RogerBW's Blog

Sunday was mostly a demonstration day as the show wound down; it was much less crowded than Saturday.

The Judge Dredd cosplayers turned up.

In War of the Nine Realms, I discovered the Valkyrie Beach Party gambit (to go along with the Vanguard Rush).

Ooh. I'm rather tempted by something like that. Though at Essen the corridors are narrower and you'd have trouble getting it through the crowds.

Pretty art, but I can't help thinking of Grave of the Fireflies.

One last game of War of the Nine Realms, hard-fought into the enemy stronghold. (The player I beat then went off to get money from a friend to buy it.)

Then I went to collect my profits and unsold items from the Bring and Buy, where the procedure was: use your smartphone to see if anything's unsold (if you have no smartphone, tough); if so, root through the tables to try to find your stuff, which has been put out randomly; queue, with lots of volunteers standing around but nobody with the ability or authority to make a decision about how the queue should work, for check-out. This took about fifty minutes.

My feeling is that it would work rather better if, rather than bare tables, the organisers used numbered crates. Your item is assigned to a specific crate when you check it in. (You'd probably still separate crates by type, as they did here - "wargames", "under £10", etc.) The on-line listing includes the crate number, and so does the label on your item, so that if people pick it up and decide they don't want it they know where to put it back. (They won't, of course, because people are stupid, but the volunteers who were wandering around trying to look important could have that as part of their job.)

Then, whether you're looking for your own unsold stuff or you've found something interesting in the on-line listing and want to buy it, you can go directly to the right physical location. Then they might even be able to publicise the on-line listing; everyone I spoke to was amazed to learn it existed.

Mind you, at least I hadn't contributed one of the eight (!) unsold copies of Mousquetaires du Roy.

Ah well. I successfully managed to avoid interacting with the Expo organisation apart from that, as I'd planned last year, and had a much better experience as a result. Having given up on doing the combination of daytime demos and evening RPG sessions, I had much more time for general game-playing, which I think was worth doing (Essen doesn't have open gaming areas at all).

I only played twelve games of War of the Nine Realms rather than the 40 of last year – that was the print-and-play version, which is a quicker game on a smaller map. I definitely enjoyed the full version, though.

Total haul in the end: The Networks plus Telly Time expansion, Star Trek Ascendancy plus Ferengi, Cardassian and Borg expansions, Startups, and War of the Nine Realms (already paid for via Kickstarter). Oh, and the Crystal Twister dice tower.