The obvious disadvantage of this plan was that I then had to get myself and my suitcase to the hotel by subway, but with my suitcase having wheels that was okay. In exchange I gained a strategic HQ for my foray into the fair, allowing me to store games there quickly, and to access stuff I didn't want to carry around with me all day.

I previously said that buying games at Spiel 2025 isn't great. The smaller stands of the developers sell only a few games, and are relatively accessible. But many games are sold at larger stands from the publishers, and those have queues where you can easily wait for 1 hour before you actually bought the game you wanted. However, Thursday morning I found that just walking around the Spiel was quite difficult as well, as it was very crowded. So I decided that if I was just shuffling in a crowd anyway, I might as well queue up for some games. As a result of that and the car parked nearby to store, I ended buying a whopping 10 full games, plus 2 smaller card games (Forest Shuffle Dartmoor and Innovation 4th edition). Here is what I bought:

1. Abroad
2. Altay
3. Covenant
4. Emberheart
5. Fromage
6. The Hobbit: There and Back Again
7. Kingdom Crossing
8. March of the Ants
9. Railroad Tiles
10. Recall

The one game I would have bought but couldn't was Feya's Swamp. On the BGG Spiel 2025 preview that game got over 1k thumbs up, but the publisher brought only 160 copies of the game to the fair, so it was sold out at 10:20 am on Thursday, with no additional copies for the other days reserved. The game comes from a smaller Chilean publisher, who hadn't predicted the hype that game would cause, and was thus woefully unprepared for the demand.

I had several great moments at the Spiel 2025: Buying a game I wanted and that won't be available in stores for months to come; getting information about a game I was interested in but not sure whether I should buy it; chatting with a developer for a game I had backed on Kickstarter; chance meetings with people I know. But the sad reality is that these great moments were diluted with a lot of boredom and hassle. For example I would have loved to get explanations on many more games, but typically each game was set up on just one or two tables; with 55,000 visitors per day, you can see how my slim my chances were to get an explanation for the more popular games. The games I bought, I mostly bought blind, based on previous research, as just seeing them set up on a table from a distance didn't really give me any more valuable information about them. Getting from one point to another at the Spiel meant shuffling slowly with the crowd. I stayed on Thursday until nearly closing time of 7 pm, and it was a bit better in the evening. But overall I had the impression that at the Spiel 2025 I couldn't see the games for the players.

I stayed in the hotel for another night, and had another day ticket for Friday, having planned to drive home in the afternoon. But in the end I decided to not use that ticket and drive home in the morning already. And I decided to not go to next year's Spiel in Essen, and instead just visit the much smaller Spiel Doch in Dortmund in April. While it is nice to get a stack of games early, and I now have enough for several months of board game nights, the cost per game this way is excessive, if you count in the cost for the hotel and drive. It was an experience, but not one I plan to repeat anytime soon.