Minmaxing Life

Essen 2009 summary

I am just back from four days in Essen, Germany, where I stayed for the annual game fair. Essen is all about analog gaming: from LARP and RPG to board and card games. As usual, I was stricken by the diversity and vitality I felt in contrast to the current staleness of the video games [...]

As a board game devotee, I accomplish a yearly pilgrimage to the Internationale Spieltage SPIEL which most people simply call “Essen” from the name of the German city where it takes place. As the world’s biggest “paper” game convention, it is to board games what E3 was to video games. But, unlike E3, I always [...]