Essen SPIEL has been the highlight of my year for a while now. It’s a fantastic experience. Meeting so many great people. Playing so many great games. Spending way to much buying them. It’s an experience I would not be without and I can’t see myself not going again, again and again.
Last year I did an article about preparing for Essen SPIEL. So I won’t bore you with the details this year. You should check it out however, it still has very valid information: Essen SPIEL ’15: Preparations.
In the above article I describe the 3 P’s. Prepare, Preorder and Pack. I haven’t gotten around to packing yet, but preparing and preordering is something I’m spending a lot of time on right now.
SPIEL Together
This year preparations for Essen SPIEL has been a little different. One of the major tools I use to browse through the huge amount of games coming out was not updated this year. So I (and everyone else) was left to manually browsing the official SPIEL 2016 Preview thread on BoardGameGeek. This quickly became too daunting a task for me.
Luckily I’m a programmer by trade and I decided to make a replacement tool that I could use. It would not be as feature full as the original, but it should get the job done. After messing with the basics for a while I decided to share my tool with all the others. As it stands now lot’s of people are using it and I’m doing what I can to update it with small features and changes so it will be helpful to as many people as possible. It feels great to give something back to this great community.
If you want to check out the tool you can find it here: http://www.tabletoptogether.com/essen-spiel/
Games & Expansions
Using the above tool I finally feel like I can browse through the vast amount of games and expansions. There are so many of them I’m interested in, but here are some of my favorites.
Games I must own
Generally when I look for new games at Essen SPIEL I look for medium length euro-ish games. Not saying that that’s the only thing I’ll be interested in, but theme and visuals are actually very important to me. Also innovative games tend to attract me and in general games published by my favourite publishers (you can find them here: Top 6 Publishers). Here is a selection of some of my current most anticipated games:
- Adrenaline
- Colony
- Fields of Green
- Kanagawa
- Kingdomino
- Oceanos
- Terraforming Mars
- The Networks
Expansions I can’t live without
Expansions for games I enjoy are normally a must have for me. So I’ll be picking up these 4 for sure:
- 7 Wonders: Duel – Pantheon
- Celestia: A Little Help
- T.I.M.E Stories: Expedition: Endurance
- King of New York: Power Up!
Chrischo
I’d have liked to be able to see the application without having to register, first. But that is probably one feature for which time was too short. Maybe you tweet a few screenshots or something if time permits.
Peter H. Møller
I understand perfectly. You can see my public share page here: http://www.tabletoptogether.com/essen-spiel/share.php?key=b80b1558292d4def9cd46a5ff776f238
I’ll send you a mail with a temporary account you can try out 🙂
chenke
Hi Peter,
thanks for the fine tool! I’ve only one question: What’s the difference between ‘Skip’ and ‘Ignore’?
Best regards
Christoph
Peter H. Møller
I’m so glad you like the tool.
You use “Ignore” and “Skip” any way you want. I use “Ignore” for games I’m not interested in, and “Skip” for the ones I’m not sure about where to put yet.
JesperA
And I do the exact opposite 🙂
chenke
And i ignore ‘Skip’ and ‘ignore’ 😉