by Justin Bell

If you missed my roundup of the pre-fair Novelty Show, click here.

***

“Man, this thing is HUGE.”

I was talking to someone on the second day of SPIEL Essen 2026 and we were talking about the sheer scale of a thing we had both been to a number of times. Even for those of us who have been going for five years (me), 13 years (this other person), 25 years, or just this show, it felt like the first day of SPIEL Essen 2026 was the most crowded I had ever seen the show.

“Felt like a Saturday,” said another show veteran I spoke to. “And that’s sort of shocking, given that there’s an entirely new hall that was also jam packed all day.”

Over the course of my four days at SPIEL Essen, I have to think that the people at Merz Verlag (the people who run the show) are at least considering the fact that Messe Essen is getting a bit tight. Walking space in some of the halls was really jammed at times, with no offender worse than Hall 3. Hall 3 (the main hall dedicated to “expert” and strategy games) was often so crowded that I could swear I saw people having actual panic attacks as they tried to navigate the halls with their new toys, and I’m not making light of the situation at all. (Saturday featured more families than Thursday, and the mix of stroller traffic alongside parents letting their toddlers walk in Hall 3, or the Galleria / food truck area at lunchtime, was quite often a challenge.)

So, space is an issue…and the show organizers say that SPIEL Essen won’t get any bigger, with a cap of the 230,000 visitors who can attend the four-day show now. I will politely respond with: we’ll see.

I’m editing this article in the evening after the fourth day of the show, in part to try to capture as many of my thoughts as possible before I board a flight back to Chicago Monday morning.

In no particular order, here are 22 things I thought about during the fair; apologies for the length and a few too many pictures. A big thanks to every person who agreed to spend time with me, or make silly faces at the camera, or include me in their drinks / dinners / evening booth parties, or let me store my big orange bag (aka “Ol’ Bessie”) as I parked it in various places to avoid moving it around through the halls. Enjoy!

1. I’ve met a lot of people in the tabletop space, but never someone who manages a publisher, designs games, and is a classically-trained singer. Although I think the catalog of inPatience is quite interesting and has a clear goal of providing interesting, small box, solo and two-player hobby productions to the community, I was much more intrigued by the personal story of Shadi Torbey, the designer of Onirim and an opera singer based on Belgium. Games are cool, but opera? Dope.

2. The best booth of the show belonged to the team behind Magic: The Gathering Star Trek…because these people put together a Starship Enterprise booth complete with stairs that lead up a flight of stairs into the main play area. The artwork for the various Star Trek captains over the years was cool as well, but man, the look of that ship made people stop in their tracks. Or treks. (I’ll see myself out.)

3. For the first time in my five years attending SPIEL Essen, I played a game outside the Messe with friends. We played Qork, a game so simple that I could use the next 30 words to tell you all the rules. (Instead, just go out and buy a copy, it’s great, 10 years old, and offers solid, dumb fun.) After Qork, we played Hitster, and laughed as we learned that my very deep but narrow focus on 80s and 90s hip-hop doesn’t seem very helpful when you’re trying to win.

4. Chris Whitpan is the man! I met Chris at TraXX (a small but mighty 18xx gaming convention in Colorado) a couple years ago, and we usually run into each other randomly—at or near the Lonny Games booth, to say hi to Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler and talk train games. Then I came to realize that Chris runs the PAX tabletop events. Across breakfast one day and a couple cab rides together during the week, Chris and I spent enough random snippets of time together that I now wish he lived in Chicago so that we could toss him into our other game nights. Not surprisingly, Chris is the guy that knows everyone, so he’s not a bad guy to slide up to at a local drinking establishment.

5. At one of the booth parties on Friday night, I met a guy from Spain who does a podcast and is just generally a gamer. Walking out of a publisher presentation, I ran into Giulia Amici, an Italian content creator I met last year, and she had some interesting opinions about the booths she had visited. Another person I met wanted to chat about the quality of the pretzels at one of the food stands. A community manager for an exhibitor had pointed opinions about the curry on sale outside of her booth’s hall. This is why I love chatting with people who I don’t know—everyone has an angle, something interesting to say about a demo, or the food, or an old game they snagged from a used game booth. You only get that kind of thing at conventions, and I love it.

6. Superstar designer run-in #1: While I was standing in the Devir booth on the show’s second day, I got to meet Isra and Shei, the designers also known as Llama Dice. The White Castle is in my personal top five, and many of the other Llama Dice titles remain in my collection. I might have yelped out loud when I met those two and it was a pleasure to chat about a bunch of things not related to games during a second run-in the next day. It’s always fun to chat with the designers of your favorite games…it’s even better when you get to share a laugh.

7. More Hegemony? Yes please. The best game I played in 2023 has a third expansion launching on crowdfunding next year titled Hegemony: Shadows of Authority. The addition of new action cards, new elements on the Politics Table (including crime and the environment), and a couple new mechanics mean that one of the biggest table hogs in recent memory is getting a little bigger…count me in!

8. There’s a spot outside of the Galleria, at the Messe where the line of food trucks indoors turns into a line of trucks outdoors, that has a vendor with a red tent and an extra-long smoker. That tent does pulled pork, but pulled pork in a few different shades: a pulled pork sandwich, fries topped with pulled pork, pulled pork a la mode. (I made at least one of those up.) In general, I think convention food is never better than fine. But that pulled pork was solid. Tasty, interesting, juicy but not quite juicy enough, a good amount of flavor. This point is here mainly to remind myself that I’m hitting that puppy again next year.

9. I had never met Zev Shlasinger in person before this year’s show. Zev used to run Z-Man Games and now leads Play to Z. It’s pretty hard to out-energy me, but by the show’s second day, Zev looked like a man who was the living embodiment of “always be selling.” Super high energy. Big laugh, bigger than my own by a mile. Customers kept coming to the Play to Z stand, and he greeted each and every person like they were a friend of the family. I don’t know a lot of people who I would call “personalities” in the tabletop space, but Zev absolutely fits the bill. If you haven’t met him, I highly recommend stopping by Zev’s booth at a future show…it will be time well spent.

10. Devir made a big announcement at the fair: the next game in the “Kemushi” saga (games that include Bitoku, Sand, and the recently-released strategy game Shugendo) is Kaiju, War of the Yokai. The major selling point: the three-person design team includes the people who made War of the Ring: Second Edition (currently #8 on BGG’s overall rankings) and Dune: War for Arrakis. The gathered audience for this announcement produced audible gasps when this was unveiled at Devir’s booth party. I have a feeling that now is a great time to double down on my imaginary Devir shares.

11. The random run-ins you get with designers of all shades at SPIEL Essen is an absolute thrill. I bumped into Simone Luciani three different times on the first day of the fair. I met up with Cardner Babakitis to grab her new games. During a meeting in hall 2, I made eyes with Fabio Lopiano, and after we exchanged pleasantries, he stopped to sign autographs by other fans. (Fabio, can we get more corporations for Shackleton Base? Call me.) I had an interesting conversation with Daniele Tascini outside of the Board&Dice booth. Martin Wallace and I had drinks at a booth party one night. Liz Davidson and I…well, Liz Davidson and I did what it seems like we do each time we run into each other, which is laugh a lot.

12. I demoed four games this year. One is already available: ICE Second Edition, from This Way!. The other three are inbound, either through retail soon or crowdfunding in the next few months: Chimerium, from Synapses Games (possibly the world’s first chimera crafting game?), Ports of Call: The Board Game from Game Inventors (the supply and demand mechanics were very interesting, and it is based on a video game from something young people won’t recognize: the Amiga!!), and Foundation: Isaac Asimov, based on the Foundation novel series. I had a blast sitting through all the games; this is why I believe so much in the idea of “try before you buy”, and SPIEL Essen is an excellent opportunity to do that before backing or buying a new game.

13. There were massive queues everywhere during the fair, but the line I will remember is the one that built up each day in front of the Combo Games booth for their new release Queen Alice. Around 10 AM on the show’s second day, I heard a small stampede coming my way, then looked up to see geeks of all shapes and sizes making a beeline for the Combo booth. (A few hundred copies of Queen Alice were available to buy from the booth each morning. They never lasted long.) When combined with the lines for CGE’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game, situated near Combo in Hall 3, there were some nasty lines snaking around a number of nearby stands. Look, you can’t blame or penalize a vendor for selling games, and this gets back to my concerns about Messe Essen being able to handle the increasing size and scale of this event. There will always be hot games on display!

14. I made a point to meet with a lot of small and/or “new to me” vendors at this year’s show, and even though I booked almost 40 meetings, there were dozens of vendors I still wanted to meet. Every time I find myself getting down about games feeling too “samey” or serving as safe bets from established brands, I meet a publisher who worked on a single game for the last six years with a really original idea. I’m actually loving where things are from a variety perspective in tabletop…for every large, or even medium-sized, publisher, there are shops with 1-5 employees who are crushing it right now with fresh ideas and a very steady output of games with top-notch art, production, design, and development in place.

15. Starstruck designer run-in #2: after lunch on the third day of the show, I strolled the Messe with my friend Danni and spent some time catching up. At each show, I only buy one game; it’s fair to call out that this is a first-world problem, the admittedly-privileged life of a game reviewer. This year, I decided to hit the Saashi & Saashi booth to buy Railway Porters. As I was paying for my copy, I noticed a man standing near the booth’s business/storage area and realized that I was staring at…Saashi Takarai himself! A moment later, I was getting a picture with the designer of some of my favorite games, including Come Sail Away!, Let’s Make a Bus Route, and my favorite Saashi & Saashi design, Photograph (Wind the Film!).

15a. As I was snapping a picture with Saashi, I looked to my left and saw a woman whose nametag got me even more excited: Takako Takarai! Takako is the artist for all of the Saashi & Saashi games, so I asked Saashi and Takako to join me for a picture and I did my best to not lose my mind that the moment was really happening. Saashi and Saashi! At the Saashi & Saashi booth! They even autographed my copy of Railway Porters!!

16. Every time I go to SPIEL Essen, one thing really shocks me, as a man in his early 50s trying to imagine what gaming life will look like as I age: there are a bunch of people at SPIEL Essen in their 60s, 70s, and maybe even older who are walking the halls to pick up new games. I love it. I’m not saying that other shows discourage older players from attending; everyone loves a customer, regardless of age. But at SPIEL Essen, the wide range of ages is quite noticeable and I embrace it.

17. The thing that everyone fights when they go to a convention: trying as hard as they can to NOT lose their voice. This is particularly true for any kind soul who agreed to demo a game dozens of times across a multi-day show. I have to pound cough drops all day to even come close to having a voice by a show’s final day. At one of the booths, a distributor provided mics and small speakers so that their demo teams could be heard at each table without straining to be heard among the crowds in hall 2. That’s the only way to fly!

18. At three different meetings on the show’s third day, a marketer or a publisher used the word “deluxify” in a sentence. “We’re still not sure which components we’ll deluxify for the next version of _____, but we’re working on it.” I have been saying for years that “deluxify” would have its time in the sun, and I was on the cutting edge of this significant change in the way we talk about games. The edge, baby!

19. I can only comment on the meetings that I attended, but I was surprised how often a theme emerged, unsolicited, around a focus on releasing fewer games in 2027 and 2028. Sometimes, this came from publishers that already make just one or two games a year, and these same publishers are excited to see those with larger catalogs consider making fewer games. In one case, a publisher planned to come down from six games in 2026 to 4-5 games (including expansions) next year. I love games, but the rapid rate of releases means I go to a fair with 1,800 games and have no shot of seeing any real slice of that total…and that’s only the publishers who have a booth at SPIEL!!

20. The afternoon on the show’s final day, Sunday, felt like a Saturday at past shows in terms of foot traffic. I was still ducking and diving out of the way of people at 4:45 PM on Sunday. Even at SPIEL Essen last year, I spent time wandering the relatively quiet halls late in the day talking with publishers who were beginning to break down their booths to get out as soon as they could after 6 PM. This year? People were still buying games, demoing the hottest titles, and waiting in long restroom lines late in the show’s final day.

21. I was forced to ship two boxes from the fair this year—a large box Saturday, then a medium box Sunday. In total, I shipped 97 pounds of games (44 kgs) back to Chicago. That was expensive—about 600 euros—but I’m more obsessed with what the number will be when I get the bill for the tariffs back to the US. The shipping operation at the fair? A mixed bag. On Saturday, it took 56 minutes for me to navigate box packing, a wait in line, then some work with a slower agent. (I tried my best to be pleasant.) Sunday, I was in and out in 17 minutes, well in advance of the 6 PM hall closing time.

22. There’s a level of sadness when I leave the Messe on Sunday afternoon, and that kicked in again for this year’s show. Some of that is the genuine love I have for the people, but some sadness was linked to regret: I didn’t make enough time to try out more games. There’s not nearly enough time across four days unless you really commit to a battle plan to hammer two, maybe three of the halls. Hitting every stand and demoing games as much as you can is critical, but just talking to the people who love talking about their games with players is a thrill.

SPIEL Essen is still my favorite show of them all. My feet are thankful that the show has ended…but I’m already fired up for SPIEL Essen 2027!