At last, October! Whilst I understand that this is the month of Oktober Fest (mainly beer drinking) to the vast majority of people who think of October and Germany, for the gaming community it is Essen Spiel month!

We already have a whole lot of info on Essen for people interested in attending via the top left menu link, however we also wanted to let you know about some of the people we are hoping to meet up with when we get there.

We have decided to update our site to give us a better platform to promote social gaming to new gamers and also to allow us to provide updates, reviews and news between the quarterly magazine releases.

You will see that the new site includes a few changes, like:

Do you have any suggestions or thoughts to share for new people attending essen?  Let us know!  Just add your comment below.

If you arrive before the doors open you will find a lot of people milling about outside.  Don't be surprised to see people dressed up like superheroes, elves or storm troopers... if you see this, you are definitely in the right place!

Essen Spiel takes place across about 9 large halls, most filled with retailers selling new board games and card games, but with a good representation for RPGs, miniatures and LARPS.

The event also hosts a comic convention at the same time.

As the event is mainly a retail event - compared to other CONs which are more aligned to game playing - many players end up sitting on any spare floor area and getting out their newly aquired games to play.  This slowly squeezes the walk ways tighter and tighter.

Parking

Parking can be very painful and time consuming...  Arrive early and you're likely to get parking within a 5 minute walk from the halls, arrive after the halls have opened and you should be prepared to walk 15 - 25 minutes from the car park.

Although it is not obvious, you will be asked to pay for parking when you leave.  From memory this was about  €10 (roughly US$15/ GB£ 9) for the day as you exit.

Essen - more correctly "Internationale Spieltage SPIEL" - is an annual board gaming event that takes place in Germany, in the city of Essen.  To many board gamers this is their 'Mecca Event'.

Over 120,000 visitors descend on this event to see the newest board games, card games and other social gaming interests, such as RPGs.  The fair takes 4 days, from Thursday  21st October through to Sunday, the 24th October.