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Monday, October 20, 2025
The logistical challenge of Spiel Essen
On Thursday, the Spiel 2025 in Essen starts. Over 50,000 visitors are expected per day, for 4 days, so over 200,000 visitors in total (which aren't necessarily 200,000 different people, as some people come on several days). This makes the Spiel the biggest tabletop game convention in the world, about three times as big as Gen Con, the biggest North American convention. But Essen is smaller than Indianapolis, so the ratio of fair visitors to city inhabitants of the Spiel is about 5 times that of Gen Con. That makes visiting the Spiel somewhat of a logistical challenge.
As I now live just an hour and a half drive away from Essen, two years ago my wife and me tried to just go there on Thursday morning by car. It turns out that traffic around the fair area is extremely congested even hours before the fair. And while there are multiple parking garages, they are all full. We ended up parking illegally at the side of the road somewhere 10 minutes walk from the fair. So last year, we decided to take a hotel room from Wednesday to Thursday. By luck, we found a room somebody else had cancelled. Hotel rooms during the fair are extremely hard to find, and "surge pricing" triples the cost of a room to sometimes over $500 a night. This year, despite booking in January, I couldn't find a room anywhere near the fair, and had to take a room downtown. At least I booked it before their surge pricing algorithm kicked in, and got it still at the regular rate. So I'll have to take the subway from there to the fair this year, which slightly complicates things.
This year I booked the room for two nights, Wednesday to Friday. My experience from the last years was that getting into the fair itself on Thursday morning is hard. Many of the visitors queue before the entrance already well before the doors open, as they want to rush in early and get whatever hot game before it sells out. So this year I plan to turn up a bit after the opening time of 10 am. As in the previous years I always left the fair in the afternoon on Thursday, this year I plan to concentrate on Thursday afternoon and stay until closing time at 7 pm. I'll probably won't do that in just one foray, but rather go back to the hotel around noon, for lunch, a bit of rest, and maybe to store the games I bought in the morning.
That is, if I even manage to buy any games. The world's largest tabletop game fair is a surprisingly horrible place to buy a tabletop game. The place is just packed, and last year one stand selling a highly desired game on Thursday had a queue of over 1 hour to buy the game. Getting to the stand with the game you want is already a challenge. Getting to see the game is hard, getting 5 minutes of basic explanation is harder, and getting to play it is nearly impossible. Whether you can buy the game depends a lot on how popular the game is on the previews, and how many copies of the game the publisher actually managed to bring. Some games are sold out before noon on the first day. Last year, I only bought two games at the fair itself. Which was just as well, because the crowd in some places means that even just walking forward turns into more like a shuffle, and if everybody is carrying several bought board games, foot traffic gets even slower. Large Cajon backpacks are prohibited, but a lot of people have trolleys, which also make walking in a crowd difficult for everybody. I think I'll just bring the classic Ikea bag.
While getting a hot new game at the Spiel is nice, it isn't why I am there for. Ideally I want to see many different games, even games I am not yet aware of. I am mostly looking for games that can be played in under 3 hours, including set up and explanation, for my board game nights. That limits how complex the game can be. Then there are secondary considerations, about how much I like or dislike certain game mechanics, or how much the theme of the game appeals to me. If I like a game, and it isn't available to buy at the fair, I can still mail order it later. Seeing a game demo live is often giving me more information about a board game than a YouTube review video. I'll just have to overcome the logistical challenges and the crowd to get to that point.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 10:29 AM Permanent Link
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I see that a lot of companies that go to Spiel Essen let people pre-purchase their games. That doesn't help for discoverability much, but at least you'll get the game you want if you knew you wanted it ahead of time.
This, in common with most things I read about conventions in general these days, seems like insanity to me. In the 1980s and early '90s I went to many comics conventions, most of them the largest in the country at the time, and none of them was remotely like anything I read about now. They were busy, sure, and you had to queue to get in - for a few minutes. Once inside, you could wander around freely, get to the dealers easily, see all the events you were interested in, mix with the professionals at the bar and generally have a relaxed good time. It was all relatively civilized.
The irony to me seems tobe that those were the days when there was no WorldWide Web and conventions and marts were the only way to access this kind of thing. You couldn't just go online and watch a video of a panel or browse through a dealer's stock and order it to be delivered to your house. It seems like there should have been more congestion then and less now but somehow the whole thing has spiralled out of control, turning it all into a logistical nightmare that cannot possibly be more fun than it used to be and almost certainly is not much fun at all, most of the time.
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The irony to me seems tobe that those were the days when there was no WorldWide Web and conventions and marts were the only way to access this kind of thing. You couldn't just go online and watch a video of a panel or browse through a dealer's stock and order it to be delivered to your house. It seems like there should have been more congestion then and less now but somehow the whole thing has spiralled out of control, turning it all into a logistical nightmare that cannot possibly be more fun than it used to be and almost certainly is not much fun at all, most of the time.
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