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Review of Essen the Game: Spiel '13
Blurb from the publisher: 'Essen the Game is a strategy game where each player is a visitor to the International Game Fair of Essen.
With your wish list, face the crowd and make your way to the booths of your favourite publishers. But beware that games' availability is limited. To achieve your goals, you have to manage your budget and clutter. The number of games that you carry will reduce your moves in the halls. You will need to come back to the parking lot to store your purchases in your car before returning to the exhibit hall in search for that rare item.
Essen the Game, the opportunity to live or relive a crazy day in the kingdom of games!'
What you get: Your EUR 45 will buy you a copy of Essen the Game: Spiel '13, a 90-minute game for two to five players. The box contains the rulebook and an additional game elements card in three languages (English, French and German) as well as the following items: the board, 5 individual trunks, 60 game tiles, 60 wish list cards, 4 entrance admission and 1 press pass, 18 ranking cards, 100 euro bills in denominations of 5, 10, 20 and 50 euros, 5 scoring tokens, 5 meeples, 5 actions tokens, 2 crowd tokens, 14 event tokens, 5 last turn tiles, 1 first player token, 4 popularity markers.
Attention! Do not confuse this game with Harry-Pekka Kuusela's similarly titled Essen published by LudiCreations, which also came to see the light of day in Essen 2014. It is an altogether different game about vendors and how they deal with limited resources in Essen (or any major gaming convention at that). There is actually a funny story about how both these games came to be. As both games were being designed, it was somehow found out that another team is working on a game with a similar title. A skype call was frantically arranged, with the participants in each game trying to figure out whether the other game infringed their rights or stepped upon their work. It became soon clear though that the games saw Essen under a different guise, used different mechanics and had different art concepts. And they lived happily ever after, by both games being available in Essen 2014. But I digress.
Gameplay: Essen the Game: Spiel '13 (EtG:S'13 from now on) lasts seven rounds. The players are fighting for the highest tally of victory points, or in case of a tie having purchased the most games from their wish list, and in case of a tie there, having the least money possible. As the game proudly proclaims, 'to return from Essen with money is a shame, Sir'. Victory points are obtained by purchasing games, and are exponentially increased when these games are part of one's wish list. Availability is limited, there being only one copy of each game. Even though the monetary value of the games remains mostly constant throughout the game (Bruxelles 1893 for example costs 40 euros), the victory points each game provides fluctuate during each round.
This is achieved by each game scoring points in three ways: by having a fixed victory point value (e.g. Bruxelles 1893 has a value of 1), a variable one depending on the category it belongs to (again, Bruxelles 1893 is an hourglass), as well as how the media (the English speaking BoardGameGeek, the French speaking TricTrac and the German speaking Fairplay Magazin) perceive it. There are four categories of games: the meeples, the dice, the cards and the hourglasses. They mean nothing in themselves, however the public's perception is altered each turn thanks to a clever mechanism relating to where boxes are unloaded in the fair's premises. Apart from its category each game also belongs to a colour, depending on where the publishers booth is.
Each player chooses a colour and gets the related meeples and car trunk, 300 euros, and a personal wish list comprised of four cards, for which the other players will have some limited information about.
The board is teeming with activity. There is the exhibit hall, the pallet truck, the storage area, the parking area, the early departure spaces, the personal action tracks, the pre-order track, the common wish list zone, the popularity tracks, the ranking tables and the scoring track. Wow. It also needs a couple of minutes to set up, namely the popularity tracks (all four aforementioned categories start with a popularity of 2), the common wish list cards, the game tiles (to see which games are available, which will become available in the next turn and how their popularity is affected), the morning ranking and the evening ranking cards as well as the crowds.
Each of the seven rounds is divided into three phases: exhibit maintenance, first player and the players action phase.
In exhibit maintenance, and after the first round, the following take place. First, the games that were on the pallet truck (the intermediary zone between the storage and the exhibit halls) are now released and can be purchased. New games take their place, and through a clever mechanic alter the perceived value of each category of games. The hourglasses might be viewed more favourably, while the points of the cards might now be reduced. The same mechanic also influences in which parts of the hall the crowds will flock, as well as which games will become notorious. Events of this kind include the buzz (extra bonus when that game is bought), the flopp (drop of value for that game's victory points), the goodies (a minor bonus in victory points), the discount (drop in price for that game) as well as the sold out (the game becoming available only by preorder).
The first player phase simply determines who the first player is. At the beginning of the game it is the player that randomly drew the press pass. On every other round it is the least encumbered player.
The players action phase is the core of the game. Each player has eight actions, which he can use to move, purchase, playtest, unload and withdraw cash. These actions can be done in any order and frequency. Moving is straightforward. All meeples start at the entrance and move in any direction counting each space at a time. Crowds are there to make your life more difficult; passing through them costs two movement points. There is a courtyard at the center of the exhibit hall with food and drinks for the fair price of 20 euros, which immediately restores two actions. A player can playtest games no matter where he is. He draws two cards from the wish list deck, keeping one and discarding the other. To purchase a game one needs to be on the booth where it is sold and have adequate money to conclude the transaction. Bonus points if that item was also on a wishlist, the common or the personal one. However, each good purchased encumbers the player and immediately limits his actions by one. That is why, every now and then, the player must rush to the parking lot to unload his purchases in his car trunk, reclaiming his actions which he can immediately use. When on the parking space, a player can also withdraw money by redeeming victory points per increments of 50 euros he withdraws.
After four rounds are played, the morning ranking cards are scored. Half the day has already passed in-game, and each news site was providing its own combo suggestions. For example, BoardGameGeek was suggesting two meeples and two hourglass games, TricTrac three meeples and one hourglasses, while Fairplay Magazin recommended one meeple and three dice. A player earns an additional four points for each combination that is satisfied. One's purchases can be used to satisfy more than one combinations. After scoring the morning cards are replaced by the evening ranking cards. These will be ranked at the end of round seven. Leaving the fair slightly before closing time to avoid the traffic also confers advantages, namely six and three victory points for the first people to leave.
Finally, the game provides a slightly easier variant for a more relaxed family play, as well as a slight rule adaptation for the game to be playable with two players only.
The strong points: Theme, theme and theme. On this game, theme goes to eleven.
If you have ever been to any relatively major convention, be it GenCon, Origins or even more so, the gargantuan Essen itself, you will be blown away by how faithful this game is to the subject matter. After having attended three consecutive Essen fairs, I still can't believe how true the game is to the details. To start with, there is nothing, nothing on the board that is fictitious, aside from the slightly altered look on each euro note making it more Essen related. Each publisher, designer and game is 100% real, was present in Essen 2013 and is used under license. Idem for the fair's logo and design, as well as those of BoardGameGeek, TricTrac and Fairplay. I can't even imagine how much time and effort was needed for the holders of all this IP to agree so that it could be used together in one single game. The hall blueprint is followed as closely as possible (with some abstractions, true); the car trunks that the players will use have real-looking Belgian plates (the designers' country of origin); you draw on tickets or press passes to decide who goes first, for crying out loud. What next? The design team popping out of the box for a live demo?
Apart from faithful, the art is both appropriate and practical. Colourful or gray depending on the needs, this board is a living lesson to all publishers of how to arrange a hundred elements, all of them important, in visible and immediately perceptible patterns.
Mechanics-wise EtG:S'13 is a themed simulation, predominantly based on point allowance and pick-up/delivery, with the asymmetrical goals of set collections and semi-hidden objectives. This isn't about mindlessly buying everything in your path, even though it might be a valid tactic under certain circumstances. It is about buying the stuff that provide you with added value, or deprive your opponents from the ones they want. Just looking at the numbers, the main grunt of the victory points is not the static ones that each game would have provided anyway. It is the variable ones, either due to the media frenzy, the events taking place or the public perception of the games.
Again, all this adds to the theme, with the necessary minor abstractions. Limited game availability, maximizing your enjoyment out of the fair in a reduced amount of time (here: rounds), trying to follow up on what's hot and what's not, it's all here. It's really here. Essen for me is a great place to meet people, make friends, play games... and EtG:S'13 brings it all back on, in a solid gameplay for a game that can be easily played twice in a sitting of three hours.
The funny thing is that, even though it takes around ten minutes to a quarter to explain the rules, anybody that has attended a convention can immediately grasp them with ease, even if they are relatively less used like the one about out-of-prints or how the last round works somehow differently. The game is not hard; effectively it does not address itself to hardcore gamers only. Its target group is pretty much anybody, even though those that have attended or would be fascinated by the idea of visiting a convention are more prone to be enthusiastic about it.
Did I already mention that EtG:S'13 is perfectly themed?
The weak points: The game is so well themed and I am probably raving so much about it that if one has never been to or has never been interested about attending a gaming convention the point might be partially lost. There is still a mid-weight borderline light game there... but would you play a game that is perfectly themed around golfing if you didn't care about golf at all?
One some more serious gameplay issues, one will always feel that he has limited actions and can't influence the board. Even more so, at some points and because of what others have played, one might feel that the most meaningful options have been deprived from him.
Player interaction does not rate high. I, for one, get easily bored by games with low player interaction due to what I perceive as pointlessness or simultaneous solitaire play. Luckily enough, the feeling is substantially more subdued in EtG:S'13. I am tempted to say here that this is also part of the theme, and I understand why such a game cannot have higher player interaction. Players can impede others by remembering what is on their wish list and try to procure it first in order to deprive their opponents from it, but that's that. The rest is a partially solitaire affair, where one tries to maximize his movement and purchases through calculations which are effectively basic arithmetic, rates of return, and some fair amount of forecasting (what has already been played vs what will be). That, unfortunately, can be a pain with slower players how are prone to analysis paralysis. Being the lucky reviewer that I am, my partners in crime are not slow; on the contrary, I felt that that the amount of time between rounds is fair to not only pay attention to what the others are doing but also to calculate what needs to be done and immediately execute it once my turn came.
I am not fully convinced about the way the wish list works. Apart from the common wish list which is applicable to everybody, each player has a semi-known wish list, which he expands as the game progresses. Again, this can be thematically justified ('something wasn't on your wish list but due to the hype and playtesting you actually added it!'), however it has a weird result: something that is on neither the common list nor on nobody's list is potentially on everybody's list. I did not perceive this as creating any major distortions, but having it in mind altered my choices at times in a way that wasn't fully in accordance to theme (namely: hunting on the wish list for games I was about to buy in order to increase my victory point intake).
Maybe for me the biggest departure from the theme is the lack of time pressure. I am not certain how this could have been implemented. Maybe something as straightforward as a timer per round or as convoluted as a timer per player with a fixed duration for the whole game. It could have even been unequal, to accommodate less experienced players, I don't know. I strongly feel however that a game with that name and theme, and no matter the mechanics (which it very well used) should not be left to devolve in a long and dwindled affair. After all, the convention's doors close at some point; the vendors will not wait for the undecided idiot that blithely looks at the material without purchasing anything.
Conclusion: Buy now and invite your friends over. You are a gamer. You love conventions. You love games with theme. EtG: S'13 takes you there.
To find out more about Essen the Game: Spiel '13 and Geek Attitude Games, take a look at http://www.geekattitudegames.com.
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