by Justin Bell

On the day before SPIEL Essen opens to the general public, the fair hosts a media session and awards activity to show off the latest and greatest data. Part of the press conference includes an awards announcement for the Deutscher Spiele Presse (German Games Prize); the main category for family and adult gamers was won by the game Artengarten (Sanctuary), the lighter Ark Nova release designed by Mathias Wigge and published in Germany by Feuerland in 2025.

In a release shared by the events and PR team behind SPIEL Essen, Merz Verlag, lots of fun info was included:
* The show’s first three days are already sold out; assuming Sunday also sells out, more than 230,000 visitors will stroll the eight halls of Messe Essen this weekend, a new record.
* The fair has broken its attendance record for four years in a row.
* 997 exhibitors will have wares on display this weekend…and, you can tell even from the release, everyone wishes that the number topped a thousand. (Next year? Probably, although I’m not sure where else Merz Verlag will be able to accommodate more booths!!)
* Those exhibitors call 53 different countries home. While Germany, the US, France, China, and Poland lead the way, even Iceland has a booth this year. Kuwait does too! The people who make these games, toys and puzzles come from everywhere, so it is a delight to have the opportunity to meet people from so many different places.
* There are more than 1,800 novelties repped by those exhibitors this year. It’s gonna be tough to see everything, but you can’t argue about one thing: gamers of all shades should be able to find SOMETHING they like!

Of those 1,800 new products, about a thousand of them were on display at the press event that opened up for a few hours after the press conference, known as the Novelty Show. In essence, press members get to snap photos of the show’s hottest games up close, before the masses descend on each publisher’s booth and get in the way of my very amateur-looking photos taken with my Pixel phone’s camera. (I kid…sort of.)

The other great thing about the Novelty Show is the access to a range of each publisher’s representatives, to chat about the games or the things they have coming up soon. That might mean anything from a conversation with a marketing rep about plans for upcoming crowdfunding campaigns, to a studio head excited to talk about their 2026 results, to game designers who can provide a brief overview of a game you have never seen before.

I’m always fascinated by what each exhibitor decides to do for the Novelty Show. In limited cases, a smaller exhibitor might have someone who sits in all three of these roles, like Leonie Grundler, the founder of Lioness Games who also designed Biome and struck me as the lead marketer for the items in the Lioness catalog. (She is also one of the tallest people in tabletop, so it was a little shocking to meet someone at the Novelty Show who was noticeably taller than I am.)

The Novelty Show is so large that Merz Verlag organized the event in the Grugahalle, a multilevel event and stage space in between the Messe and the Atlantic Congress Hotel Essen. A funny tagline surfaced among the gathered media/content creator community during the Novelty Show: “wait, there’s a downstairs, too?” Those who entered from street level saw an entire floor’s worth of games…and then learned that the morning press conference that took place upstairs had another whole floor of games, but there wasn’t clear signage for anyone who skipped the initial press conference.

So, there’s an opportunity for next year. The other ding: the exhibitors on the first floor had lighting that was poor in certain parts of the space. That meant many of my pictures required flash photography and/or professional equipment to really shine. A number of media members get away with using mobile phone cameras for their images; some exhibitors suffered a bit from the lack of better overhead lighting.

Strolling the Novelty Show took a couple hours. Hugs and high fives were available everywhere I looked, and everyone had their full, normal-sounding voice for what is likely the final time of the weekend.

There were a number of highlights, outside of the catch-ups and the networking on display.

For the first time, I met designer Friedemann Friese (2F-Spiele, and the designer of many “F”-titled classics over the years, such as Findorff, Fishing, and Funkenschlag, which is the first edition of the game now known as Power Grid). Friedemann is hard to miss, not only because of the bright green hair but more because of the big, hearty laugh.

He was the person manning the 2F table, on the Grugahalle’s upper level. We had a brief conversation about tabletop celebrity status that resonates, now that I have met other popular game designers over the years.

At SPIEL Essen, Friedemann is a celebrity; making great games for 20+ years will do that for you. But he was so excited to meet players from around the world, something he gets excited for every year. “I only have to be a celebrity for five days, then I can go home and not be a celebrity for the rest of the year!”

At the Czech Games Edition booth, I ran into Eleni, a member of the CGE marketing team who handles teach and promo videos for the company (and who you usually see running around doing CGE vlogs at SPIEL Essen and Gen Con). Eleni had a busy morning, including putting the finishing touches on the edits for the now-live teach-while-playing video for Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game. I’m still shocked by how many people I have met or know through my networks who have been anxiously awaiting a rulebook, so this teach video will probably have thousands of views by the time I wake up Thursday morning.

I also ran into Branislav Berec at CGE’s booth, the man behind the Nithrania—Game in a Nutshell video series of board game instruction videos. I love Branislav’s work, and it sounds like we’ll be seeing more content from him in the very near future. The teach space for medium- and medium-plus strategy games is crowded, and for good reason: there are so many providers of great content right now, in a category that seems to be getting bigger every year.

The best part of that stand visit was getting a picture with designers Vlaada Chvátil and Tomáš Holek, dressed in costume for their appearances tied to Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game. They’ll be at the CGE booth all weekend signing autographs and taking pictures with fans.

And, even though I thought I had a long journey to Essen from my home in Chicago, the reality is that many people come from outside of Europe to attend the show. Two of my favorite people in tabletop are Maggie and Amy, the Australian couple better known to their community as Thinker Themer. I ran into them while running around the Novelty Show.

It sounded crazy to me when I heard it, but it felt even crazier after talking to them at the show: they are doing a multiweek round-trip tour that launched in Australia, then went to Tokyo Game Market in Japan, then arrived in Germany for SPIEL Essen, then they’re flying back home to Australia. I love board games as much as anyone, but I could feel my body weight shift when they shared the flight pattern. I’m turned over just by flying to Germany…imagine doing that across so many more time zones. Thinker Themer, we salute you!

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. But first: a big thanks to the people who stopped me at the Novelty Show to say thanks for the work I’m doing here at BGG. It means a lot, but it also helps to know that for some, the work is resonating in ways I was hoping for when I joined this team. It’s pretty cool to meet people from all over the world who read BGG to get some of their tabletop news. From the BGG folks behind the scenes to the community here and abroad, it’s great to be one slice of the news pie you bite into every time you need it!