The Essen report

All I can say is wow. I thought I was prepared for how big the Essen game fair would be, but I was wrong. Throngs of people is the only way to put it. The Messe where the fair is held is very large; scarily, the Spiel doesn't even fill it. Unfortunately, the layout of the place left something to be desired in my opinion. Food choices were much better than I expected and prices were not too bad, except for the drinks. 3€ for a 1/2 liter soda bottle or water bottle is really gouging, especially since I saw that they had a couple of vending machines around that were only charging €1.80. On top of that they also charged a 20 euro-cent deposit on the bottle (which you could get back if you turned it in of course). Enough with the complaints, though. On to the games...

The night before the public could get in I was lucky enough to get in a game of the new cooperative game Ghost Stories at the hotel. I liked that quite a bit; the system reminds me a lot of Panedmic but this theme is much more to my liking.

When Mark and I arrived, the buzz was certainly heavy towards Le Havre, the new game from the Agricola folks. People were waiting in line an hour plus sometimes to get the English verison of the X-deck and the veggie and ani-meeples. Also a lot of Le Havre copies exchanged hands. I spent a lot of time just wandering around and being amazed at how many different booths and how many different games were around. It was hard to know where to start. I ended up at the Rio Grande Games booth and we played Fast Flowing Forest Fellers. A nice quick racing game with enough interesting decisions.

Next I ended up at the Gipf Project booth playing Zertz twice against my friend Russ who now lives in Poland. It was great to see him again and kick his butt in the first game. :)

Most of the rest of the day I spent wandering around the convention. Russ and Anna and I ended up going out for Thai and Chinese food and playing Forum Romanum at the restaurant which was one of the games I really wanted to get if I could at the used game stores at the Fair.

Without getting to wordy, here are my thoughts about the new games:

Dominion: solid game which I'll play if someone requests it
Vineta: okay game, won't refuse to play
Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas: great theme, I think the cards might be a little unbalancing, but I would play again
New World: Carcassonne: didn't like it at first, but by the end thought it was fine. would play again.
Der Schwarm: odd game that I liked better than other folks
Zack & Pack: don't need games like this, if you can call it a game at all.
Diamonds Club: fine game, better balanced than I thought at first, would play again if requested.
Princes of Machu Picchu: good game, think I need to play it again before rendering a final judgement.
Steel Driver: interesting mechanic for victory at the end of the game. definitely would play again.

Comuni: The find of the fair. I really liked this and managed to get it signed by all 4 Italian authors. Definitely will be playing again. The theme seemed pretty integrated to what you are doing in the game and the external attacks that get folks to form the comuni of the game name are definitely an interesting mechanism.