This week’s comic is a little late due to a deadline followed by a lovely case of Con Crud… oh well, it happens!

We made a short video compilation every day! You can watch all of them on our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/semicoop 

When we were at Spiel we noticed every conversation someone asked “What did you play today” and while you’d think everybody plays games at Spiel, we realised loads of people (including us) don’t really play games at the convention. That might sound strange but just let us show you how busy our Spiel days have been:

Wednesday was Press Day. We arrived in the afternoon to check out the novelties show, where most new games are set up on tables for the press to check out without the masses of visitors. There were a lot of games missing though, but it was nice to get a preview and scribble down which games we’d like to check out the following days. In the evening, we went to a dinner organized by Jay (CardBoardEast) and Justin (MeepleMountain) at an Italian restaurant. We’re used to ordering a pizza per person but we hadn’t seen that this restaurant served pizzas with a 45cm diameter! Oh dear! It was a fun night and we had lots of fun talking to Beeneta, Tim Chuong, and Banzainator! On our way back to the hotel we enjoyed the light festival in Essen.

Thursday was the first official day of SPIEL! We bumped into some friends and we joined them in a demo of the game Atoll by Albi, it’s a fun sealife-themed engine-building game in which you’re building a coral reef. After that, we had a meeting at Hopeful Games to try out their upcoming game Neon Hope. This was probably our highlight of the fair. We’d say it’s an Arkham Horror the Card Game-styled storytelling game without the deckbuilding hassle set in a Netrunner-like world. We really enjoyed our demo and the way the gameplay worked. We’ll share our detailed experience/opinion when we play the entire demo case.
We also had an impromptu meeting with Debbie and Rob from Wize Wizard Games and they showed us their upcoming new card game Draconis 8 which had us intrigued because the game works with decks of only eight cards which you’ll be able to buy in tiny booster packs. We said hello to some friends, had dinner, and returned to the hotel where we played a game of Dead Cells (it actually feels rogue-like!) and I played Hot Pot Holic and 1 AM Jailbreak while Heinze played a game of Fishing.

Friday was one of those days at Spiel that flew by! We came in a little later and mostly said hello to publishers who showed us cool things. We had a lovely explanation of City of the Great Machine and Key Enigma showed us their latest cool project which is a pop-up book escape game! We really enjoyed their escape game Hack Forward so it was cool to hear them talk passionately about this new project and what other projects they have planned. We bought some awesome meeple socks at our friends of Rood met Witte Stippen! We knew that Rory (from Rory’s Story Cubes) was demoing at the Eldfall Chronicles booth so we went there and had a lovely talk about the game and why he thought this was so good and how he consulted on parts during the development. After a long day, we retired to the hotel and played a game of Seaside and Dirt and Glory. We were joined by more awesome people and we played another game of Dirt and Glory which is a very fun take on blackjack, although we think it takes a little long with five players.

Saturday! Originally the busiest day of Spiel but not this year, because every day was sold out and busy. We picked up a copy of Gibberers after it was highly recommended to us and this is one of the games we have a perfect gaming group for. It’s a game in which you develop your own language and that sounded right up our alley. We dropped by the meet-and-greet event to say hello to some people and walked into a lot of friends and… people who actually recognized us while we weren’t part of the meet-and-greet (thanks for saying hi though! :D). It mostly was a social day and we ended up playing some short games in the hotel in the evening. Ian showed an upcoming game he illustrated called Sausage Sizzle (it’s adorable!) and we played Potato Tomato which was complete chaos but also hilarious. We also tried to play Bottle Imp with six players but we wouldn’t recommend that…

On Sunday we first tried some releases for next year with a publisher, which wasn’t planned at all but happened because we all stuck around after breakfast. Then we headed to the hall for three meetings, first with Scorpion Masquee who showed us a very exciting new project for next year and we visited our friends at Deep Print Games, which hyped us up for their seven(!) releases in 2025. Lastly we had a nice talk at Czech games with Eleni about social media and marketing, which is always nice as we’re always intersting in how people social media to hear what we might have missed or could change. Then it was time to head home with stacks of games!

These are all the games we brought home! We were gifted most of these games, so we put a * behind those we purchased ourselves.
– A Fake Artist Goes to New York *
– Battalion
– Can’t Stop *
– Calling Card *
– Compile Expansion *
– Crime Unfolds
– Dead Cells
– Dirt and Glory
– Eldfall Chronicles starterpack
– Festival
– Flatiron *
– Floresta
– Gibberers: The Word Game of Language Invention and Civilization Development *
– Gloomhaven: Bugs and Buttons
– Gosu X expansions *
– Guilty: Monaco 1955
– King of Tokyo Duel
– Middle-Ages
– Moving Wilds expansion
– Neon Hope (demo)
– Pina Coladice
– Ratjack
– Rebel Princess
– Seaside
– Seers Catalog
– Seti
– Sky Team: Turbulence
– Sandbag
– Sausage Sizzle
– Typewriter
– Xylotar

 

We have played some of them but we’ll be busy trying them out the coming weeks and seeing which ones are winners in our opinions. If you see anything you love (or our curious about) let us know, we’re still not quite sure where to start… 🙂

What is your favorite Spiel release, or are you most hyped about?

Me: “Well I intended to play a game but the number of people is overwhelming so I got around the hall as fast as I could, barely taking anything in, and got myself outside to breathe”

(I’ve not been to Spiel but UKGE usually goes like that for me 😅)

Handycon 14 soon though, lovely small con so I can get a bunch of gaming in!

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