The main negative point is that after a full day of visiting the convention, I’m not sure that I have seen everything, but my feet hurt too much to continue. Given the pandemic, the organizers could have spread out the booths a bit more, there was unused space at the back of the halls. But at least you needed a Covid certificate to get in. I didn’t get to play as many games as I would have liked, it seemed it was easier for small groups than fir a single person to get somebody offering them to show a game. So I squeezed in with other groups, and played Paper Dungeons and Oathsworn. Not sure whether I will get these games later. But while I didn’t get to play much, I got a lot of short explanations on games to find out whether I would be interested. Malhya is definitive maybe, although it seems to me that the game has been under development for a rather long time, since 2018, and still hasn’t even launched the Kickstarter.

I was a bit hampered by the fact that I like thematic, story-driven games, preferably played co-operatively. But in a European board game convention you unsurprisingly mostly see competitive Euro games, with all sorts of worker placement, tableau building, and other mechanic-heavy gameplay elements. Even Destinies, while story-driven, is competitive. I’ll have to play it once with my wife to see how much that bothers us, otherwise I might have just to play it solo. Only one of the games that I backed in crowdfunding (Nova Aetas Renaissance) was represented at the convention. I would have loved to see more of them, to get at least a first glimpse while waiting for these Kickstarters to deliver.

At least I didn’t overdo it on the spending. I took an airport hotel 15 minutes by car south of the convention, which was a lot cheaper than the hotels in walking distance. I was happily surprised that they charged me only 6 bucks a day for parking at the convention center. And I paid only 175€ for those games I bought. I even saved money by eating ouside the convention, but that was more to take a break and bring the games I had bought back to my car, so I didn’t have to lug them around. I had a really fun time overall, but I’m happy I took a hotel instead of driving back home after a long convention day.