category: Board Games
tags: SPIEL Essen
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Essen 2025 is over, and here’s my yearly Essen post.
As always, I went through all the games in the GeekPreview (1368 this year!) and picked a mixture of gamer’s games and family/kid’s games.
This year, I played 12 games altogether (7 on day 2, almost on par with my record from last year).
Day 1:
I was there with my family to check out games playable with kids:
Brick Like This! (Dotted Games)
A cooperative/team communication game. One team member has a card with the silhouette of a small Lego model on it, and the other team member actually has to build that model with Lego bricks…without seeing the card, just relying on the instructions of the card holder.
You can play this either against the clock (sand timer) or against other teams.
Follow me - The Adventurers of Knowledge (Happy Baobab)
(no link to BGG or elsewhere available. It was a prototype, and at the time of writing this, I couldn’t find anything about this game online)
I didn’t know anything about this game before, we just walked by the booth and it looked interesting.
The game board consists of a fixed track on the outside and a big picture in the middle…and many different “inlays” (sheets of paper), so the picture on the inside and the values on the outside track can be replaced.
In the beginning, all fields on the track are covered with playing pieces (plastic diamonds).
One player removes the first diamond to reveal a “task” - something the players must find in the picture in the middle of the board (e.g. a symbol/number/letter - as I said, there were many different inlays to change the tasks).
All players play simultaneously, the player who finds the “something” first places one of his colored disks on it, and then removes (and keeps) the next diamond, revealing the next task. And so on, until all diamonds are removed. Then each player gets points depending on the number of diamonds collected.
Driving Me Crazy! (Simplexity Games)
This game was one of my picks from the GeekPreview, but I was a bit disappointed. The description sounded like more fun than playing the game actually was.
It’s a card game where you have to play “road” cards until one player reaches a certain amount of kilometers (=numbers printed on the road cards). There are also other (“action”) cards which let you do stuff like steal cards from other players’ hands, or force other players to discard the last road card they played.
As I wrote, the description sounded interesting, but the actual gameplay was somehow…I don’t know. I don’t want to say “boring”, but somehow this game didn’t “click” for me.
Octocube (Sit Down!)
I first read about this game in a designer diary on BGG a few weeks before Essen. I’m always looking for games with new/interesting mechanics, so a game where you have to collect tiles by rolling over them with magnetic cubes immediately caught my eye.
Then I saw it again in the GeekPreview, and decided to check it out.
This was really fun. The box says it’s for age 10+, but IMO it’s also fun for older players. Rolling a cube over tiles sounds simple at first glance, but there are also some interesting decisions:
- each side of the cube can only hold one tile, so do I spin the cube before rolling in order to land on an empty side?
- removing collected tiles from the cube is a separate action, but do I remove all of them?
I may choose to leave some tiles on the cube in order to collect more of the same type later (because I get bonus points for removing many of the same type at once)
Break-Out: Escape The Dungeon (Smart Games)
Smart Games are most well-known (at least to me) not for “classic” boardgames, but for one player puzzle games. We already have some of those at home, and tried some more at their booth.
I played mostly Break-Out, a kind of “dungeon-escape” game where you have to roll your pawn (a cube) across a dungeon, pick up a key (and in some scenarios a weapon), which stick to the cube via magnet.
Yes…another game where you roll a magnetic cube over things that stick to the cube
The exit is a door which only opens if you land on its field in the right orientation and have the key.
Day 2:
I was there alone to play games for myself:
Formidable Farm (2F-Spiele)
2F-Spiele is one of the booths that I visit every year because I’m a fan of Friedemann Friese. Of the two games released this year, Formidable Farm sounded more interesting to me, so I checked out that (but still played the other game later “by accident”, see below).
In this game, you get cards with contracts and have to fulfill them by paying resources: crops, vegetables and animals.
When you fulfill a contract, you also get a reward, so the ideal strategy is “serial-fulfilling” multiple contracts in the same turn by using the reward from the first contract to fulfill the second contract, and so on.
Wispwood (Czech Games Edition)
CGE is another “auto-visit”, and I really liked Wispwood when I played it there.
In your turn, you pick one of eight wisp tiles from a central board. Between every two tiles there is an image of a shape that looks like a Tetris piece. You pick one of the two shapes next to “your” tile, and take enough tree tiles so you can build that Tetris shape out of your wisp tile and the tree tiles. Then you have to place the shape in your player area, where you have to build a 4x4 grid with these shapes.
There are four types of wisp tiles, and there are multiple goal cards per type. One card per type is used in each game, and it shows how you can get points for the wisp tiles of that type, usually by putting them in certain positions (e.g. near to or away from other tiles) and/or based on the number of tiles from the same type that you have).
When the first player has his 4x4 grid completely filled with tiles, the round ends and scores are calculated. The game goes over three rounds, and each round the max. size of your grid increases (5x5, 6x6).
Bohemians (Portal Games)
Another game which I first heard about by reading its designer diary on BGG, and then I saw it in the GeekPreview again (and it’s published by Portal Games, which I also like).
The main mechanic is deck-building, and you build the deck in order to place four cards on your player board each round.
Each card has some half-icons on the left and right side, and some of them are also printed on your player board. You have to pick/place these four cards from your deck so you get as many full icons as possible. Each full icon gives you a point, and some cards have texts that give you additional points. You can spend these points immediately to buy new cards for your deck, and there are also special (more expensive) cards that are the “end-goals” of the game - the game ends if the first player has bought a certain amount of them (in the demo game we played it was only two of these cards, probably more in the full game).
Fearless (2F-Spiele)
In the afternoon, I went to the 2F booth again, with the intention to buy Fishing (which I wanted to buy last year, but it was sold out). Just at the moment when I arrived, I saw people leaving a demo table, so I jumped at the demo table and played Fearless.
It’s a trick-taking game (like Fishing), but there are cards with positive and negative values (from -6 to +6).
As usual, the highest card wins the trick, but in this game it’s possible that you win the trick but still get a negative score, if the other players all played negative cards. And you have to make sure that you win about equal as much positive and negative cards! Because in the end, the player whose total score stays closest to zero wins the game.
It was fun, but it’s another trick-taking game (like Fishing). I decided that I like Fishing better, so in the end I bought Fishing anyway.
It’s High Tide! (HABA)
I went to the HABA booth to check out Point of View (see below). There was a demo table with that game, and people just sitting down with one free seat. I asked the group if I could join them, but it turns out that they had just occupied the table to check out It’s High Tide! for their kids. I joined them, and it’s really a nice kid’s game - a racing game where sandworms try to get from the beach to the sea by rolling dice.
Most of the spaces are “regular” ones, and some are holes. One of the dice results may trigger a wave (a cardboard “wall” that is pushed from the finish to the start) which pushes back all worms who are not sitting in holes.
Point of View: Spooky Festival (HABA)
After playing It’s High Tide!, we just stayed at the table and also played Point of View with the same group of players.
Another game with an interesting mechanic I never saw before. Each player gets a big sheet with a hidden object image, and there is a stack of cards which contain tasks that the players have to fulfill, like finding/counting persons/objects on the big sheets.
The caveat is that all players get an image of the same scene, but viewed from different angles. They are not allowed to show the images to each other, so each player can see only a part of the whole scene and the players have to communicate and find out what the others are seeing.
Severton (Albi)
I’m a huge fan of Vlaada Chvátil, and when I saw in the GeekPreview that he published a new game (not a second edition, not a new Codenames version…a completely new game!!), I had to check it out. It’s based on novels which are apparently well-known in the Czech Republic, but I never heard about them in Germany.
It’s a cooperative game for up to five players. There are five characters who are always in play, even with less players. The characters have to navigate a city, fulfill quests, and try to avoid patrolling enemy gangs (“Vonts”).
The game board is a city map with a number of locations, connected by lines in three different colors. To go to an adjacent location, you have to play a card matching the connection’s color. Interesting: other characters in the same location can basically say “I’ll follow you” and have to play any card. The Vont patrols move in a similar way, they draw cards that basically say “first go in the direction of the blue line, then the yellow line”.
A big part of the game is figuring out what the Vonts will do before it’s actually their turn. Their movement cards and also their “action” cards (which indicate how strong they are and if you can escape them by fighting, persuading or hiding) are not revealed until they actually move.
With certain cards, the players are able to reveal some of these cards during the players’ turn, so they know if they can just ignore that particular Vont patrol (because it’s going somewhere else or they are able to defeat it), or if they have to move somewhere else because the patrol will be coming their way and is too strong.
Tabletop
Although I also play tabletop games, my main goal when I go to Essen is checking out new board games.
But still, I always go to the hall(s) where all the tabletop publishers are, too. I just never wrote about it in my previous Essen reports.
I never play games there (starting with a new tabletop system is not as simple as just buying a new board game), I mostly go there to look at miniatures and terrain, and buy new supplies (mostly paints).
This year, GW hosted the Golden Demon competition (I’m not aware if there were also Golden Demons at SPIEL in the previous years), so I also spent quite some time to look at all the GD contestants.
