SPIEL '17: Pics from the Press Room — Charterstone, Gaia Project, and More

The first day of SPIEL '17 is over, but as is often the case for me at conventions, I'm not even caught up to date after SPIEL's 0th day, that being the press day in which you get to take pics of all the new games in the press room. Here's a sampling of the 250 pics that I took on Wednesday, a ridiculous amount of photos to take given that I can hardly post them all publicly in a reasonable amount of time — yet not taking them also seems wrong given the opportunity. Hmm...

Charterstone

Frank Heeren from Feuerland Spiele told me today that their line on opening day stretched from their booth (about one-third of the way into Hall 3) to almost the back wall of Hall 3, a distance he estimated at 200 meters. Charterstone above and Gaia Project below were among the most anticipated new titles at SPIEL '17, and the Fields of Arle: Tea & Trade expansion further down hasn't been a slouch either.

Gaia Project

Fields of Arle: Tea & Trade

The 2016 Brettspiel Adventskalender came in two formats: one giant box in which each item was packaged in an individual space and a compact box in which all the promos were stacked togethere. The 2017 Brettspiel Adventskalendar is once again giant, and Matthias Nagy of Frosted Games told me that the large size is due to a special The Castles of Burgundy promo that can't be folded, which means that a small size box would still have been roughly two-thirds the size of the large box, which means it wasn't worth the hassle to offer in two sizes.

Board Game: Brettspiel Adventskalender 2017

2017 Brettspiel Adventskalendar

You know what photographs terribly most of the time? Card games. They look somewhat lifeless or the light glares across them, obscuring the faces. In any case, here's one of Alexander Pfister's new titles at SPIEL '17, co-designed by Dennis Rappel and published by Österreichisches Spiele Museum e.V.

Tybor der Baumeister

One month ahead of the Justice League movie, Spanish publisher ABBA Games has brought its Justice League-themed game (which we previewed at SPIEL '16) to market.

Justice League: Dawn of Heroes

Another title that's not in the BGG database, must less on our SPIEL '17 Preview, is Terraformer by Russian publisher Rightgames. We'll see whether I can manage to discover what the game's about in the next few days.

Looking forward to running through these scenarios, whatever they happen to be, and Space Cowboys has already stated that they're working on more.

Simple yet appropriate decorations on the 2F-Spiele table.

Not sure what to make of this as "Pylos Brexit" seems like a joke, yet someone went out of their way to number boxes as if these were part of a limited edition production run and demo them in the press room. Bizarre.