SPIEL '17: The Day After, and Plans for Lucca

SPIEL '17 is over — but you knew that already, didn't you? All the tweets have ended, and the #SPIEL17 hashtag is being used only by those like me who still need to filter through hundreds of images taken and not yet shared.

Everyone is posting pics of the piles of games they took home from SPIEL '17 in order to prime their gaming groups in anticipation and establish a playing agenda for the next few weeks or months. I'd share pics of all the games that BGG is bringing to BGG.CON — which opens in just over two weeks on Wednesday, November 15 — but I don't have any as we did things differently this year. In years past, we'd box games and palletize them in the back of the BGG booth, carting them out only on Sunday after the fair ended.

For 2017, the time between SPIEL and BGG.CON is the shortest it's ever been, so we brought BGG.CON co-organizer Jeff Anderson to SPIEL '17 to serve as an extra pair of hands. Jeff used a handtruck during the day to move stacks of boxes to a truck in the parking lot, where he then further prepared them for the trip to Dallas. On the Monday following SPIEL, he planned to drive the truck to Frankfurt, where they would be air-shipped on Wednesday for arrival in Dallas by Monday, Nov. 6, giving the con crew roughly one week(!) to process 47 giant boxes filled with hundreds of games. That number is a bit misleading as a few boxes contain only promos that will show up in the Geek Store and one box consists of games I shipped home for myself since I'm still on the road (see below), but in any case, we shipped hundreds of games that will be available to BGG.CON attendees.

In addition to those boxes, we've asked a few publishers to ship games directly to Dallas for use in the BGG Library. We ask publishers who demo games on air in the BGG booth during SPIEL to donate games for use in the Library, but sometimes publishers sell out their stock without having set aside copies for BGG or the person who agreed to donate games doesn't tell the presenter to bring copies or the originating publisher can't get us copies in English or a dozen other things happen. This happens every year, of course, because SPIEL prep is a messy business, but we've already talked about how to put better processes in place for SPIEL '18 to ensure that we'll have all the new games on hand for attendees of BGG.CON 2018 in November. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and all that.

As for our SPIEL '17 coverage, you can see all of the material recorded on our Twitch channel, albeit with labels that don't match reality, given that we have four videos labeled "Day 3" and three labeled "Day 1". Whoops. Go by the day of publication instead, and cross reference that with our posted broadcast schedule, keeping in mind that "Day 1" for us was actually Wednesday, October 25, the day prior to SPIEL '17 opening. Many thanks and much Geekgold to MentatYP for posting summaries of the daily broadcasts with timestamps in that schedule thread. We'll post the individual videos on our YouTube channel and the BGG game pages as soon as possible, but I'm not sure how much we'll be able to edit given our need to prep for BGG.CON. That job is in someone else's capable hands, so we'll see...

As for me, I left Düsseldorf far too early on Monday morning and headed not west to the U.S., but south to Italy to attend the Lucca Comics & Games fair for the first time. I've seen pics of the incredibly crowded streets, and I know the fair is more about comics than games, but given that the fair starts on November 1 — only three days after SPIEL this year! — I thought it made sense to attend. What's more, I'll meet my family and in-laws in Rome afterwards for a few days of actual vacation. Woot!

Naturally I kept my eyes open for games during my travels, stopping into a toy store in the Munich airport to see this array of games:

This display features what might be considered a standard line-up of hobby games with the mainstream offerings, with many of those same titles appearing in an Italian toy store in Pisa:

"8-legged stretchiness"

As in Germany, advent calendars are a big deal in Italy, such as this very special one from Ravensburger in which children are taught all the scientific principles they'll need to know in order to kidnap Santa Claus. Educational!

Pisa also has some impressive graffiti along the tunnels that separate rows of houses and apartments:

Although far more common than images are tags reminiscent of my teenage years in which you felt that you had to publicize your cause the only way you knew how:

Clockwise from upper left in my rough translation: "Better no lying than lying", "No GMO", "Too much order creates disorder"

And since I was in Pisa, I took a walk around town to see You Know What:

While there, though, I mostly took pictures of other people taking pictures, finding it fascinating to see other people take this one idea they've seen others do and re-enact it:

Of course some people have different models for the fantasy images they want to recreate:

Wishful thinking, dude!

My approach to gaming conventions mirrors my attitude here. At conventions, I'm often content to walk around watching others play games instead of playing games myself. I observe their experience of the thing and their interaction with it, often because I've played the game myself and am curious to see whether they respond to the game similarly. How well did I read the gameplay and the experience that the designer and publisher tried to create?

In the end, though, I gave in and posed with the tower with the standard pose that everyone else does: