Essen Experience: Thursday

Hi all

here I'm in trying to describe the Essen Experience. It is difficult for a non-gamer to understand what really Essen means: thousands and thousands of gamers, more than 500 expositors, tons of new games and friends from anywhere in the world!

This year my Essen Team, the hardcore gamers, was really well suited: me (Liga), Monty and Viki. Monty and Viki are gamers from my gaming club: TreEmme.

We start Wednesday evening at 8:30 PM with my kangoo, some food, a lot of expectations and more than 1000 km of road ahead. We arrived at Essen at 7:30 AM!

Just the time to rest a bit, grab a press pass from SdP (was great to have the car just in front the fai exit ready to be loaded with tons of games!) and some expositor passes from Lorenzo "ManiacHouse" and Claudio "Esagek" and we are in, in the WonderLand!

Monty and Viki was at thet first Essen and got blasted by the huge dimension of the fair: at the end of the Essen Experience Monty decleared " I don't know how I have could lieved without".

The Thursday was devoted to shoppings. I got almost the 90% of the game in the first day! But we have had also some good game:

At lunch time we played Space Dealer and was a real blast! We bought 4 copy: one each and one for club TreEmme!

Here in the pictures you can see Tobias Stapelfeldt, the designer, explaining us the game and we was already getting fun thinking about how it could be evolve.

Here we are close to finishing the game.

The game was nice but I got last since one of my timer was really slower than anyother ones!

After a short visit to the Italian's booth I run at R&D where Richard was waiting my team ("the hardcore gamer") for a session of playtest of his new Keymarket.



I don't know how much I can say about it but the game was good and I think with small fixes could be ready for publishing. At the R&D booth I was also pleased to meet Cynthia from MeeplePeople: we decide to donate here and her website the Hardcore Gamer logo: I think you could find it soon on MeeplePeople.

We finished our first day in Essen just walking around and looking booths and games.

Here you can see me getting my copy of Esagek signed by Claudio, the designer.


We have a dinner at Draco together with SdP, Racca and Genma from Tana dei Goblin, the Acchitocca team and some other Italian friends. I just passed quickly to the Istra's Hall to say hallo to some friends and then go to bed early!