• German publisher HUCH! & friends had a few new releases at Spiel 2013, including the abstract strategy game Ignis from designer Dominique Breton.
• Designer Roberto Fraga often creates fun games that have a wacky interactive element, and he does it once again — this time in a co-design with his wife Florence — in Ka-Boom. I still haven't got this to the table with my son, but that's mostly because we've been shooting Coconuts at one another instead of building blocks.
• Designer Touko Tahkokallio's name will be forever linked with Eclipse in the mind of gamers, but he creates other types of games as well, such as the puzzle-solving Enigma and Mauna Kea mainstream game about treasure hunters on the run from lava. HUCH's Katrin Reil tells us how to play:
• First-time designer Dave Cousins from North and South Games explains Rock, Paper, Scissors, BANG!, which debuted at UK Games Expo in May 2013 in a small run two-player edition and which was boosted to a four-player edition for Spiel 2013.
• Martin Williams' Sagario was on display at Spiel 2012 in a demo version, and now Ságaze has released a published version of the game.
One positive quirk of the new floor plan for Spiel 2013 — in which Halls 1-3 were used instead of Halls 4-12 — was that publishers weren't segregated as much as in previous years. They couldn't be! After all, with only three halls you're almost guaranteed to have large and small publishers in the same hall. In this case, the enormous Hall 3 — which had one of the Messe's two entry points — had all of the large publishers concentrated in two-thirds of its length, while medium-sized and tiny publishers like Ságaze filled the back third. When asked about the change, a number of those small publishers said traffic seemed better as German families didn't just scoot around Halls 10-12, then jet out the door, but instead kept wandering down Hall 3 until they unexpectedly ran across someone like Asyncron, Surprised Stare Games, or the Korean Pavilion. Half the battle of getting people to pick up your games is for them to know you and your games exist, so this change seemed like a plus for all.