Essen Game Fair 2011 Day 3

As promised the weekend is more crowded.  As it turns out this is a good day for people watching.  There is a whole other feel to the RPG room-soldiers, elves, dark elves, medieval folks and anime characters are common. Some are here for the costume/talent contest.

This is also a big day for competitions. Speed chess where the two players have one minute to complete ALL their turns, as in the whole game takes two minutes, if they use all the time.  Okay you say.  Then you read the note that says these same two guys will be doing this ALL DAY with only 3 breaks.  When we saw them after lunch they had already played some 250 games.

Also a Rubick's cube competition.

And Gemblo.

And yet the craziest thing was running into an old coworker that I haven't seen for over a year.  She now lives in Germany and in this giant convention we just happened to walk past each other-small world!

We did get in a couple of games though.  First Trias from Doris and Frank.  We love Doris and Frank!  Trias is dinosaurs on Pangea, which then breaks apart and you want your dinosaurs to rule the larger islands.  It has some strategy points that will take more playing.  So we buy it and some other games...and a t-shirt....we really like Doris and Frank :)

We randomly try Paperclip Railways.  Indeed paperclips form your rail line.  The guy got his idea from String Railways, which was very popular last year, but this is a more detailed game.  It may be a better game than the feeling we got because our game suffered from one player whose English was not good and took LONG turns.  Usually it is the non-Germans speakers can be at a slight disadvantage if the game is not printed in English, but this developer was British.  This seems to me to lack replay value as the most interesting parts are the clever names but it really loses for us as the box is large and our suitcases are not infinite.  But I do love the flexibility of paperclips as rails.

That is it for us today-people watching is more tiring than game playing!