Fraser McHarg: Spiel 09 - A bit of Setup Day

Welcome to number one in a series of what will probably be brief reports.  Brief due to having to actually do stuff at Essen, wrangle children and computer time :-)

We got back from Rome on Monday afternoon, did lots of washing and repacked and then at Tuesday lunchtime drove down to Essen and checked into our hotel.  We then headed off to the Spiel.

On the Tuesday afternoon it is very much setup stage, Melissa tells me it is a little less set up than it was this time last year.  Wandering through the first hall we saw big Ystari, Haba, Days of Wonder and Ravensburger stands under construction.  Also a palette or five of Dominion games.

Working our way through other halls dodging trucks and forklifts we found Bezier Games, Lookout Games, H@ll Games and Z-Man Games mostly finis hed.  We had a chat at Lookout before moving on for more exploring.  We met Ann at the Lookout stand.  Often known as Melissa’s Good Twin, she is also my Power Grid buddy.

I had a chat with Zev remarking how I was amazed to see that Greg Costikyan was back into board games with Megacorps.  It seems that Zev’s younger days were much like mine with exposure to some of Greg’s earlier war games and Paranoia.  More recently Greg has been heavily involved with mobile phone games.  This will be a must when the stock arrives tomorrow.  In the mean time w got Endevor which I had played back in September.

Off to say hello to Ralph at H@all Games and to Uwe Rosenburg too, well really for Melissa to do introductions.  A quick scout around hall five and then back to Lookout.  On the way we saw that Chessex (fine purveyors of gamer porn, i.e.  more dice than you could poke a stick at) were setting up a rather large booth.

Back at the Lookout Games stand we met Frank Kulkmann and did some new L-Deck card sorting.  For the completists there are 24 new L-Deck cards (including Daughter the Elder), plus reprints of at least some of the old ones.

I then headed off to Essen HBF to do a pick up of some of the BGG crew.  This was complicated by the fact that most of Essen HBF is under huge reconstruction and is very hard to find navigate around compared to all the other German railway stations I have been too (and there have been a few).  I ended up managing to fit Aldie and five of the many bags, but the rest were relegated to a taxi.

It was then back to Spiel to pick up the rest of the family.  In my absence they had picked up Kung Fu and met the Lamont brothers as well as Doug and Shelly Garret.

We then went to a tappas bar that Melissa had been to last year.  Good food, but no beer available (a problem with the hoses).  Back to the hotel and bed for the kids and blogging for Melissa.

Day: 1
Games: 2
Beers: 0

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