Board Games on Analog Gaming

SPIEL Essen 2025

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:00:00 +0100

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).

SPIEL Essen 2024

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 23:00:00 +0200

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.

Unboxing Worms - The Board Game

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 23:00:00 +0100

Last winter, I backed Worms - The Board Game on Kickstarter. My package finally arrived this week and today, I unboxed it.

This is the Mayhem Pledge - the cheaper one. The only add-on that I bought was the German language pack, because my native language is German.

SPIEL Essen 2023

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 23:12:34 +0200

One year passed, I wrote no new post since my first Essen post, and now it’s October again…Essen time!
Like last year, I went for two days, Thursday and Friday.

And I went through the complete GeekPreview again and picked a mixture of complex games (for me) and lighter games (playable with kids). I ended up with about 10 “Must have” and way too many “Interested” games.

I actually did play eight of them (four each day), and ended up buying all four from day 2.

SPIEL Essen 2022

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 23:44:11 +0200

This year, I was finally able to attend the SPIEL fair at Essen again.
The last year I was there was 2019 (IIRC, that was my 13th year in a row). 2020 was a virtual event because of Covid, and 2021 was in-person again, but I wasn’t able to go because of time constraints/family commitments.

This year, I went there for two days, Thursday and Friday. Although I had already planned to write this post before the visit, I was so thrilled to be at Essen again that I forgot to take pictures most of the time. The few pictures I made are all from day 1: