• Martin Nedergaard Andersen has had a couple of dozen games released by publishers in the past three years, with Russian publisher Lifestyle Boardgames being responsible for two of them. The memory game Fruit Mix challenges you not to match the fruit hidden behind the tiles, but the fruits (and plates and colors) keep changing, so good luck with that.
• Which number is larger: the length of the longest cigar or the number of sausage varieties in Germany? Andersen's Giraffometer from Lifestyle throws lots of numbers at you in different categories, but you don't need to know the exact answers to score — you need only guess well and get lucky.
• At Spiel 2014, Lifestyle demoed Marie and Wilfried Fort's Splash! to distributors and other publishers, and by Spiel 2015 the game had been released with versions in Dutch, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Polish and Russian. Why? Because Splash! is both familiar and easy-to-learn, a balancing game in which you want others to knock stuff over so that you can score.
• New publishers pop up each year at Spiel, sometimes only to appear once before vanishing and sometimes to launch a title that heralds a new presence in the game industry, with most newcomers falling somewhere between those extremes. One of the first-timers for Spiel 2015 was Italian publisher Apokalypse Inc, which debuted with Manlio Zaninotti's movie-making game The Producer: 1940-1944.