OPENING

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Eschensfield 2026 is still not over. This is part two of the episode, so strap yourself in. There's more games to be covered.

PHASE A: PULL UP A CHAIR

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Welcome everybody to the Just Play podcast. This is JP, and uh this is part two of the Essence Spiel uh basically episode where I'm going to be covering more and more games and more and more things.

PHASE B: SPIEL 2026 PART ONE

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So, and the first episode, if you've not captured it, uh or the part one, um, I've covered the uh pretty much the journey and and the the press and the first full day of Essen Spiel. So if you've not seen that, go and watch that first and then jump back into this. I'll put a card in somewhere here so you can kind of do

FRIDAY - DAY 2

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that. Um, and effectively I'm gonna start the the episode on the Friday. So this is the Friday of the of the uh convention and and basically carry on. So just as I mentioned in the first part, um I've been providing motivational music for the team. Um I say team for for our group, and uh yeah, and this one today was Everybody Have Fun by Wang Chung. Um so that again is this a funny song. It's just a funny song, and the best line or lyric in it is does anyone know what a Wang Chung is? And I don't know, it tickles me. It's just one of those weird songs. So that was the uh the motivational music for the

Electrify

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day. Um, I got in early again and I managed to sit down and secure a demo along with Rob and Curly uh at the AEG booth for Electrify. And Electrify is a game that's not out yet. So yeah, so Electrify is designed by two designers, uh Ian Hutchison and uh John D Clare. So John D. Clare also designs many of uh games that I really enjoy, like Cabitos, um uh Unstoppable, and uh any anything with cardcrafting in, pretty much. Yeah, so um I've always wanted to try this. I've been seeing this on the crowdfunding recently, and I thought, yeah, let's give this a go. So, what is Electrify? Electrify is a game where you're generating electricity from coal all the way up to renewables, where coal is the worst and renewables is the best, and you're trying to develop research and develop your your your kind of business, I suppose, uh that has various different departments, and and it's kind of this engine building, card laying um game where you're trying to fulfill contracts and get victory points. Now, the first thing to say the victory point tracker is 12 points long, it's also the round counter, so you don't get lots and lots of points in this game, and I quite like that in games. I like the fact that getting a VP feels earned. Um, June Imperium did it well, so every VP felt like a slog to get, but wow, man, you you felt like you earned it. Um so he kind of has that feeling there. Um, but effectively, what you got in your player board is a board where cubes would sit to represent the energy and what types of energy there are. And then below the board, you've got a bunch of columns um from different departments that you you have. And the top of the columns has their actions, and at the bottom of the column has their improved actions, should you improve uh an area, and then in the middle of the columns, you've got this kind of set of rectangles, which is effectively slots for your cards to go. Um, and what you're gonna do on your turn is that you've got a dial that you use, and you both or all of you are simultaneously selecting a department, which is one of your columns below to do. Once you've do it, you reveal. Now, if you share the same department with another player, you both get a research point, and it's a little research marker, it goes from zero to six. Um, so you move up there, and uh, and if you don't, you get to slide up the the column one slot to the right, and you're effectively creating a gap between you, which is what it does, it makes it slightly more powerful. So you have that kind of game of what are they gonna choose? I want to do that because I just want to make this more powerful. Once you've done that, it's pretty much you're on your own doing your kind of multiplayer solitaire thing because you don't really interact with each other uh at that stage. So you run your your columns and you have more cubes that you can highlight what you're gonna activate. Um, and the reason why they're there is because some of the cards in the column will have an arrow pointing left, so then that would activate the card directly to the left of it, and sometimes it's a diagonal arrow going that way or that way, which is a diagonal up or down, and again, it causes this chain reaction of activation. So, what you do is you put cubes in all of them to know that you can activate them all, and you can do them in any order. I love that because obviously it's important that you go this way or that way, um, and you're popping the cubes off, doing the thing, getting the thing, more energy, doing this, moving up, whatever. So sometimes you're getting energy directly above um where the column is, and obviously the furthest right it is, the more powerful that energy is. And once you um you can also spend energy to put cards into the column. Um, so you're spending cubes off the board, and to the left they're worth one, to the right, they're worth seven, or maybe even more. Um, so you're kind of buying these these brilliant cards that are, you know, are gonna kind of kick off and do some cool stuff. So, yeah, you're you're activating this kind of engine, you're doing lots of things, um, and to the point where you are hopefully going to fulfill a contract, and you don't block people out of fulfilling contracts, you just can only do them once, and and then generating points, you're improving your departments, and you go again, and you go again, and you go again. Um, we had a demo, it was a four-round long demo. It was a pretty good demo because it basically propelled us into the middle part of the game rather than starting from scratch trying to build the engine, so you can get a feel of of how the game kind of progresses. So I enjoyed this. I I think if that was there at the booth, I probably would have picked a copy up because it's my kind of game. Um, I think people are looking for a lot of direct player interaction is not going to enjoy this because there isn't really any other than the department selecting. Um, but it's just a nice little game um to to play, and I could see, yeah, I could see this being in in the collection. Um, if if I pick it up, it's not something I'm gonna probably rush and crowdfund to get, but if it's around, I I'll probably definitely pick it up. Um

Mindclash Games & Against The Storm

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spoke to my friends next at the Mind Clash booth, and as always, that's always great to go to the booth because uh I know um that in the back of the booth there's lots of snacks, and when you've been on your feet for half a day, you just need some crisps or some coffee or some chocolate. So um had my meeting with Soma and we had a really good chat um and managed to get the Anachrony um promo promo tokens, more anachrony stuff, um, and expansion for Ironwood uh Steelers Spirit. So that's cool. I'm looking forward to to diving back into that game as well. Um, they were announcing at the uh the uh convention that the courtroom is going to get another three scenarios, so obviously courtroom was a big release for them this year. And again, those that don't know courtroom, it's this um game where it's set in this noir uh world of 1920s or 30s, and there's three cases in there, and you you're basically split into two teams of prosecution and defence, and you're literally arguing the cases and playing the game. Um, I've got a copy, I had one before Essen. I'm looking forward to trying that out soon. Um, I think it might be a game I play with uh Rob and our respective wives because I think it might be quite fun to do that in the evening, and they like doing like murder mysteries and things like that, so I think that might be a good adjacent um group to do. But yeah, three more scenarios coming. Um also talking about next year, and obviously they've announced Against the Storm, it's a game we're very excited for because I'm looking forward to the next heavy Mind Clash uh game. I feel like I'm ready for a new one in a different IP. Um, and also talked about some of the secret stuff that I can't reveal, which it is what it is. Uh so yeah,

Prague Unseen

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so Mind Clash was always fun, and and then we swung by uh Albi um to pick up my uh copy of Pragan Scene and just catch up with Peter and then actually had a beer. This is the the cup I had a beer in. It's got a little weird clip on it, look. Um, but I'm using it for water today because I'm literally off a beer and it's too early, so I'm not doing that. So, yeah, so smoke with that, but I'll cover a bit of Pragon scene. I didn't play Pragon Scene uh during the convention, but I already played it beforehand because I went on to gaming rules um and and played it with Paul Grogan. Um, but for those that don't know what Pragon Scene, let me cover it a little bit. Uh so Pragon Scene is a game set in the wonderful world of Prague, but it's like this fantasy version um where you've got these four different factions. You've got the Horned that look like kind of demon-y, um, you've got robots, you've got the golems, and you've got the vodniks. The vodniks are like these upper class top hat people. And effectively it's a worker placement game, and you've got all the different types of workers, one of each four types that I've just mentioned, and on the board, you've got four squares that represent the districts of each of those uh those areas. Each of the districts has like a mini game in it, so one will be a cauldron, which is the horned, which allows you to basically get specimens or items put on your little shelf. Um, that kind of is a bit of a set collection uh mechanic. Um, the other one is like uh the robots area where you're trying to uh do inventions and you're kind of spinning things around like a rondel to get uh stuff, and it has like a Concordia style effect of getting items or resources, or you can get rumors and flip all the tokens back. Um, so you can do that. You've got another area where there's a golem, a big like massive golem that you can move around and collect guilds and and resources as well, which guilds help you build bridges in the game, and then you've got the Vodniks area, which allows you to um effectively go around this this this water mill um collecting resources and also move and propel your ship across the river. Um and and uh basically trying to it's like a race to get to the VPs. Um it's a very interconnected game, and the game starts off quite restrictive in that you put a worker down and uh effectively you do the thing, but also one of your actions to move a worker to a building. Now, the game starts with four buildings, one in each district, but you can build more on your actions in the game, which then kind of improves the worker placement spots, or yeah, effective worker placement spots in the game, it gives you more options to do things because you can always move a worker into its district's building to get more stuff. And once you do that, you free up the space for yourself to put someone else there, should you wish. Um, but the bridges that you build help to move those workers to adjacent districts to use those buildings. So, again, suddenly as the game progresses, bridges are built, it expands the options and the board as the three rounds uh progress, and it's just a clean game, it's just a really, really clean game. I love the look of this. I really enjoyed my playthrough, and I'm really happy to have a copy. So thank you, Albi, for for for that one. Um, and yeah, it's it's just a a cracking game to play. I just find it fun, it's just cool. Um, so many of our friends picked up a copy, and many of them uh been playing that in the hotels as well, which I taught uh Becky and Curly kind of how to play it.

Meeple University

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Also bumped into Stella from Meeples University uh straight after that. And again, lovely to see Stella again. Uh, I first met her properly at the UK Games Expo this year, and uh yeah, it's just just uh she's a sweetheart. Uh so again, it's really, really nice to kind of catch up with fellow content creators, especially big ones like Meeple University. So, yeah, that was awesome. Um,

Mechs vs Minions

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one of the big demos we sat down, uh, we're kind of ready to sit down at this point, was uh Mechs versus Minions at Incredible Dream Studios. Now, Mex vs Minions is a game set in the League of Legends uh universe, and um it's been out of print for God knows how long. I think it's a 10-year-old game, it's been out for absolutely ages. Um, but Mex versus Minions is uh effectively a game where you are in a mech and you've got these minions that are kind of like it's like horde mode that they're coming wave after wave after wave, trying to like ruin your plans. Um, which sounds easy if you could just stomp them out and kill them, but you have to program your actions in your mech to do what you want to do, so it's not quite as easy as as you think. So, effectively, what you do on the turn is you have these bunch of command cards, you draft them, and you go, Oh, I need that one because that helps me move or spin 90 degrees to the right, or that one allows me to do this flamethrower attack, or that does chain lightning, or that does something else. So, between you are trying to figure out cooperatively what works for everyone, and you put this in uh slots one to six on your player board. Now, the smart people won't put anything in play uh slot one because then you can't put anything to the left of it. Um so you're kind of probably putting it somewhere, maybe two, and then you run your your command. So you might be at the start of the games, I move one space or I turn around, and you don't do a lot, and then the horde advances, and you're like, okay, my next card. I'm gonna put that after two, put it into three. So I now rotate again or move, and then I do the thing, which probably doesn't do anything. So again, you're configuring this chain of actions to try and get your mech into the right place to unleash Carnage, and we had a blast, like we got sat down to the demo and we didn't get um anyone teaching us. So Rob did uh you know pulled double duty here, and he he actually taught us this the scenario out of the book. So we played that, got kind of grips of the game, and then we played the the actual demo scenario, which I think was mission four. And uh by that point, someone had kind of turned up and helped us with the odd question here or there, and then we played, and then we me, Ian, and Rob were just having an absolute blast. Like we were just having so much fun. I think we were there an hour and a half, which is mad for a demo, and we practically had finished mission four. Um, and then another group came and we thought, no, we need to let those have uh an experience and try this. So we let them um kind of uh we finished around and let them play. Um, but off the back of that demo, Rob and Ian have pre-ordered copies. They wanted to get some at the show, but um, unfortunately, they were sold out, they were literally just like flying off the shelves, um, which I don't I'm not surprised. It's uh it's a well-known game, and the fact that they were demo demoing it there is is what it is. Um, so yeah, so that was really good. Mexico vs. Minions, what a game. I I I will play that happily any day. Um it was just such fun, you know, to do, especially by the end. Um, and what was funny is that when you ever get hit, you'll you'll you pull a damage card, and that damage might you know reverse all your commands around, and that just uh that happened to me, and it was just utter carnage. And everyone was just laughing, going, Oh no, I'm just literally running away. Um, so yeah, so recommend it, recommend that game if you can get

Cardboard Alchemy Meal

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uh hold of it. Um, and then we get to the evening, and um Mark and I were invited to Cardboard Alchemy's meal. Um, so Rosie um and Peter, uh Peter Fawn yeah, invited us out uh along with other content creators. So yeah, I have to read from a list because there's quite a few. So we had Will and Sarah from Tantrum House, Amy and Maggie from Thinkerfema, Stella from Meeples University, Julian and Libby from Box Meeples, and uh yeah, and we had basically went to a Vietnamese restaurant and we just caught caught them up and had some food and we had some really good chats. I really enjoyed that meal. I I felt very very privileged to be there. Um, and yeah, it was just really nice just to chill, have a few beers, and just like shoot the shit, to be honest. Um, yeah, so we had some really good chats around different things. I was sat next to Will, so I was asking him all sorts about um, you know, his channel and and what you know he was up to, and and vice versa. He seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing and what I was up to, and you know, talking about you know the early mistakes that everyone makes um in content creation. It's just again like-minded people going through what you've gone through and um yeah, had a blast and and loved that meal. It was fantastic. So thank you so much, Rosie. Thank you, Peter, for for inviting me. I absolutely loved it and I'd love to do it again. So that was the end

SATURDAY - DAY 3

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of Friday. Then we get to Saturday. So Saturday, Saturday's motivational music was Take Me Home Tonight by Eddie Money. Um, another classic song, another great song. Those that might have noticed with these songs that if you look at my reels on Instagram or Facebook, those are the music that I've been putting to my videos for every day. And that's the kind of in-joke that um, yeah, the people that have been with us will will know. But yeah, this is the literally day-by-day music for for all of the vids. So I got to Saturday and and I've been nursing a cold. I'll not mention this on part one, but I'd actually come to Essen with a with a cold, so I kind of felt like I had concrud coming in, which was not great. Um, and I kind of got to Saturday and it was just all getting a bit on top of me. And I said to the team, I said, look, I need to have a bit of a lay-in here. I need to just have a bit of a rest. Um, so that's pretty much what I did. I had a lay-in. Saturday's typically the busiest day, and I normally pick Saturday as my demo day when I do it because I'd rather just demo and not have to worry about the huge crowds and things like that. Um, so yeah, so we did that, had a lay-in, chilled out, and then we went in a bit later and had a good mooch around the the halls um for a bit, and then caught up with Julian from Box Meeples. And I have to say, like, Julian, um, I'd not um kind of met Julian or Libby from Box Meeples before. I've obviously heard of the the channel. Um, and Julian unfortunately had uh some crap news um when he he basically started on on the Wednesday because he had his stuff stolen um from uh yeah from the press event area. And he has I think it was his bag, it had his money, it had his um his equipment in. So we think he lost a lot of recordings that he was doing. Luckily, he didn't lose his passport. Um and I think he kind of tracked this the stuff that he went to Dusseldorf. So it was someone that was wasn't kind of uh press or or someone that wasn't um you know publisher, etc. It was just somebody who maybe worked there or maybe um pretended to work there. But it sucked, man. I felt for the guy, um, because you know you come to a convention like this to have fun and then yeah, like shit like that happens. And yeah, so I really felt for him. Um and we don't like hearing those stories because we want people to have fun and not deal with that.

Small Batch

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But other than that, he was in good spirits, in fairness, he's in good spirits. So we had a big, or they had a big board because he was at Paverson Games, and they had a big board to kind of promote their class of uh 89 uh game, which I haven't played or didn't get to play, but he took a Polaroid off me, stuck myself on the board, and then put a little bodation sticker on because why not? Um so that was quite fun. Um, and then he said, Oh, have you uh uh you demoing anything? I said, No, no, I would like to. And he said, Well, why don't you try um small batch? Um, which he was literally gonna demo in like 10 minutes. And I said, Oh, have you got anyone signed up? He said, No, so we're right, done. So we did that. Mark Dainty walked past literally again, and so we collared him and said, You fancy a demo, and he said, Yes, please. So he sat down and then we decided to play small batch. So small batch is a distilled game, um, it's like baby distilled. And like, spoiler alert, I prefer this to distilled. I think this replaces distilled for me. Um, not that I don't like distilled, I enjoyed my game of distilled, but it's I always thought it was it was okay, like it was it was good, okay. Wasn't like it didn't blow me away, it wasn't brilliant. And playing this just felt like a uh a more direct version and a cleaner, uh quicker version of the game, and I just think I prefer it to be honest. So, how does it work? Well, it's got a lot of uh the mechanics of distilled in there, because again, it's a distilled game, but you have a river of cards in the middle, I think heart and over, um, but it's uh communal to all players, and these are your actions. So you'll pick an action, you'll do the top part, everyone else does the bottom. I love this. I love the fact that I do something and everyone else does something because whoever does an action, you're doing something. Every turn, things are happening, so there's no downtime really. Um, and then when you've you've fulfilled that, the card goes to the bottom and pushes everything else up. One of the cards is an aged card, which you don't use as an action, but when it gets to the top of the uh the board or the right hand slot, it will trigger the aging process, which will age all your aged um alcoholic drinks, um, puts all the flavours in, just like the normal base game. But the actions in the game is that you can improve by putting um improvements and equipment into your distillery, which are just cards, which are people, you know, greenhouses, whatever. Um, you can get bottles and uh casks and and you know, barrels and all those kind of things to put in your drinks. Um, other ones you can get more ingredients, you can learn more recipes, which you'll spend cards. Now, cards are your currency in the game. So you're spending cards to get more cards to get the best configuration that you want, and you can then have one over. Each type of alcoholic drink. And then you can distill, which is the distill action in distilled effectively. You shuffle that deck, uh, all the cards you want to put in. You shuffle, you take the one off the top, one off the bottom, back to your hand, and then you've got what you've got. Hopefully, you've not made mood shine, and you can do something with it, and you put that into your your drinks area and ready to sell at some point. It's pretty simple, it's a pretty straightforward game. Um, and Rob really enjoyed it, and he's now torn because he's not played Distilled and he really likes Small Batch. Distilled is available, small batch isn't because it's coming out next year. I think it's coming out for UK Games Expo release. So there's probably uh the window for it. And yeah, it it was just fun. I think it personally for me replaces Distilled, it's just um a quicker direct version, little downtime, and it plays, you know, within an hour, an hour and a half. Um, so that's

Ascend the Shinra Tower

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that's it. So yeah, so we walked away from that, and then we had the meet and play event. So the meet and play event is an event they held hold every Saturday, and this time because Essen has actually eight halls, it didn't it normally has seven, but it actually grew to have hall eight as well. Um the meet and play area was off hall eight. Normally it's off hall three at the back, um, but it's uh yeah, off hall eight. And and we went up there, and the meet and plays effectively well, the content creators can go and for general public to go and meet the content creators and the the you know the their fans of their work and things like that. So I walked in, saw a table. Mike Dennis from Ready Study Play was there, had some other other guys there from I think his team and and just generally friends. Um, and I sat down and played uh Ascend the Shinra Tower, um, which is a game that is based in Final Fantasy VII. Um it's very kind of loosey-goosey because really it's uh like Rhino Hero, um where you're just stacking uh bits of flimsy cardboard and a tower to try and send cloud to the top to defeat the boss. Simple. Um, but actually it was quite a nice game to play um without thinking too much, a bit of a dexterity game. And yeah, on your turn, you get two cards and you pick one and then you do it. And it could be I build the tower. So you build two sides of this kind of flimsy um yeah, hexagon, I would say, as you bend it round, and then you put a uh a floor on it. Sometimes those floors are holes, sometimes they have a literal hole in the middle, and if there's no enemies, cloud moves up one, you've got to pick him up and put him on the side. Other times you're picking cars that put enemies on there, so you have to use like uh attacks to get rid of them, or you can bring some of uh cloud's friends like Barrett and Tifa and you know Jesse Biggs and Wedge into the mix to do stuff. Um, and yeah, you can just imagine you're trying to put you know uh cloud onto there, and you just you you just got the shaky, shaky hands because you're trying to be still, and it's just one of those games. Would I buy it? No, I wouldn't buy it, it's not for me. Um, but it's it's just kind of one of those fun games to play. Um, a few people came over at the event um to speak to me, which was brilliant. Like I didn't expect it, like I don't expect to to to to have that, you know. I'm I'm a small channel, um, and I know I've been podcasting for four years, but I don't expect that. And so people came over and we had some you know good chats, and I managed to hand out some badges, and then I had a a really long chat with a German lady. Um, and yeah, we were just chatting and chatting and chatting, and before I knew it, it was like five o'clock. And I was like, Oh wow, I I do need to go because I think I planned to go like around half four, and I think by this point everyone else has kind of uh pretty much gone.

Container

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Um so I I managed to leave and um yeah, pop back to the hotel and grab some food, and then thought I need to sit down and play some games tonight. So it was a double feature on Saturday. First up was container. Um, container, um, which I think AllPlay was uh doing distribution for, is the new kind of uh small box version. It's about 35 euros, it was. I think it's a bloody bargain, to be honest. Um, so we play container, we learned here we did the short game. So container is a closed economy game where you manage a uh basically a shipping company, um, and you have a ship. There's a beautiful ship uh piece that can hold five containers on it, and everyone's got their board which has their factories section and their their docks section, and in the middle you've got container island and you've got the the auction uh area, and everywhere else is C. So you can do many things on your actions. Um you start with a bunch of money in your hand, some of it which is zero, which you think that's weird, but that's for for the auctions and bidding, and denominations up to ones, twos, fives, tens, etc. And everyone starts with the same. And because it's a closed economy again, this money's gonna flow around the the players into different people's hands, um, and many, many times not in yours, and it's gonna be tight. But you can produce um containers based on your factories that you have, and the more factories you have, the more containers you can store in your uh factory area. But the colour containers depends on the factory colour that you have. Um, so you can do that and you pop that into your factories, and that means other people can then buy um those containers from your factories to put into their docks, and so they buy them, and that's how you get some money, and then suddenly those containers are in the players' docks. So now you can send a ship to pick up or buy those containers to put into the ship. Um, and then you can move that ship to a variety of places, but mainly you're gonna put it to container island. So once you get it to container island, you then treat it as like an auction lot, whereas every other player will then bid to what they think that's worth to try and buy. Um, and let's say someone put in four, someone else putting five, and someone else putting six, and it's all revealed. The six would obviously win. Now, here's the rub. I love this is that you can buy um like match the the number that the highest person put to then keep those containers and putting them to your section, which will give you score, um, or you can get double bubble, so you get 12 money back and let them have it. So you sometimes you're wanting containers um that you don't want to send to the island, so you can get money, and sometimes you want them because you want them, and on your secret card, you've got a list of all the colours. So, for example, green at the top might be worth 10 bucks to you for each container, the reds might be worth you know six, and so on and so on and so forth. And that's pretty cool. But the rub is at the end of the game, once you get to container island, the one you have the most of goes away. So you're like, so you kind of want to have the second most of the top card, uh, sorry, top container colour in your card. And it's just quite crazy, but it's it's a fun game. It's just a fun little economy game of moving containers around, selling them, trying to keep um, yeah, basically keep keep things going. And the other board is the auction board where you can kind of trigger auctions for containers or trigger it for money, and this thing will seed and get better and better as as you go. You can take loans, which you have to repay, all that kind of stuff. But no, I really enjoyed container, it is a good, is a good game. Um, and for the price point and what you get in that box, yes, please, it's it's pretty cool. I won't buy it now because uh a friend of mine's got it, but I think having played it, if they hadn't have it, had it, I probably would have picked it up.

Timespan

SPEAKER_00 29:39

And then we get to the game I really wanted to play. So I said on Saturday, I want to play Time Span. So I picked this pre-order up um earlier. And Time Span um is a civilization themed game. I'm gonna call it a Civ themed game because it's not really a Civ game. Um about you playing cards into your timeline and effectively triggering lots and lots of cool stuff um to advance through history to get to the end of time to pretty much now or to the future and get the most VPs. Um doesn't sound interesting. Well, it is, I promise you, is it's a very, very clever game. I I've thoroughly enjoyed this. This is one of my I won't say surprises, because I pre-ordered it, so I must have thought it would be good, but it I think it surpassed my um expectations of what this game was. My only problem with the game, and then those who watch the vlog will know this, is the production quality of the player boards. I say board lightly, the thin cardstock that looks like a banana shape uh very quickly. I don't I think that could be a lot better, guys. Like I think just some thicker cardstock would have solved that problem. It didn't need to be dual-layered, it didn't need to be anything special. Don't get me wrong, it would be awesome if you had all of that. And I think we've just been spoiled, haven't we? I think we've just been spoiled having all of that um kind of deluxeness um in in our game. So, yeah, to not have it was like, oh, this is a bit naff. Um, but look past that because the game is is excellent. Um, the game is fun. So, what happens in the game? Well, effectively, on the board, you've got a bunch of tracks. You've got the culture track, which allows you to get more workers, you've got the science track that allows you to unlock your technology. Um, you've got tracks for shipping, like air and space at the top, which will be for ages one, two, and three. Um, and then you've got the round tracker, which you kind of follow around. But you'll pick your civilization. Um, I think I was the Chinese, and then you pick your technology board that sits above it. So you have this combo of um or pairing of I've got a variety on different technologies and the civilizations because they're all kind of slightly asymmetric in how they work and what they do. Um, and yeah, once you've got that set up, you away you go. So effectively, what you do is on your uh round tracker, the first thing you'll do is a discovery phase where you're gonna draw two history cards, one's face down, one's face up, and you're gonna have a discovery tile that's sat on there, and you're gonna have one more per player. So in this case, we played a three player, so we had four. And then we pick one of them, and you're like, yes, so you resolve the discovery tile straight away, unless it's got a little clock on it. Um, and then you'll get stuff, and then you get more history cards in your hand. Now you'll start with your playable where you've got three cards already on your timeline, which is like the will, the shaman, and fire, I think it is. And the idea of the game is once you've kind of gone through the discovery phase, you then go into the actions phase, and the first thing you do is you have a camel people and you send the camel to either a neutral wonder, which you pay a coin for, or the marketplace, which you get luxury goods for um from, and maybe some stuff. And that's like uh an advanced worker placement spot for your camel. Um, and you can also send them to your own wonders once you've built them, but you can uh sorry, no, you can't send them to your own wonders once you build them because it's like a trade mechanic, but you can send workers there. Um, so you kind of want wonders that people will come to you because you're gonna get victory points, you're gonna give them victory points for doing it, but equally you don't want to help your opponents too much, do you? Um so that's not what you want to do. So you get these hands uh cards, and then on your the kind of worker activation, this is where the simultaneous play comes in. And I like the simultaneous play in this game because if it wasn't there, I think it would drag on. Um, the downside is if the players don't know what they're doing, you don't really know if they're playing it right. So I would always teach this game with the first one, first uh worker phase is turn order, just so everyone understands how it works, and then let them have it and and trust that they can do it. Um so effectively on the right hand side you've got a bunch of resources, which is all trapped by eight cubes. Um, so you've got kind of cubes sit at the bottom, that means there's nothing. You've got coins, it's like a big row, you've got your free starting resources, and then you've kind of got ones that sit above it and above that, etc. The idea is that if you're ever upgrading resources, you're just sliding the cube upwards and you're spending everything from there. I quite like the simplicity of that. It keeps saving lots of tokens being moved around and all that kind of stuff. Um, but yeah, so you're playing a card, and what you do, you play it into your timeline. So you put the card in, you slide everything to the right, and then suddenly the card is in place. But what it means is that you actually your board is a worker placement area, and you've got workers that look like these little happy and sad faces that you can put onto your action boxes and do the thing. Um, you've also got static boxes that are there and they never move, so you always have access to those things which your sieve provides. Um, but the cards is what's variable because time ebbs away. You can also deliver luxury goods onto those cards, which could be fur or it could be silk, and the card tells you what it can hold. And the idea is if you load a luxury good onto it and you go to the place with a worker, you're actually getting more out of uh bang for book. So again, you're improving the uh the card action, which is cool. What's going to happen? The more cards you put in, the ones on the other end of the conveyor belt will go into a graveyard, so they'll kind of slip off, turn and turn upside down, go into the graveyard. Any workers will go to sleep. Um, and then this is where the cool thing happens. So a lot of the cards will have on-death effects. So when it comes off, it then triggers a thing. Uh, some have when it's moved, you get a thing. Um, and also if it's got luxury good on it, you take that off, you flip it upside down, and now you've got income, which we like. Income's great. So you're kind of doing all this thing, you're trying to squeeze as much efficiency out of that action phase as possible. So you run out, you're done, I'm out, move on. And then you go into like your piece and income phase. So the piece is effectively you're you're highlighting all of the doves that have been played on your cards or or sieve boards or or tech. Um, and then you add them all up, you score those points, and the piece is effectively what denotes turn order. And if there's a tie, your civilization has a number and that breaks the tie. And then you rinse and repeat, and you rinse and repeat, and to the point where you advance the ages, and eventually you get from age one to two, two to three, and then the game will end. Sometimes you can get cards from the future, and that's why there's an age four deck in there, so you can pull these fantastic futuristic cards, and and then away you go. But yeah, you're you're kind of putting people into your timeline, things into your timeline, and um yeah, it's it's just really cool. It's it's quite unique in how it works. I I really like it, and I love the fact that it's SIV themed, it it sings to me. And we all walked away from that game going, that was that was pretty fun. That was that was excellent, and I can't wait to play it again, to be honest. Um, I lost that game, but I still had a great time, and it shows to me it's a marker of a great game. So there you go. So that's that. Um, so that's time span, and then

SUNDAY - DAY 4

SPEAKER_00 36:56

we get to Sunday, the last day, and here we go, the last day of of Essence Spiel. And the the music was actually chosen by Rob today. I was thinking I need something a bit lighter, not too heavy upbeat, because it's Sunday. So the motivational music was Magic Dance by David, uh, two pairs of socks, Bowie, um, who plays Jared the Goblin King in the film Labyrinth. So, yeah, that was kind of the perfect nonsense that

Diablo: Unbound

SPEAKER_00 37:23

we needed. So, exciting day, Sunday. Lots of things happened. Um, first up was Diablo. Oh, Diablo Unbound. Um, so Glass Cannon Unplugged had announced Diablo on Wednesday evening that that was their next game, and their booth was Diablo, like Diablo was spewed up all over it. Um, and effectively that's all they were doing, just demoing Diablo, nothing else, and and effective just promoting that game. So we had a media demo on Sunday, uh first thing at 10. So myself, Mark, and and two other people that we didn't know uh joined us for a game. So now Diablo, what is Diablo generally? Diablo is based off a video game IP where you you basically go around uh the depths of dungeons, and these the spawns of hell are just gonna come at you constantly as you kill them. Relentless minions and minions and minions getting better, getting XP, getting loot, and effectively going back to town, rinse and repeat, and off you go. So it's kind of one of those grindy games where you you just get better and better things, you unlock your your character class, and you can just be basically uh a bit of a bit of a uh killing machine. So this is the board game adaptation. So the first thing is the board game is effectively taking Diablo 1, 2, 3, 4, DNA, um, and all the things from it, and then putting it into this game called Unbound, which kind of takes references from from all the Diablo series, and it's a kind of miniatures smash-em-up game, is the best way to explain it. So we were playing a scenario where I think we were up against the butcher. The butcher was like the main big bad for this particular thing, and you play the game over three acts, and you have different boards um for the act. So I think we played one was like in the chapel, and it had a meat hook in the in the centre that bad crap will happen if you stand near it. Um, and then the start of the game, we're all kind of like back to back in the middle of the board, and loads of minions are all around, which were melee in range, and then you had some elites that kind of sat in the corners, and our objectives was to rescue the fair maidens that were tied up on poles. Um, and so effectively we have four character classes: you had Rogue, Sorceress, uh the Barbarian, and the Paladin. I played the Paladin, and what was great to see is that all of the characters were asymmetric, they they weren't the same. Um, and uh my character um basically had this oath ability where if I played a card and played another of the same suit, I can then trigger the oath ability. So again, charging up and becoming more powerful. And I had some defensive um figures of defiance dome or something, which would help protect other players that were kind of near me if they were getting absolutely twatted by monsters. So yeah, well, how's the game work? Well, on your turn, you can move, you can um effectively play your cards to do like moves, attacks, and knockdowns and pushes, and and this, that, and the other. Um, just what you'd expect from a Diablo game. And you're gonna roll dice. If you crit, you it has an exploding dice system. So if you crit, you roll another one, and if it crits, you roll another one. I love I love exploding dice uh systems. I'm just thinking they're fun. You end up kind of rolling lots and lots, doing absolute mega damage. Um, and you genuinely have to work together because the minions are gonna keep spawning at you. And whilst the minions only have one health and you can kill them pretty easily, the big ones, uh the elites, have like 12 or 14. Um, and and yeah, we we we didn't have that many turns because it was kind of one of those demos where you go around with learning the game. Um, but what was quite fun is if you're getting absolutely pummeled, um, and also if you're getting loot, because you don't look at the loot straight away, you've kind of got the loot face down, you have a town portal token, and you can portal back to town to kind of do your healing and and and sorting out your loot, because then you can look at it and go, Oh, I've got a better helmet, I've got a better this, da da da. So you forego your turn to improve yourself, effectively get your health potions, and then jump back in to basically kick some ass even more uh to help. So that that's quite cool. You do that during the battle, but you've got to time that because you're leaving your teammates um effectively on their own if they're the if they're still there. Um but yeah, it it's it's a demo. I'd like to see more, I'd like to play more. It was fun, and I think you know, those who have played Diablo are likely to like this. It's it's a good, fun, clean game, but it is in development, and it's a lot to do it. And I think next year is gonna be the Krausman and campaign for it, and they said you're gonna get um three bosses, and you're gonna get three kind of um free lots of free acts um for different kind of terrain and and and whatnot. Um, and also you've got free minion uh families that you can throw in, like skeletons and and and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, um no doubt there'll be expansions, all that kind of things will kind of happen. But yeah, this is kind of how it works. It's it's just a little skirmish uh battle game that you kill lots of things and you feel good because you're literally you know kicking ass. Um, but there's there's relentless hordes of minions that come at you. But that's Diablo, right? Um, so we played

Trash Poker

SPEAKER_00 42:34

that and and then I decided to basically go and play uh trash poker um on the way out because I wanted to do half a day on Sunday. And so trash poker, we sat down and played, and I I'm interested in trash poker mainly because I've been into my uh gambling adjacent games, and I didn't know whether this would kind of feature in my upcoming episode um around that. And so I had a demo, um, we had we had a quick teach, but the guy had to leave, unfortunately. Um, so we played like four rounds, and we probably wasn't playing it absolutely correctly. Um, but really it's just a poker game where you're drawing a big kind of hand from your deck, you're you're playing um your your hand as best as you can, and the cards that you don't play can be stolen by the other players, so to help basically fill their hands better. Um, but you can also the cards you steal, you can put into your trash area, and if it's a certain number, you can start activating for end game points, and you can start improving your own hands so you can score more and get more when you do play. So you can kind of double down into a I'm going into a pair strategy or a flush strategy or this strategy. So I can see elements of that, and it's definitely inspired by Bellatro because you've got these foiled jokers and foil cards that you you unlock as you play the game. Um, and I'll be honest, I I I wasn't in love with the game compared to Deco, which I think is Better compared to some others that I've played, that I just think that they're just better at the moment. However, it's a demo and I might have been playing it wrong. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to check out the um the rule book and have a proper read through and and just see what that game actually is. And it might be a lot more layered and more in depth than I probably have given it credit for. So yeah, take that caveat. But it was it was pretty popular, and it's quite thankful because they've just given us drinks. So if you're demoing, they give you a drink, and that's always appreciated. So thank you

Kingdom Come Deliverance

SPEAKER_00 44:34

for that. And then we end up um uh getting back to the hotel, and I had planned to play Kingdom Come Deliverance, which I know everyone's gonna be wanting or waiting for me to talk about Kingdom Come Deliverance. Like you picked the game up on Wednesday, mate, like when when you're playing it. Um and the reason why I wanted to pop it is because I did want to try it whilst I was out there. So, Kingdom Come Deliverance. What is this game? Kingdom Come Deliverance is based off a video game IP uh designed by Vlada uh Schwattel and Tomas Hollock, as I mentioned earlier on part one, and effectively it's a medieval simulator um where you go around, you do quests, and you try not to die. Um, and basically you start off as a peasant with a knife and which you're trying to better yourself uh throughout the game and do more and more things. Um now the board game adaptation is uh there's a lot of similarities to to Mage Knight, I guess, compared to Mage Knight, but to me it's it doesn't feel like Mage Knight. I don't get on with Mage Knight that well, um, mainly because it doesn't immerse me in the world. I'm not a massive fantasy um like themed person. Like I'm a bit done with fantasy tropes, but I like this. Medieval is different, so it's like, yes, you can be in uh like medieval times and and try to improve yourself. So I quite like the theme of this. Um but effectively you start off um you pick your character and you get a character card, and it can be male or female, and and you've got your tile that flips like that, and it has a little notch in which will reveal the name. So you pick your character, and I think I was the burglar's child, um, and I think someone was like the bastard son of something, or the miller's son. It was quite funny. So you pick that and you get your starting resources, you've got a knife in hand, and it tells you where to start, and the game goes, off you go. What do you want to do? And you kind of in this open world, and we played the the introductory scenario, which is called the cumin menace, and the game doesn't really give you any scenarios to do fully until um day three, and it's a four-day uh experience rather than the five-day experience. And effectively we just wanted to play the tutorial because I've not played this before, and and away we go. So, my starting quest was I had to fashion my own bow, which meant I needed to go and chat to um one of the uh the merchants in town, which luckily I was already in there, and then I had to go to a forest and make my own bow, um, which I did, uh, which was great. Um, I spent a lot of energy um doing that, so I ended up sleeping in the forest. But but basically, on your turn, you've got a hand of cards, five cards, and on the cards, um you you effectively can do many of the different core actions in the game. So everything that's a hexagon on the card will trigger a main action. If you haven't got it, tough shit, you can't do it. Um, you can do a lot of side actions, um, which spends this I call it energy. They say movement points, but I like to call it energy um because it's not always movement you're you're spending it for. Um so you're spending this resource of energy to bit either move around the map to get to to places you need to. And if you're moving through like muddy fields, guess what? You get dirty and you take a dirt token, you have to put that onto your clothes. If you keep getting muddy and you're stacking lots of of their tokens up, basically at the end of the day, you're gonna get bad cards, these bad karma cards, because you just smell, you're just a stinky peasant, and uh many people will will not uh think kindly to you for doing that. The reverse is like if you're doing some good things, you get good cards. I think there's a card called Piety, and it gives you um some good cards that are very powerful uh indeed to use. Um, so you're moving around, you're doing different things, you can shop, you can eat, you can do that because you have a hunger track, and at the top, um that's gonna dwindle away quite quickly unless you keep yourself well fed. I like that system a lot. I think that's very thematic because the how well fed you are is how much you can contribute towards the main actions. So let's talk about that. So when you do a main action, let's say I'm gonna steal something, which I did in this game. I stole a sword because I needed one, and they were like 36 um Grosian, which is the uh currency in the game. And it's like, no way I've got that much money, I'm gonna pill for this because I kind of built myself into a stealing um build. So I thought, let's have let's have it. So you you'll have a card that says, uh no, um, Master of Disguise is an example, and it'll have uh an icon for the dexterity or stealing. You pop that under your board and you say, I'm gonna steal, and then you do a test and you draw the amount of cards, which typically is three. It does change depending on what you're doing. So it typically is three, and you're revealing them from top to bottom, and you're looking at the symbols in the top left for how many successes you've got. And if it's the success type of the action type you're doing, it's a success. If it's gold, it's a success, like wild, and you're trying to get as many as you can. Like for this sword, I need five. Um, but yeah, for any other things like you're hunting or you're fighting or whatever, you use the same system and away you go. And if you fail it, whoopsie daisy, you don't you don't do it. Um, and then you manage to flip this other tile over where all your tests happen, and it gives you two extra bonus successes next time, which is quite nice. Um, if you succeed, hooray, that's great, you do the thing. Um, so what happens in the game is that you have four phases in a day. So you've got morning, like noon, um the afternoon, or uh evening. Yeah, evening and night. That's it. And different things will happen as you transition through the day. And effectively, you can only really play a main action on the first three phases of the day at night. You typically can't unless you've got ways around it. Um, so yeah, so you're kind of trying to min-max um what you can get done in a day. And if you're spending cards to also move, because you can ditch them to help you move or give you more energy to move. If you want to have cards early in the day, guess what? You ain't gonna be doing much, and you're gonna have to do a lot of resting um to get yourself uh in a better position for for next time. So there's a lot of levers and mechanics in this game to basically get you to do what you want to do. Um, but you can go to inns, you can listen to rumors, you can pick up more quests. Um, and the more quests you do, the more VPs you get. Because this is a competitive game, but I think there was a co-op mode in there as well. Um, and then the scenario kicked in on day three, and then that's where it started to get more interesting. Oh, okay, right, so we can do this now and contribute to this quest line and do that questline and things like that. And yeah, so myself, Rob, and Adam Turtsy played this, and Adam has got the brain of a genius, so he was figuring this game out, and I could tell, like, he went kind of full circle on it. He said, Oh, I'm not sure I like this. I think I prefer Mage Knight. And I think by the end of the game, he was like, I'm sad now because I think I need to own this game. So I think he came away really enjoying it. My experience, my first play experience, I didn't do very well, and I didn't quite get how the game worked until it was too late, to the point where I was just doing tests on things, and I shouldn't have done tests on things, which was quite clearly failing. Um, and I couldn't quite get to do what I wanted to do after the opening day. So I really enjoyed day one, and then days two and three were okay, and day four was just absolute trash because I just got myself in a real bad position, but that's because of me. That's because of me, not the game. I didn't understand what the game was until it was too late. The game looks like an exploration adventure game, and it's not, it's an efficiency puzzle game. It's literally trying to get your card system and your deck building, because the other thing you do is you build XP for certain skills, and then you unlock more cards into your deck, the the the advanced skill cards, and they are amazing. They are absolutely when you get them, you're like, Oh, this is so good. Um, and you're trying to spec your character to what you're trying to do. So you can be good at persuasion, good at the gift of the gap, you're good at fighting, you're good at stealing, you could be good at hunting and having great perception. You could be good at like picking herbs and doing herbalism and potion making and things like that. So you're kind of doing those things, and yeah, it it I got to the point where I just I didn't have a great first play. However, the introductory scenario is designed to teach you the game, and it did it, and it taught me the game, it made me learn some valuable lessons, and I am now at a position where I'm gonna play this again, 100%. I'm gonna play this again, and I'm gonna play it on my own, and I'm gonna just explore the world on my own and just learn it, get better at it, understand it, and just get lost in that world. And I think I'm gonna love this game. Um, I think I am. Um, and yeah, I hope I do anyway, because Mage and I I bounced off and I didn't have the get the best first experience with Kingdom Come Deliverance, but I do I see its genius. I do. I I generally see how clever this game is and and what the designers have done to immerse you into this narrative. And it's not like you're eating walls and walls of text, it's just through the actions that you do, you're creating this story, you know, you know, getting into a drunken bar fight, and then this happens and that happens. And it's just yeah, I I think I'm gonna really enjoy this game once I just get my head around it, and then um, yeah, we'll we'll see, won't we? We'll see. Um, but I don't want to put anyone off it because I just think if you don't enjoy your first experience, play it again um and try and get your head around that game. I think it deserves your time, deserves your attention, um, because it is doing something special personally, and I know the game's very expensive. The game is very expensive, um, but there's a lot of game in there, it's a lot of components in there. Um, and yeah, I I like the more I think about it, like I think I was frustrated when I first played, but now I'm you know a few days on, I've come back from Essen, I'm home now. It hasn't left my mind. It hasn't left my mind. It's like I need to get back into this world. So fingers crossed, I'm gonna do that. So yeah, that's pretty much Kingdom Con Deliverance. Um, and

MONDAY - TRAVEL HOME

SPEAKER_00 54:53

that's pretty much um the end of that day. We had a nice kind of chill, packed the bags, drove home um on the Monday, and uh we had a little cheeky game with Deft Trap Dungeon. I enjoyed that. So Paul was reading out, he was the narrator. We had a system where every fight we had we won because we're awesome. Um, but we played Death Trap Dungeon in the car for about half an hour, um, maybe an hour. And uh all I'll say, without spoiling it too much, if there's a borehole in the middle of a wall when you fight a big, massive grub, uh, don't go in it. Because that's what we did, and we got an ex nap because we killed the other one. Um, we killed its mate, and it literally just murdered us and we died. Um, but you know, looking at that book and the pictures in that book just really brought me brought me home to being a kid because I I think I've still got Death Trap Dungeon, it's probably one of my favourite fighting fantasy books. Um, where you know, it's like choose your own adventure, go north, go west, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah. So that was it. That was Essen. Got back, sorted out the bags, got the haul photos done, and just happy to also be at home because it's been you know, been away for a week. Uh, but I love Essen. Um, and I think this is probably my best one I've ever had. And and it wasn't because of the games per se, it was because the group was was fun. Um, we all had a laugh. There's lots of banters like being away in a stagdo kind of feeling where you're just having constant laughs with people, and also just meeting um uh different people from the industry, you know. I met Asaf, uh, which I forgot to mention on Sunday as well at Glass Cannon because he was working there. So Asaf from Easy Board Games. Again, managed to give that man a massive hug. He's such a legend. I love him to bits. And just meeting different content creators, learning from them, um being being kind of part of it. Uh just feels genuinely a privilege to be there and you know, and and having the relationships with the um the publishers that I do have now. Um, just it's just fantastic. So, yeah, that was my essay experience, guys. That was pretty much what it was. And I know that's you know, two episodes, bumper episodes of stuff um that I've tried to cram in there. There's no doubt more and more that I've I've not covered, but you know what, we can't be here all day.

PHASE C: END OF PART TWO

SPEAKER_00 57:14

Um, so yeah, that is the episode. Thank you so much for for listening along. Hopefully you enjoyed the vlogs, hopefully you enjoyed a little bit more of a deeper dive on on what I've been going through. And uh yeah, if you do, please like, subscribe, comment, engage, get on the socials. I love all that. If you want to support the show even further, I have coffee, so any pounds that come my way really helps keep the show alive, keeps the show going, and keeps me talking about games, which I love. Um, but generally I'm off to sleep now. I say that I'm not I'm I'm actually off to work, but I need to go to sleep because I'm very tired. Um, so I'll leave you with this sentiment, which is you only grow old when you stop playing. So make sure you go to Essen at some point in your life. Take care, everyone. Bye bye.