The only downside was that I had to leave the convention half an hour after arrival to lug Hoplomachus: Victorum to my car. Those Chip Theory Games weight a ton, and you can’t just carry them around with you all day. But getting back into the convention was easy, I got a bracelet that allowed me to bypass the ticket check. I only bought one other board game at the Spiel: CoraQuest, a family dungeon crawler. I stayed nearly all day, and still had the impression to not have seen everything, the convention now being back to full pre-Covid size (last year it was smaller). As a result I only managed to play a single game, Warcrow, a prototype of an upcoming Kickstarter, which didn’t overly impress me. There were a lot of upcoming Kickstarter games on show; but only Nanolith from the games I backed this year showed their game after the crowdfunding was already over. Forest of Radgost, which I had backed in 2021 was also there, but that one is already shipping and I should get my copy soon. I still said hi, and they were happy to meet one of their backers.

Several of the games I had wanted to see weren’t there. Getting a board game delivered in 2022 is still a problem. So most of the games at the convention were not crowdfunded, but retail games. I didn’t buy any of them, because I wasn’t interested in many of them, and I didn’t even see many especially good deals. A retail game from Amazon, including shipping (or free shipping with Amazon Prime) can be cheaper than picking the same game up at MSRP at a convention. Unsurprisingly for a board game convention in Europe, there were a lot of Euro games. I am somewhat picky about those, I just recently got Wingspan, and that is basically *the* must-have Euro game. I’m staying away from the more complex Euro games, as I prefer more thematic games. And while Wingspan has a certain elegance to its game mechanics, a lot of the newer Euro games just have an overload of different ways to gain victory points. That doesn’t really appeal to me. And I am not a big fan of the “most victory points” victory condition anyway.