the table that said that both Rahdo and Dice Tower had ranked this high on their anticipation lists. Maybe I just need to play this more and they have seen things I haven’t yet.
The next surprise of the day was running into Cardboard Rhino, who in real life turned out to be even more lovely than in her videos – which I know seems impossible! An even bigger surprise was that she had heard of me, something I usually assume just isn’t the case 😀
So after a little bit of fan-boying on my part, we talked about games to check out and off she went producing more footage. Again someone who does the for me unthinkable and tries to create on-the-day video footage!
Biggest surprise of the day though was learning that Ryan Laukat is at Essen! If you want to meet him, he’s signing games at 1PM at the booth of Schwerkraftverlag (3 Z-611) on Saturday. I’m not big on selfies, so I forgot to take a picture, but it was great to catch up with him over coffee after talking for Origin Stories: Sleeping Gods – An Interview with Designer Ryan Laukat (part 1). I’m eagerly awaiting my copy of Creature Caravan to arrive which hopefully will be any day now … still waiting on the Belgian online retail I bought my Gamefound copy at after missing out on the campaign.
Fun side story: SPIEL could very well be turned into a board game. Today I played the chapter “find a toilette where you don’t have to wait 25min to do number two”. For obvious reasons, I didn’t take pictures, but the lines were one of the indicators that really a lot of people were at Essen today. Walking through the halls, it didn’t feel quite as bad.
Over to Oink games to play Souvenirs from Venice, purely because I loved the theme. In it, sets of souvenirs are randomly played out as a grid and players have to move their gondolas through he canals and go shopping. The challenge is to find sets of three items of the same type before time runs out and the airplane leaves. The motor here is that on each player’s turn, one more tile is flipped and the game ends when all tiles are either revealed or have been bought (= replaced by coins). One can actually do a little bit of aggressive stealing to stall other players and there is a pigeon mechanism where all players need to unexpectedly give one of their purchases to their left neighbour. Overall, it’s quite cute but don’t expect a super deep game. Picked up a copy just because of the theme, but I don’t see this often hitting the table for me.
Following a suggestion by a reader in the comments, I chose Raas: A Dance of Love as the final game of the day. Its theme and inspiration is Indian dancing and finding love through it, which is intriguing, but unfortunately didn’t come through for both me and the group that had played before me. Nonetheless, it was a very good game and if it hadn’t been a preproduction demo copy, I would have loved to pick up a copy.
In Raas, players are drafting dice by simultaneously selecting one of six wheels on the very unique looking board. This is done by playing a card lettered A-F. The letter indicates the wheel and the seating direction indicates which sector on the wheel is relevant for the player. Each wheel consists of two layers, an upper layer that shows a die colour + pip value combination and a lower layer that shows a bonus effect. At the end of the turn, the top layers rotate based on the cards players played and then the whole system is rotated further based on the current round but turning the big nob in the middle.
Players reveal their cards and then from A-F in turn take the respective die and place it on their personal board. The goal is to score well during the three scoring rounds of the game. For that, one has to push up multipliers on three bonus tracks which allow to for example score X amount of VPs for each die of a certain pip value (e.g. 5VP for each 1). It’s pretty abstract with pip values, round discs, wooden sticks … all rooted in the dancing theme but as their are no dancers anywhere to be seen on those giant wheels, it’s easy to forget what the theme is.
Overall, I would describe it as an interesting action selection game where the turning of the dials produces a nice random element as it’s too complex to really control or plan ahead. I wouldn’t call it dice drafting because there isn’t really anything you’ll do with the dice except scoring and manipulating values to improve said scoring. Players are also not competing for the same set of dice as in for example Troyes. It was a lot of fun and if they manage to replace the cover and bring the dancing them more to the central board, Raas will be popular with many players.
And finally to catch up, the big one: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I have actually played this Wednesday evening but had no time to really write about it earlier. After Kutna Hora, I got rather suspicious of what CGE’s next big Euro would bring but it’s actually quite enjoyable! In SETI, players send out probes to land on the planets of our solar system and send out signals to scan for extraterrestrial live. There is fighting for majorities in scanning sectors, upgrade tiles to make actions more powerful, side boards that only get revealed at certain points in the game and add replayability, … and all the other goodies of a modern Euro game. The big wow factor of the game is the rotating, multilayered solar system which makes timing interesting. If a card incentivises you to land on a specific planet, you might need to spend a lot of energy to get your probe there or you get your timing right and wait for the planets to align right and it’s only a short hob to get there.
The game is driven by many unique action cards which players draw from a common deck and market and gives a slight Terraforming Mars or Ark Nova feel, both games I don’t really enjoy, but this one I liked. There is of course an economy of resources, in this case money, energy, and credits, and on your turn you choose one of a handful of core actions or use the action on a card you have.
It’s getting late and BGG’s poor editing system (lesson learned: don’t try to blog on poor hotel wifi) has made writing this already way longer than necessary, so let me just sum SETI up as: way better than I thought, but I think longterm it will lose its fascination for me personally. It’s just to euro-y Euro and recently I rather enjoy system-designs like Splotter games or the recent Rise & Fall, games where I have more of a story to tell after playing them. However, if you are among the many fans of Ark Nova and co, definitely check this one out. This likely will be game of the year for a lot of people.
And with that, as always over to you: any games you want me to check out? What was your favourite discovery if you were at Essen yourself or thing you would have liked to see if you weren’t able to come? How would you like to run into?