To Essen and Back

     I won’t go into too much detail about my journey, except to say that I started off at home at 4:30 am and travelled by car, plane, train and metro to the Spiel fair, getting there a little after midday. The one thing that I found amazing (and I’m sure that those European friends reading this might think it’s an everyday occurrence) is the robot coffee barista in the airport. Perhaps we’ll all soon be replaced by robots. [Axiom – I’m looking at you!].

     I made my way to the Asmodee stand in Hall 1 and soon saw the big Altered box at the ceiling above the Altered learn to play area. Unlike the setup at UKGE last year (where they had 4 tables) they had around 16 tables for people to learn to play and a number of employees who were there to help teach the game.

     I was approached fairly quickly by one of the volunteers, but I declined the opportunity to learn to play given I already knew and have played the starter decks a bit in the past. The whole area though was full of people. A bit later one of the players came up to Saphire and me where we were talking and asked about getting more cards for a deck. Saphire (who is a fantastic person) had spare unscanned commons wrapped in packs that she offered to him and his partner, and I explained how you could scan the cards in the app to them.

     I met up with Marc, The Bravos Hatter, with whom I have a lot of discussions about Bravos on discord and we swapped some physical Unique cards we’d traded the month before. It was really nice to meet him and put a face to the name.

     The challenge area for the booster wars and the Boss battles was in the Gamegenic area which was next to the Altered stand rather than in the Altered stand itself. The booster battles were well underway with participants and the Altered team having a booster each and they played their hero and drew 3 cards a turn which they could play for free (no mana in this game). I believe that there was only one random region card in the middle, so these battles were relatively quick and fast to resolve.

     I had a chat to Saphire for a while. She was wearing her Teiga and Bloob costume which is really fabulous and includes little fox ears and a fox tail. She’s really put a load of hard work into it, and she looks great. I had my bravos sweatshirt on and was pleased to see a number of Bravosi in the crowd appreciated that I was displaying my faction pride.

     I went around the rest of the fair for a while as I was due to pick up some games and promos. The fair was really busy considering that it was a Thursday, but apparently this was because it was a holiday in Germany. As a result, getting around the Halls was a lot harder than it had been in previous years. 

     I got back to the Altered stand a while later and we got together all three of the Musabi that were there with Lokinox to take a quick photo. I had a short chat with Fortunus about our Musabi project that we need to do some more work on before the Boss battles started. The Boss is quite powerful and also designed to help make the matches shorter by having the boss having an ability to move either the Boss’ expedition forward or the opponent’s expedition forward as well as being only across two region cards rather than three. I saw a lot of Subhash decks there as well as some Basira and Kojo against the boss. I guess this was because of the shorter track the speed decks were the keys to winning. I saw about a 50%-win rate from team community and the winners all got a Loki card and a playmat.

     Whilst the Boss battles were ongoing, I took the opportunity to harangue a very nice man at the Gamegenic booth about the number of pages in the Altered folders. They are just that little bit too small to fit a small set in them and too small to get the core set into two folders. I explained that an extra 4 pages were probably needed. The very nice man explained that they had to be careful with sizes as the folders wouldn’t stand properly if they got too big with the binding, but he said that 4 extra pages might be possible, and they would look at it in their next production cycle. I also asked about faction deck boxes (since I was asked on discord about it) and he said they had to be careful about having too many products for game stores, but that they would discuss it.

    It was starting to get late, and I knew I needed to head back soon to get my plane. Unfortunately, it was just then that Loki offered me to be the boss for a while, but there just wasn’t time alas. That was the price I had to pay alas for jet setting in just for the day. I instead had to say goodbye to everyone and wish them the best.

     As I was leaving the hall I realised how thirsty I was. The Hall was baking hot, and I’d only had one drink all day. I bought a bottle of coke zero on the way out and drank it straight down. When I got to Essen HbF I bought a second bottle and drank that straight down. When waiting for the train I bought a third. At the airport I had two more. I had no idea just how dehydrated I had got throughout the day, and it took me a lot of liquid to make up for it. I guess next year at UKGE I need to remember to take a lot of liquid with me.

     I got home at 11:30 pm after having a good (quick) flight home and went straight to bed, but really happy with having had a fantastic experience.