Scott Tepper: Essen 2008

So I’m back from Essen.  What a trip.  As ususal, it was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun.  Here are some tidbits to give you an idea of what the trip was like for me.

Sunday morning 7:00a – arrive in the Dusseldorf airport.  Unlike walking from the gate in US airports, here you walk and walk through a glass tunnel above the terminal.  You can see into the shops below, and it’s a little erie because it’s so quiet.  Once I make it through customs, it feels more like an airport and less like a hamster habitrail.  Out in the open, the terminal looks all modern and shiny.  Everything is shiny metal and glass.

Like last year, I arrived in Germany a few days before Spiel so I could do a little sightseeing.  I had such a great experience with the person I stayed with last year in Cologne, that I used Couchsurfing.com again to find someone who could host me for a night in Dusseldorf.  After sending a request to stay at their place, Marc and Louis agreed right away to let me stay with them and suggested we meet at the Chiquita fruit bar when I got to the airport.  My flight arrived early, so I thought I’d get a drink while I waited.  And so, 15 minutes after arriving, I encountered my first US/Germany difference for this trip. 

I ordered what was described as a Mango Yogurt Smoothie.  The ingredients included Mango, Apple and yogurt.  My assumption based on past smoothie purchases was that the yogurt would be frozen.  When, after seeing the server put ice and an orange liquid into the cup and then adding a rapidly flowing white liquid, I knew I was getting something different.  I also never saw any apples put into the mix before it was attached to the blender.  The resulting drink tasted unlike anything I’d ever gotten from Jamba Juice.  It was blended to the consistency of water, and tasted like mango-flavored sour milk.  MMMMMMMM!  But I figured it was good for me, so I forced it down.  One good thing about the flavor is that it gave me an eye-opening jolt like coffee, but without the caffeine.

While waiting for my host to arrive, I checked out the options for connecting to the web with my laptop and was a little startled to find that to use the airport internet, it would cost 3.95 € (about $5.70) for 30 minutes.  9.95 € (about $14.42 ) for 2 hours.  I decided that it wasn’t worth six dollars to check my email.

Promptly at our agreed upon time, my Couchsurfing hosts arrived (in German, they refer to this as being “pünktlich”) and took me back to their place so I could drop off my luggage.  The apartment was nice and bright.  Its balcony, which overlooked cute little farm, was large enough for a table so that you could eat outside in nice weather.

My hosts took me on a three-hour bike tour all around Düsseldorf.  The city was beautiful, far prettier than the dull pictured represented on the postcards that I found to send back to my family.  We stopped twice for food.  The first time, they took me to a little hole-in-the-wall place that sold, for the most part, just french fries.  The schtick was that you could order your fries with several different dipping sauces, such as mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, curry, onions, etc… My hosts told me that their favorite was the “joppi-sauce”.  I tried it.  And though the yellow-orange color looked unique, the flavors tasted somewhat familiar.  I asked Marc what the sauce was made of, and he didn’t know.  So he went and asked, and it turns out it is a combination of ALL of their dipping sauces.  It was one of those instances where you wouldn’t have eaten it if you knew what it was.

After about a half hour of bike riding to work off some of the fries, we stopped at a bakery/pastry shop that had a large dining room.  I ordered, somewhat by accident, (I just wanted to ask what that particular torte was made of, and the woman behind the counter decided that that was what I was going to have) a lemon merangue cake that turned out to be one of the most delicious desserts I’ve ever had in my life.  It was so light and creamy and sweet.  Mmmmmmmmmm!  I wish I could have taken a few of those cakes home with me.

Once we got back home, it dawned on me that I had been up for 29 hours straight, and was ready to just take it easy.  As we were walking in the door of the apartment building, Marc asked me to remind him why I was going to Essen.  When he learned it was for a game trade show, he became excited and told me that he and Louis love playing games.  He brought us down to the storage unit where, after digging through some boxes, he found 3 old games that he wanted us to play.

The first was some sort of party game that wasn’t going to work well with only 3 players.  The 2nd was an old Ravensburger title called Punk Sucht Lady, which was designed, surprisingly enough, by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich.  It had what seemed like an interesting and unique theme; the players were matchmakers and they had to choose what they thought were the best matches for their clients.  The problem was that you could do a little negotiating, but then the points you would score for the matches were completely arbitrary.  I figured this out right away, but I wasn’t about to be a rude guest and point it out to my hosts.  Luckily, they figured it out after only one round after which they declared that they’d had enough and should try the last game.

The 3rd game was a little bit more up my alley.  It was the called Hotel and while it was Monopoly-like, the bits were great and you seemed to have a few more decisions to make than you would in Monopoly. 

After a scrumptious dinner of spaghetti carbonara, and the 3rd X-men movie on TV in German, we finally called it a night and I slept like a rock.

The next morning, Marc and I had a nice talk where I invited him to come visit Chicago and then he took me to the train station where we said our goodbyes.  For the first time in 4 visits to Germany, I finally figured out how the train schedules worked and made it to Essen without a hitch. 

This was my 4th time at Essen, and though I was staying at the same hotel as my previous visits, the ownership had recently changed.  Even though they were renvating the hotel, the only changes that were obvious so far were made to the underground pub.  The sole internect connection for the guests was still a single cable underneath at a tiny little desk underneath the stairs. 

My German, as a result of working with a German tutor for the past year, had improved and I felt much more comfortable speaking with shopkeepers. By now, I was very familiar with the city and had no problem getting around with my single day to myself before I’d have to get to work on the booth.  I headed to the Gummi Bear store in the city where I was to pick up some Gluwien (mulled wine) favored Gummi Bears, and then got a Heisse Shokolade (hot chocolate) and wrote some post cards at an outdoor table at a cafe. 

Tuesday was the first real day of setting up for the show for us.  Here’s a picture of what the booth looked like when we first arrived in the morning.

Later on in the day, the tables and chairs had been delivered.

Jay had arranged to have a shipping container positioned outside the side hall door to hold the games we would be stocking the booth with during the show.  After a couple of hours we had loaded up our break room / storeroom with the games that we’d be demoing and selling.

And for fun, here is what our break area, complete with refrigerator, coffee pot and cabinets to hold the demoers purchases during the show looked like.

And here is what the booth looked like when we were finished setting it up.

Before we had everything set up, though, Dale Yu and Valerie Putman stopped by the booth, and I was happy to take photos of the first time they saw the finished product of Dominion, the game that they both developed.

After playing with a Dominion prototype for months, it was a little weird for me to be playing with the final product that had different artwork than what I had become accustomed to.  I had practiced teaching the game to my German tutor in German and French, so by the time I got to teach it to strangers, I felt reasonably proficient, and I had no problems teaching the game, although I kept forgetting how to say the verb “to hire” (einstellen) in German.

Although I had been practicing how to teach Dominion for a while now, doing it over and over at Essen helped me develop a compact and concise spiel.  My favorite part of the explanation came, though, when I would tell the players what they do on their turn.  I say that there are 2 things that can be done, and two things that must be done, and they are always in the same order. 

First, I explain that they can (normally) do a single action and I give an example of a simple action.  Next, they can (normally) do a single buy, and I explain what a buy consists of.  Then I tell them, while demonstrating, that they must clean up their play area and their remaining hand of cards.  Lastly, I relate that they must draw 5 cards.  To work this order into their heads, I repeat the order of the actions again: Action, Buy, Clean-up, and Draw.  I repeat it again for emphasis.  Then comes the fun part for me:  I point out that in case they forget the order, it’s very easy to remember: “A B C D.” That never failed to get a laugh or an amused expression of admiration for the design of the game.

Not surprisingly, Dominion was very well received.  It was requested over and over to be demoed, and I had a great time demoing it.  It climbed Fairplay’s chart and stayed on top till the end of the show.  And by Sunday, we had sold out of all 2 pallets worth of copies that we had of the game.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.  Here’s a pic of what the booth looked like during the show.

While I demoed Dominion the most during the show, we had quite a range of other games as well.  The Princes of Machu Picchu, by Mac Gerdts, was requested a lot, and I have to admit that one of the first times I demoed it I made 3 mistakes that I realized later in the day.  All in the same demo I forgot to give the players a starting card, I didn’t tell them that they could give up a llama to move their prince to any region, and that using a temple was similar to a production area for triggering a sacrifice.  I can only blame the jet lag.  Aarrgh.  I know that I am harder on myself than anyone else will ever be about demoing, but I hate it when I realize that I didn’t teach a game correctly.

I was surprised that I was asked to teach Galaxy Trucker so many times.  The game had been released in the previous year, but Rio Grande had been distributing it in the US, but with the positive reviews and the release of the new expansion, many people were eager to give it a try.

The other games we were demoing at the booth during the show were A Castle for All Seasons, Sylla, Galaxy Trucker, Strozzi, Lost Cities The Boardgame, Royal Palace, Fast Flowing Forest Fellers, and The 3 Commandments.  Luckily, we didn’t have to demo the Carcassonne Catapult expansion.  Most of the demos went pretty well, although the only one I remember not doing so well on was the first time I taught Sylla (I hope Lorna will forgive me one day).  By the 2nd time I taught it, though, I had my spiel pretty well down. 

Because we were selling more games this year, I had to spend more time each morning prepping the booth, so I didn’t get as much time as in the previous years to run around to see the other booths and make my own purchases.  This was a good thing for my wallet, but not good for my knowledge about what was going on all around the show.  But on the last day I did take a half hour to run around and take some pictures of games that I thought looked interesting.  Here are some pics for you:

Steffan Spiele always has some neat looking wooden abstracts

I stopped by the Selecta booth momentarily and saw a father and son playing a game of Mare Polare.  I usually just pass by the kid games, but this one looked really cute, and the boy looked like he was enjoying himself.  I asked the father if I could take a picture and the boy stopped playing and stared at my camera and became suddenly serious.  Right after I snapped the picture, but boy grinned a huge smile and the father laughed.

And for no other reason than it’s a fun place to stop for today, here’s a picture of Eric Martin.  In my next, and final installment on Essen 2008, I’ll show you some more pictures and tell you about my “interesting” time at the end of the show and my tragedy at the airport.

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