Drealmer's Tumblr

Essen Spiel 2010

I have always been upset about people dismissing video games as being worthless hobbies for children and immature adults. And now I realize that some time ago I was pretty much considering board games as such myself… that puts things into perspective.

Meeting the right people was all it took for me to scratch the surface and realize that there was a lot of things to my tastes in there, and I became a rather big fan in the course of a few years.

This weekend, together with my girlfriend and a friend of ours I drove six hours to get to the largest board game fair of the year: Spiel in Essen, Germany. Roughly 150000 visitors, thousands of games, kilometers of aisles, 8 hours straight of navigating through the crowd with our big bags of purchases… that was awesome. Look at what we bought, feel the weight.

What I really love about board games is the elegant simplicity of the mechanics. Of course it’s all relative, some games require quite a bit of reading through the rulebook before you can start playing, some are too complicated for their own good, and some are just crap.

But in general, it’s all about emergent gameplay. These games combine simple principles that lead to interesting situations and provide an entertaining theme.

I think what was putting me off originally was the naive illustrations and the apparent predominance of medieval references, neither of which I particularly like. I shouldn’t have judged the book by its cover.