So let’s say you’re a total newbie in the world of boardgaming. You visit a couple of hobby websites around this time of year looking for a list of Halloween-themed games and you see all these people going on about something called “Essen”.

Yeah, I'll get there. No problem.

There are lists and pictures of all these new games you’ve never heard of and people are prattling on about the amount of debt they’ve incurred by taking four or five days off of work to take an international trip to go gorge themselves and any number of surplus suitcases on newly released games. You dig a little bit into a few forum posts or news items and before you know it, you’ve convinced yourself that “Essen” is boardgamer code-speak for Shangri-La, Atlantis, and The Promised Land all rolled into one. You start to believe that every board game ever published is going to be there tucked away in a second-hand vendor’s stall and that men, women, and children join hands to sing hymns and praises to designers like Reiner Knizia and Wolfgang Kramer.

All those speculative guesses aren’t entirely far from the truth; Essen Spiel is really just a gigantic annual game convention (with a smattering of comic books and other geek culture stuff for good measure) that takes place in Essen, Germany in mid-October. It is at Essen that most of the major European companies release their most anticipated games so it has become sort of the “premiere” event for new titles—it’s kind of like E3 for the board game industry but it’s a public event as well.

Over 150,000 people pack into the Messe Convention Hall and vie tooth-and-nail for a chance to be among the first to play (and invariably comment on via online forums) the year’s crop of new games. There is a similar event held in Nuremburg each year but it is an industry-only event and tends to be a little more low-key in terms of high profile releases. The closest thing in the US that we have to Essen is probably either Gen Con or Origins but the kicker is that Essen is a much more mainstream event that draws many people not inclined to wear chainmail or discuss FIREFLY at unreasonable length. Games and events geared toward families and children are a big part of the fair along with the typical full frontal nerdity. Oh, and the SETTLERS OF CATAN World Championship is held there each year…which I would totally own if I went.

How CUTE!

I’ve never been to Essen and I likely will never go unless it’s a footnote to a larger European trip. I just can’t imagine justifying that level of expense to go mill around waiting for a table of CUBA or HAMBURGUM to finish so I can be among the first to babble about it online or to show up at my weekly game event with it. Sure, it’s something worth paying attention to because it’s interesting to see the trends, purchasing patterns, and upcoming games but I can do that for free, at home, in my Dracula boxer shorts, thank you very much. I sure do love board games, but I’d much rather invest that time and money checking out German culture, cuisine, and city life.

Essen ’07 has come and gone, once again, without me…despite reports that Portal, the Polish publishers of NEUROSHIMA HEX slapped a gigantic quote from my review of it on one of their displays. And of course there’s a whole new crop of games in its wake, many of which we’ll be seeing here in the US over the next couple of months. If you visit any of the online retailers they may even be taking preorders on the Essen titles and there’s already buzz building around some of the new releases, most of which, by my estimation, have very little new, interesting, innovative or exciting to bring to the table.

There’s the usual pile of games with the standard Euro game themes of agriculture, impressing royalty, and generating victory points (KINGSBURG, HAMBURGUM, CUBA, AGRICOLA, etc.), a fairly complex Roman politc-themed game that may be pretty good (TRIBUNE), a couple of oddball cutie-pie games that are picked up by attendees as much for their components as the gameplay (ANTLER ISLAND), some reissues of older Eurogames (some in new deluxe editions) and a few oddball Czechoslovakian games like LEAGUE OF SIX or GALAXY TRUCKER. If these don’t sound familiar, don’t worry- most of them will be forgotten after the buzz dies down.

Cool box.

The really interesting, exciting games that were shown this year such as STARCRAFT, NAPOLEON’S TRIUMPH, 1960: THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT, RACE FOR THE GALAXY, and the never-say-die reissue of HANNIBAL: ROME VS. CARTHAGE have already been premiered or released elsewhere. Does anybody but the most hardcore Eurogamer give a rat’s ass about CONTAINER, a game that is about, I kid you not, shipping containers? The publisher apparently had to hire Miss Canada to make the game look appealing to passersby, so what does that tell you?

Of course, I didn’t put the money up to go to the fair so I haven’t played any of this stuff and have only a remote observer’s position on the fair and the releases, so take it all with a grain of salt. As always, play for yourself and then come back to tell me how wrong I am. I might even be posting here in a couple of weeks that Uwe Rosenberg’s AGRICOLA is a really neat farming game with great mechanics that really illuminate the theme. Or that GALAXY TRUCKER isn’t really the tedious puzzle solving game it seems to be on paper. Or that I’ve completely lost my marbles and fell head over heels for CONTAINER. (I am reminded of a story about pigs and wings…-ed)