Sunday is one of my favourite days in Essen Spiel. Calm, refreshingly quiet for the first hour, it gets vibrant later on when participants run around in a mad dash to secure the last places on the games they wish to try. Companies sell out, prices drop, and the scenery gets more and more surreal: empty stalls from those that achieved their goals and left early lie next to packed, bustling booths where teams of volunteers explain the games with raspy voices. Who can continuously speak for four days in a row?

Outside of alphabetical order I will start the humongous Mega Civilization, seeing how it spoke to me personally. I have logged in playing hundreds of hours of Avalon Hill's Civilization and Advanced Civilization after all. 999 Games are a company from the Netherlands better known for transposing well-known titles in Dutch. This year however they really caused ripples by creating a new, improved, mega-edition of Avalon Hill's Civilization for (hold on to your seats) five to eighteen (!) players, which can take up to 12 hours to complete. This is not a hasty, nostalgic reprint with marginal only fixes to accommodate more players in an enlarged map. This is a luxurious new game that allows players to advance their tribe all over Europe, using well-known mechanisms like the stock/treasure board and the AST and Census tracks, but with many novelties like new trade materials, new civilization advances and rules for simultaneous execution. This monster of a game is sold in a gorgeous wooden box and weighs around 10-12 kilos (I did not have my scales with me). Damn!

Columbia Games did not have a booth for the last few years, but Grant Dalgliesh, owner and lead designer was there. The breaking news is that, weather allowing, next year Columbia Games will be in Essen Spiel, with all that is means for its inexhaustible list of Harn products, block wargames and other products. The man is a genius; he let me win The Last Spike, his new game. Now I have to write the review!

Felix Scenery immediately caught my eye as a producer of beautiful, affordable sci-fi scenery. Their booth had an impressive array of buildings already set up for a futuristic battle with your miniatures and system of choice. The 1,2 mm of laminated cardboard is sturdy enough to hold even larger and heavier miniatures, something indispensable seeing how their 3D nature means that floors upon floors of buildings can be stacked. The designs are gorgeous: both sides are already painted, while no glue or other material is needed for their assembly.

The UGG booth where I met Grant Dalgliesh has probably the best selection of old school wargames and other associated titles in the whole fair (and probably the most themed auctions every day at 13:00). UGG is the distributor of many great companies like GMT and Columbia Games, while its latest offering and a production of its own, Medieval Conspiracy, will be soon reviewed by yours truly.

There is a bittersweet feeling when leaving the partially empty booths, it does not however prevail over the promise of the future. Essen will be there again next year.