Today, at the Spiel Essen 2023, karmic justice struck: Pandasaurus Games sold The Fox Experiment there, a game that I had backed on Kickstarter and, despite an "estimated delivery" date of July 2023, haven't received yet. Some Kickstarter backers will supposedly get their copy mid-November, but the container for Europe is still stuck in China, due to problems with the fulfilment hub. Furthermore the price for the game at the fair was €60, while the Kickstarter price was $60 plus nearly $30 for shipping and VAT. If I had known that, I could have gotten the game both faster and cheaper if I hadn't backed it on Kickstarter.

On the positive side I was able to pick up a copy of Freelancers: A Crossroads Game at the fair for €60. While it costs $59.95 at the Plaid Hat Games online store in the USA, they charge another $69.90 for the cheapest shipping option to Europe. I paid less at the fair than it would have cost me to buy the game at some other European retail option, like Amazon.

I'm not sure I'll go again next year to the Spiel Essen 2024. I'm living closer to the fair now, just an hour and a half of drive; but this year it was fuller than previously, and traffic locally and parking were quite a hassle. And while buying some games at good prices that are otherwise hard to get is certainly a draw, exploring and seeing new games at the fair isn't working quite as well. The more popular games draw quite a lot of people, so getting a place at a table isn't obvious, and with the noise and the crowd it is hard to really get some good explanations of how a game works. A YouTube video usually gives you a much clearer impression of whether a given board game is right for you. The most interesting games I saw were games that I had already backed on Kickstarter, and where I could see prototypes or pre-production copies. But board game companies didn't put much effort into promoting games that they basically already sold on Kickstarter, so other than a bit of assurance that these projects are real and still ongoing, I didn't get much out of that.