category: Board Games
tags: SPIEL Essen
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A month has passed since Essen 2024, but finally: here are the images I took and the games I played this year.
As every year, I went through all >1000 games in the GeekPreview. It contains about the same number of games as last year (ca. 1230 in each year, I just checked last year’s preview while writing this), but somehow I ended up with nearly twice as much “Must have” and “Interesting” games as 2023.
I didn’t expect to play even a fraction of them, given the plan to go to Essen one day alone, and one day with my family. But somehow I managed to play eight(!) games on day one…I think this is my all-time Essen record so far. The whole list is here.
Day 1:
AI Space Puzzle (Portal Games)
The “Astronauts must figure out what the AI is trying to tell them” theme feels a bit tacked on, but it’s a interesting deduction game:
There’s a secret “goal card” which shows colored astronauts and their positions on a 4x4 grid. The AI player has to communicate this via tokens to the other players, who have to get the positions and colors right.
I played a whole demo round, but in “easy” mode (where the AI has access to all the communication tokens). In a regular game, the AI player would only be allowed to use a limited number of tokens.
I really liked it, and bought it in the end.
Thorgal: The Board Game (Portal Games)
Apparently the game is based on a comic book (which I never heard about), but “cooperative storybook adventure game” sounded interesting (and right after my AI Space Puzzle demo game, there was a free spot for a game of Thorgal right next to the AI Space Puzzle table).
The game board is an actual book, and as I understood it, each double page is a separate scenario. But the game itself somehow didn’t “click” for me. You run around, collect tokens, fight enemies, level up…nothing I haven’t seen before.
Fishing (2F-Spiele)
An interesting combination of trick-taking and deck building. In the first round you get random cards and play a “standard” trick-taking game, but for all following rounds your deck consists of the cards that you won in the previous round’s tricks.
If you don’t have enough cards, you draw new ones from a stack which contains:
- more cards of the existing colors, but with higher numbers
- an additional “trump” color which automatically wins the trick
- cards with the number zero which allow you to pick one card from the trick before the winner gets the rest
- (and probably more, but these are the ones that I saw in the demo game)
This was way more fun than it sounds. I really liked it, but it was already sold out when I wanted to buy it.
FateFlip: Washed Ashore (Frosted Games)
A “choose your own adventure” game, those seem to have become popular recently. You are stranded on a remote island, and work your way through a card deck, making decisions similar to the “adventure books” that already existed in my childhood:
- If you want to stay at the beach, read card no. 13
- If you want to go into the forest, read card no. 17
Some cards are items that you can get during the game (e.g. the axe on the gallery image), and you also have a character card where you can mark your current energy, food and safety with paper clip-like markers.
I only played a short single player demo and thought about buying it…but the German version wasn’t available yet (I’m fluent in English, but I’m also lazy…so when it has a lot of text and there’s a German version available, I will buy the German version :-)
And I had pre-ordered In the Ashes, which apparently is a mixture of “choose your own adventure” book and a dungeon crawler. At the time I played Washed Ashore, I already had picked up In the Ashes, but had not played it yet. Ultimately I decided that one “choose your own adventure” game was enough, and didn’t pre-order Washed Ashore.
Little Alchemists (Czech Games Edition)
I already own the “big” Alchemists, but a family-friendlier version of Alchemists sounded tempting.
As I understood it, the demo game that we played is the simplest version of Little Alchemists. It was basically nothing but drawing tiles, scanning them with the app and mark the result behind my screen (and auto-selling the potion to a customer if we happened to create the potion that customer wants).
For me (someone who likes complex games and the original Alchemists) this was a bit too light…but then again, it’s the family version and I can imagine kids having a lot of fun just scanning the ingredients.
And the game contains multiple small cardboard boxes with “little expansions” that you can unlock by playing a few games - although I don’t know what kind of rules/mechanics they will add.
Industrollization (DicePen)
The publisher has released about ten “roll and write” games, which I all found in the GeekPreview. When I visited the booth, I happened to play this one, which is about loading goods on trains and delivering them to factories. Nice, but nothing special.
Intent to Kill (Hobby World)
Another deduction game. The players are split into 2 teams, murderer and detective. There are about 20 character cards on the game board, each character has properties like sex, age group, size etc.
The murderer is secretly assigned one of those characters (that character is the murderer himself), plus a motive which limits who he’s allowed to murder.
The game goes over five rounds, and each round the murderer kills one of the characters. The detectives can question other characters adjacent to the crime site and ask questions about the murderer’s character’s properties (e.g. “Is the murderer male?”, “Is the murderer in his forties?”).
In general, the player who plays the murderer has to tell the truth, but for certain questioned characters (for example, if his own character is questioned) he’s allowed to lie.
In the end, the detectives win if they can guess the murderer’s character and his motive correctly. That was a very fun game, and I bought it.
Forest Shuffle (Lookout Games)
This was released last year, but I didn’t play it yet, heard good things about it…and when I walked by, there happened to be a free spot at a table where they were just starting a new game.
It’s an interesting card game where you have to place cards with trees in front of you, and other cards with plants/animals (which are split and always contain two plants/animals, so you have to pick one) on the left/right/top/bottom of the tree. Placing a card isn’t free most of the time, you have to pay with cards from your hand.
The cards contain a lot of icons, many of which are used for end game scoring. The image in my gallery, for example, contains cards which grant:
- 3 points for every card with a “leaf” icon
- 5 points for each “completely occupied” tree (with a card on each of the tree’s four sides)
- 0/3/6/12/20 points for 1/2/3/4/5 cards with a “butterfly” icon
Day 2:
I spent most of the second day (as planned) with children’s games and toys.
I played only one “real” game, because when I visited the APE Games booth on day one, I discovered they have a signup list for Pampero, and the next free spot was on day two.
Pampero (APE Games)
A heavy economy game about building wind farms and power grids in Uruguay. To actually build the wind farms/power grids, you need a bulldozer in the particular area on the game board where you want to build…and you need a card with the right action. Building stuff gives you resources and income, some of which you need to fulfill contracts.
Beautiful wooden components, and after playing I read that the author worked with Vital Lacerda in the past…which explains a lot, complexity-wise it feels like a Lacerda game.
