The Nerd Herd…

Now a new regular event for a few of us is the Essen Spiel, an enormous gaming convention in Germany with now six halls full of board/card/dice/role-playing games, live action materials, collectables and all manner or related items. It is one of the largest (if not the largest) event of its kind in the world, which for the most part is about selling you your next favourite game. Naturally it focusses on the European market and style of Euro games, but there are still a few AmeriTrash games and several exotic flavours from other parts of the world.

We continue to stay a little way out from Essen at the Handelshof in Mulheim an du Ruhr in what has become a family home away from home, where they provide us with a space to play our games.

The only game I bought this year was called Ishtar, a simple ‘gateway’ style of game. One of the reasons is that I need to reorganise my game storage as I have run out of space.

In addition to the gaming our little sub-group of gamers also enjoy a good meal and social interaction over a glass of wine or two. And this is usually catered for by the Mausefalle restaurant nearby, where we usually all go for the Pork Knuckle and the Apple Strudel, and this year was no different.

However, we also found another restaurant nearby called Ratskeller that also had some very lovely food.

As our party included English, South African and New Zealanders, we were drawn into watching the World Cup Rugby, unfortunately as is the case with these competitions, there were winners and losers.

It was however entertaining to be part of the buzz in what seemed to be the start of a joke (an Englishman, South African and a Kiwi walk into an Irish bar in Germany…) the bar in question being amusingly named Fritzpatricks.

Some of the older regulars were absent from the hotel this year but we hope that we can encourage some younger folk to join us in the future.