Oriol Comas and Xavier Garriga: Playing in Spain – An Overview - January 2006

About twenty five years ago there was a good games publisher in Spain called NAC (Nike and Cooper). After nearly ten years of business they closed the company and with them it seemed that also disappeared the good taste for publishing games. They published nearly forty games, most of them simple war games like Spanish Civil War, Second World War or D-Day and also good German games, like Escape from Colditz or Conquest of the west, the latter still searched for players.

In the eighties, we had also some abstract game publishers, like Henry Higgins and his beautiful wooden games. Some years later, in the nineties, Joc Internacional, a former importer of Avalon Hill become also a publisher and produced, apart from a large number of role playing games and CCGs, games like Civilization and Diplomacy, both in nice editions. Some years after this, but, he had to close the company because of bad investments in CCGs.

Some other companies, of course, published more mainstream titles, like Clue, Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, but we assume these are not the favorite companies of the real players. They use to be more interested in companies like Devir, that thanks to the security of being the Spanish distributors of Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon have decided to release some of the most known euro games of the last years (Settlers of Catan, Lord of the rings, Doom, Genial or Carcassonne) and also have done some shy intents to publish Spanish designed games, like Capitán Alatriste from Antonio Catalán In the last two years we have seen some new companies entering on the market. The most important is Edge Entertainment, from Sevilla, that distributes games from Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight or Steve Jackson, but there are some others from Madrid like Crómola (that does Werewolf and Jungle Speed) and Mercurio (distributor of Queen Games).

What is the meaning of all this? Spain is a non players country? No, of course, we are players, maybe not as core as Germans or Americans, but you may find groups of players around the whole country. In the last year we have had a growing number of web logs dedicated to the gaming phenomena and also some minor fairs involving board games. These fairs are not so important like they used to be in the nineties, when we had for four years the JESYR (Days of Strategy, Simulation and Role Playing) and after them some editions of Gen Con (in 1994, 1996, 1999 and 2004).

In 2005 we had the first National meeting of board games in Madrid. It was not a success in terms of attending, but for sure that it will be one of the most important annual meetings in the future and it will be a reference for other cities. One of the most important events in the meeting was the delivery of the award to the best game published in 2005 in Spain. A group of players from all the country proposed six games to the final jury, composed by journalists and experts on games. The finalists were Alhambra, Genial, Heroscape, Mystery of the Abbey, Ticket to ride and Werewolf. The jury choose Ticket to ride as the best game of 2005.

There are also a few authors, but is very difficult for them to publish their games. People like Jorge Gómez Arrausi (winner of 2002 Abstract Games Award with Unlur), Xavier Bonet, Josep M. Allué Fran Garea probably would find editors in Germany or USA, but not in Spain, at least for the moment. In 2005 we have seen only two games from Spanish authors, Agora Barcelona, a majorities game over the squares of Barcelona, created by Oriol Comas and Jep Ferret and Sombras sobre Isla Negra, edited by Cub de Jocs, a group of five players that have decided to self publish this card game of martial arts combats.

Anyway, it seems that the situation has improved a lot in the last three or four years and we will see a lot of new projects in the board game scene in the next months. Stay tuned!

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