SPIEL 2025

This Friday October 24, Dan and I drove to SPIEL 2025 in Essen, Germany. It has been 3 years, since I last went to the world’s largest boardgame convention.

Since we’re not able to publish something Orctober related, I thought a report from this year’s SPIEL would make up for that. Apologies for that. Nonetheless I have something “orcy” in mind for the close future. It revolves around a handful of Space Orcs.

An endless drive

Despite the relatively short distance, the drive to Essen took quite some time, partly due to small roads, traffic and construction sites and a detour due to a wrong-way driver on the motorway. That’s why we left Luxembourg at 6 am.

Fortunately we could enjoy a typical German breakfast: “Kaffee und Fleischkäse”.

Replenished we finally arrived at the entrance around midday. Despite heavy traffic and quite some queues at the entrance of the outside parking lot and its cashier’s check, entering the main building went very smoothly.

Impressions

As every year, board games, of course, take up the biggest portion of real estate in the very large halls. It really is a huge venue, well worth a visit!

Since we had limited time, we shifted our focus entirely on tabletop war-games and the odd RPG. That’s why we mainly stayed in hall 1.

The first exhibitor we met, was MyMiniFactory. They were promoting their new Fighting Fantasy RPG miniatures for 3D printing, which look stunning in my opinion. I got a code to download one of them. As a big fan of the genre, I’ll send it soon to my printer! Plus we had a very pleasant chat with the great guys from MMF.

One Page Rules were represented at a very well made booth and by super friendly people. They were even handing out some free goodies like dice and miniatures! Besides a fantastic looking exhibition space, they showcased their new physical starter sets. Their new plastic miniatures look awesome. Their demo tables were very busy too. To me, all this really points out their huge positive impact OPR has made on the market.

By far the most impressive exhibitor was, unsurprisingly, industry leader Games Workshop or Warhammer as it’s called nowadays. Unfortunately, and to be expected, there were no discounts available. On the flip side, staff were distributing free Space Marines at the entrance of their onsite painting classes. What we really liked though, was their exhibition of Golden Demon winner pieces. Those were really impressive in my opinion.

Other well represented exhibitors with a large selection of products, we went to, were for instance Warlord Games, Ulisses Spiele for the Dark Eye RPG products, Archon Studios, several gaming mat producers, and the excellent Sci-Fi Trader Online shop (for my Battletech “needs”). All the usual, and unusual, paint manufacturers were there. The only one we couldn’t find for some reason, was the Army Painter.

When we found Osprey Games, we were disappointed that they didn’t have any of their wargaming related products.

Loot

Apart from the afore mentioned soft goblin toy, I didn’t buy that much.

In the end, I only bought books and cards for Battletech at the Sci-Fi Trader booth. Also, I could finally acquire the hard to find Fighting Piranha decals for my Mech miniatures. At GW, I bought a soft goblin toy for my son, which was received with an underwhelming success …

Surprisingly I ended up with 5 free miniatures:

• 2 Space Marines from Games Workshop
• 1 Human Empire Ranger for Age of Fantasy Quest by One Page Rules
• 1 Kobold from Titan Forge
• 1 strikingly old-school STL file by MyMiniFactory for the Fighting Fantasy collector’s TTRPG

I also got 3 D6 from Fighting Fantasy, One Page Rules, and MyMiniFactory respectively.

Not to mention a bag, a cup and a coaster from Scifi-Trader.

Our thoughts

As said SPIEL 2025 in Essen was again a huge event focused mainly on boardgames. Understandably so. Wargaming and RPGs are but a small fraction of the entire analog games industry. The limited time we had there allowed us to concentrate on wargaming products. If we included RPGs, we would have needed more time, not to mention the huge selection of boardgames.

We would have liked more miniature producers, smaller game companies and a proper representation of Osprey Games and the Army Painter. Also 3rd party vendors selling (GW) products at a cheaper price would have been nice. I say this because that used to be the case at SPIEL in the past. We know the show is mainly centered around boardgames. But still, that extra bit of variety would have catered even more to us wargamers

Ultimately, it was a good event though, with nice folks to talk to, enough products to spend your precious gold coins on, and a healthy amount of freebies for the hunters and gatherers among us. And, it felt good to be at a gaming convention again, something I was starting to think I wouldn’t enjoy anymore.

What was your experience at SPIEL 2025 in Essen? Let us know in the comments.