Essen Spiel

A couple of weeks ago we had a great time visiting the Essen Spiel. If you don’t know, it is the biggest boardgame fair in the world and takes place in Essen, Germany around October. This year it even set up a new record by reaching 204.000 attendees, and most of the tickets were sold out (first time ever!)

Spiel is gigantic. There are 6 different halls full of boardgames: Family and Party Games, Expert games, Hobby games… We spent most of our time in Hall 3, where the “expert” games were. But we also tried a few party games that we found promising.

Spiel is a great place to discover new cool mechanics and find nice games to play and buy. Many times the designers themselves are there to explain the rules and play (usually) short demos of their games. It’s also a great way of trying out games that are soon (or currently!) in crowdfunding.

Among the game and shop stands, you can also find more “business” related companies, like different game manufacturers and retailers. So it’s also a great opportunity to set-up some meetings and find good, fitting partners for your projects.

This year we brought there Bomb Away, and were able to show it to some potential future partners. We also received some tips from more experienced developers that gave us a lot of confidence in our crowdfunding plans for next year.

We came back with our luggage quite full of games; And we will spend a big chunk of our free time on the next weeks just trying all of them. We will also post about some of them in our socials. Follow us if you are interested!