12bitplay

CarinaSkag

Member

From: Australia, Wirrabara

Registered: 2020-09-14

Posts: 1

Comparing it to Gen Con in particular is interesting

Search                                                          Previous     Next →                Spiel 2019.
November 6.

2019              This year I attended my first ever Essen Spiel

the world’s largest board game convention.
Bucket list item: Check.
I came back with this pile of games    …as you can see, they are mostly (but not all)  abstract strategy games .
And for the most part (with a couple of notable exceptions) they are games that I am unlikely to see in a store here in  the state s.
I haven’t played them all yet, but I have made a dent, and I’ve quite enjoyed Control V, Nova Luna, Hetrix and Stackers so far.

My family played a game of Miyabi

and my wife even declared she approved of the purchase.
I was demoing and exhibiting with Adam’s Apple Games, who had, months ago, during the  kickstarter , hoped to have Thrive there for sale, but alas, there have been manufacturing delays, and it now looks like it’ll be next March (probably at the earliest) before we see the final production copies.
You can see me here standing next to the 3D printed  prototypes  that we’ve been showing around for the last year or so.
Spiel is more like a trade show (they refer to it as an expo) than most of the other  board game  related events I’ve been to.
Comparing it to Gen Con in particular is  interesting , because at Essen there are really no “events” at all.
Some exhibitors might post a list of events they are having in their booth, (signings or  tournament s most likely), but the convention itself has no designated spaces for events, and doesn’t post a schedule.

At Gen Con the expo hall is maybe 1/4th of the designated convention center space

and probably 1/2 of the total space is purely for events.
(Many of which are ticketed and cost  additional  money.) Another difference is that most people expect to actually play games in the exhibitor booths.
So most booths, even the smallest ones, have a demo table (or a dozen!), and folks sit down at them mostly to play entire  games .
Although many of the larger games at the bigger  publisher  booths (but not all) were just shorter-length demos, which is usually what you get to do, (if anything!), on the show floor at Gen Con.

But of course Gen Con has all that additional space for events

most of which are just scheduled times to play specific games.
A lot of people attend Spiel, .

This year nearly three times as many as attended Gen Con

(If Wikipedia’s numbers are correct, 209k vs 70k.) But for that, .

It never felt significantly more crowded than Gen Con to me

Yes, there is more physical space, certainly, but I think another factor could be that more folks attend Spiel on day passes than Gen Con, and so you have fewer people at any given time.
Certainly Saturday and Sunday did feel very crowded, but I saw very little shoulder-to-shoulder, .

Wall-of-humans that is common walking the expo floor at Gen Con

You don’t see stuff like this at Gen Con

You can’t throw a stick without hitting a designer.
Not thinking of the attendees so much, but as I walked around the convention, the folks staffing the booths were quite often the game designers themselves.
This was definitely not as true in the larger booths, but the smaller ones it felt very common for the designers to be present, and if there was only one person staffing the booth, I’d guess it was 50/50 whether that person also designed a game being shown.
It was super multicultural.
There were definitely publishers there from all over the world.
I personally met folks from Australia, Korea, China, Spain, the UK, Ireland, and of course Germany.
But as large as it was, .

Not all the US publishers were there

I can only speculate why, but certainly some of them don’t think a cost/benefit analysis holds up, but I also think it’s just plain impossible to go to all the events all the time.
I’m fairly certain you could find a board game event somewhere in the world to go to every weekend, if you tried hard enough.
I’m definitely glad I went, and I would do it again.
I really enjoyed wandering around the show floor and seeing all the new games.
Share:.
Tweet.
More.
Share on Tumblr.
Email.
Print.
This entry was posted in Board Games, Eigenstate by Martin.
Bookmark the permalink.
Send to Email Address          Your Name       Your Email Address                    Cancel       Post was not sent - check your email addresses.
Email check failed.

Please try again          Sorry

your blog cannot share posts by email.