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Nearly every person who I spoke with about SPIEL '18 — what they had played and liked, what they saw others buying, what seemed interesting — sort of shrugged and suggested that while they've seen others be excited about things, they weren't sure what to make of the show. Of course most of the people I speak with are designers, publishers, distributors, and other industry representatives who have a skewed perception of the show relative to "normal" people. Few of us play games at SPIEL '18, other than perhaps a few turns of something so that you can write a summary of it or see whether you want to take home a prototype (if a publisher or member of the press) or finished game.
That said, I did play Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra twice as I was able to get a review copy from Next Move Games on the Tuesday when I had arrived in Germany and I wanted to write a preview of the game before the show opened. I suspected many people would be looking forward to this game given Azul's status as the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner and a big seller at SPIEL '17, and Sintra both topped BGG's GeekBuzz list for SPIEL '18 and placed well in the Fairplay rankings.
Final Fairplay standings based on a minimum of, I believe, thirty ratings per game shown
I played Stefan Feld's Carpe Diem from alea twice as well because Ravensburger could not come up with someone to present their game on camera, and I was determined to record an overview at the show. Following a three-, then two-player game on Saturday night to familiarize myself with the rules and learn how to both play and present the elements of the game, I got to serve as "guest" on camera in the BGG booth on Sunday to explain the game.
Beyond that, I played Verona Twist from József Dorsonczky of Mind Fitness Games, who spoke with me about the game for an intense twenty minutes following a demo game, an interaction that led to me waking at 04:00 the next morning having conversations with myself about the game. Quite intense. That might have been all, but everything's a bit of a blur at this point, possibly due to lack of sleep.
As for coverage of the show, the BGG team did a fine job, I think, with us sticking to our schedule and having only a few minor delays (as far as I know) over the five days that we livestreamed interviews with designers and publishers about their new releases. (For reference, our SPIEL '18 broadcast schedule is here.) Today Jeff Anderson is overseeing the shipment of five or six pallets of games to the U.S. so that we'll have all of these featured titles and more available for play by attendees of BGG.CON 2018, which opens on November 14. So soon!
What was running through my head at SPIEL '18 — I love this film and had watched it again on the flight to Germany
The packaging and shipment went relatively smoothly. We had asked publishers to drop off games on Wednesday during set-up day so that we could pack as quickly as possible, track what was still missing, and have time to research other games we might need to pick up. I know that at the end of Friday we had more than 80% of the games we had anticipated collecting, despite having broadcast only 60% of our programmed schedule. Thanks to all the publishers and designers who presented games on air! If you plan to attend BGG.CON 2018 and will play new SPIEL '18 releases, please take a picture of yourself playing the game and tag the publisher on it to share your appreciation of their efforts.
What did not go smoothly was our scheduling process, for which I'll take the blame. Starting with the 2018 Origins Game Fair, I've been using Google forms to solicit information from publishers while simultaneously requesting preferred demo times from them so that we could co-ordinate our broadcast schedule. Thanks to the forms, I could get the info I needed for the Gen Con 2018 and SPIEL '18 convention previews, while someone else — Steph Hodge for Gen Con and Doug Garrett for SPIEL — could contact publishers to set up demo times.
While Gen Con is somewhat packed, with us having to deny space for only a portion of the games newly released, SPIEL is far more of a challenge. Many publishers release two, three, or four games, and we tell them that we can give them space for one or two on air. We'd like to feature everything, but we literally don't have the time available to do so, even though we start livestreaming on Wednesday before the show actually opens. Sometimes we've covered a game in prototype form at Spielwarenmesse, GAMA, Origins, or elsewhere, so we set aside the request for demo time at SPIEL '18, figuring that we'll book games we haven't seen at all first. Sometimes we decide to feature one game over another because the latter game is derivative of something else or not something we expect our audience will want to see. Sometimes we receive information late in the process, and sometimes we just goof up.
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Someone leaves a water bottle at our booth each show. Our pick-up at SPIEL '18...
My main goof-up for SPIEL '18 is twofold. First, I didn't emphasize in my initial note to publishers and on the Google form that they are indicating a preference for a particular day and time, but they are being guaranteed nothing. Someone else could have requested that day and time earlier, of course, but more likely we have run into one of the issues above.
Second and more importantly, I didn't write to everyone we didn't fit on camera to tell them that the schedule was filled and to invite them to submit information to be on a reserve list. (We constantly drew from the reserve list that we did have and managed to wedge many additional presenters onto the livestream.) Many publishers arrived at the BGG booth to say that they had scheduled a demo at this day and time, and I had to tell them that no, they had requested to demo a game at this day and time, but we had filled all of the available slots.
For conventions in 2019 and beyond, I will emphasize to publishers that they are requesting a time, that someone else might have already called dibs, that we might want to feature only one or two of their titles, and that nothing is confirmed until they hear from us — then I need to ensure that every publisher receives a response along these lines. Given the rate at which new games are released, we will have to be even choosier at Gen Con 2019 and SPIEL '19. (I joked with Lincoln about having a second livestream booth at SPIEL '19 along the lines of ESPN2, and he looked like he wanted to strangle me, so don't expect this to be an option anytime soon!)
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Flyer left in publisher booths on Sunday morning
The other negative to talk about related to SPIEL '18 is theft. Multiple publishers were robbed over multiple days, typically by a group of people. One person would engage with the booth help in some task that required them to go in the back room or otherwise leave their post, while a second person asked about a demo or just started stealing a game in an obvious manner to distract other booth help, while a third person would grab the lockbox or cashbox, sometimes even if the box was locked away in some manner.
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I talked with Dominique Metzler from SPIEL convention owner Merz Verlag about the thefts, and she stated that no matter how much it might make sense to have security cameras at various places in the Messe halls, privacy rights in Germany (and in Europe more generally) would not allow for that to happen. She also said that two hundred security officials walk the Messe in plainclothes throughout the show, but a police presence would not happen unless there was a clear reason for one to exist — which means that publishers who have been stolen from would need to file reports to demonstrate that the fair was a risky affair for those running a business. Even so, that might not bring about a police presence since they have to allocate their staff for the city as a whole.
For gamers and publishers, SPIEL remains largely an all-cash business, so perhaps the ideal solution would be wifi access throughout the Messe so that vendors could more readily accept payment via bank and credit cards, something that has become fairly common at Origins and Gen Con in the U.S. (A great portion of our BGG Store sales at these conventions requires only a few taps on an iPad, a card swipe or insertion, and a signature, with the sale completed almost instantly.) While we wait for that to happen, publishers need to better ensure that their cashboxes can't be grabbed and emptied within seconds. Maybe we all need to run a few LARPing sessions to simulate and test such things prior to a show opening...
That's it for now as I have a plane to catch, so let's close with a goodbye pic from fellow on-air host Rodney Smith of Watch It Played:
A crazy 5 days of Essen are OVER! pic.twitter.com/e5j1OGAKKV
— Watch It Played (@WatchItPlayed) October 28, 2018
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