So it’s been quiet for a week over on the blog, the longest time it’s
been so since I started things way back in January. The simple reason for this is that I’ve spent
most of the last week in Germany at my first European convention...
Spiel...
And from the point of view of a convention goer and a convention
organiser, it’s been one hell of an eye opener...
Everyone knows about the size of the convention, it’s supposed to be
the largest of its kind, with numbers exceeding those of Gencon Indiana. It’s impossible to get a bearing on the
numbers that were in the convention this year, but I have to say that even
though it’s spaced over a smaller area, there seemed to be less people attending
the convention than there were at Gencon last year when I attended that. A part of this might be the sheer amount of
space given between the booths, with enough space between stands to drive a van
through (and given the amount of stock on the stands, this turned out to be not
only desirable, but required. Another
part of it may well be the train strike that occurred over the entire weekend,
shutting off access to the line that runs directly down to the convention
hall. Those who were committed to
attending the show would still have found a way to make it, but I suspect the
casual trade was down significantly.
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| Pat and Lindsey at the Expo Desk |
I went as part of the UK Games Expo team, so didn’t see the convention completely
from the eyes of an attendee, but also as an exhibitor. We set up our Booth in Hall 2 (of 4) and put
our office together for the meetings to resolve the advance bookings for space
at the Expo. Wednesday was taken up
entirely in the construction of the stand and making sure that we had
everything in order for when the world descended the following day.
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| Note the negotiation settlement device at the end of the table... |
Thursday arrived and the general public were allowed access to the
show, a good number even without it being one of the main days, the booth saw
plenty of action from both the public and the traders, and things were never
quiet as traders continued to arrive and set up their own stalls. I got a little time in the afternoon to
wander around and take in the show itself before things got too busy for me to
be anywhere apart from on our stand.
Whenever I go to a convention other than Expo, I like to get a look in
to see where we could improve things, or in some cases where we could learn the
lesson before we make the mistake in the first place.
Observation One - Spiel is about Endurance...
That may not seem like much of a Observation, but when you’re putting
together a convention, you need to consider the different parts of it. While I was wandering around, what struck me
most of all was that there were no place within the entire convention to sit
down, relax, or take stock of what you were doing. This is similar in a way to Gencon Indiana,
but the difference here is that there are no space to play the games you buy at Spiel.
There’s no space to sit down and eat the food that’s supplied there, and
there’s certainly no space to take a break from the convention before going
back for a second go. I said similar to
Gencon Indiana, with the primary difference being that Gencon has mostly carpeted
floors that can be sat on, and there are places to get sit down games where you
can take a break from things, saving you from going back to the hotel or having
to find a Cafe somewhere before you go back in for the second half.
The overall feel of it (and I’m speaking from an attendee point of
view) is that the convention is very much about going with a list of games that
you want to buy, buying them, and getting out.
There were more than ten of us that went to the convention, with between
a Hundred and Six Hundred Euro’s in saved up capital to buy games, none of us were
there the whole four days, we got the list and then retired to comfortable
spaces. It’s just too exhausting when
you don’t have any place to take a break over the course of the weekend. I know that I’m built on the big side, like
many gamers if the truth be known, and that doesn’t lend itself to spending
long periods of time on the stood up and moving around stage of a convention, but
many of those who were with us aren’t built on the same scale and they were having
similar problems. It’s good to get have
a break out room to get away from the scrum, here the whole convention was the
scrum...
Observation Two – Demonstrations
While there were no places to play the games you were buying at Spiel,
there were a number of places where you could sit down to try out a game or
two. Make no mistake, most of these were
set at a rapid rate to get people on to the game and then give them a round or
so before seeing if they wanted to buy the game, rather than sit down, play the
whole game and then consider buying it. I found less than ten traders in the entire of
the convention that let you play a larger game from start to finish, but those
that were doing were getting a lot of interest.
The only difference to this was in the kids games, where a number of
the larger distributors were running continual games through the day specially
catering for the new generation. This was
the only part of the convention that seemed more focussed towards the playing
of games than buying them. An
interesting side note is that at many English conventions, the kids games
sections are half and half, with every kid being accompanied by a parent who
was watching them play. Here, the kids
were merrily by themselves, wandering from game to game as it took their fancy
with no one looking for parental approval before setting to in teaching the
kids the game.
I have to say I liked that a lot, because the inherent problem with the
English side of things is that there’s so many rules that you’ve got to follow
to make sure that the kids are looked after and everyone is vetted and you’ve
got consent to teach the kids, and here...
They just teach them...
In England, there’s hundreds of rules that we all endeavour not to
follow, and I was particularly impressed as a first time visitor to
Germany, that the rules aren’t written down, but by Grapthars Hammer, they’re
followed, and without anyone needing to follow them up... This may well extend to the childrens zones,
everyone is so used to the rules being followed without being asked that they
consider it to be normal to leave your kids to play games while you wander
around a massive convention.
I’m not sure I could do it,
but it was good to see that there was a lot of trust in the community.
Observation Three – Scale
It’s not just the show that’s bigger than other conventions, it’s the
amount of product that’s packed into the show.
In England, most stalls have a good amount of product placed on tables
that are raised to the height where you don’t have to duck down to pick
something up. At Spiel, the product was
literally stacked from top to bottom, and all of it in order with regular
restocks to make sure that the levels never dropped too far.
This was the case all the way through the
convention until the latter half of saturday when the stock started to finally
run out. While it’s good to see that the
traders were organised and planned to sell the whole stall, it was another
example that the entire point of the show was to continue selling things till
they ran out.
Observation Four – Language
It’s widely accepted that most Europeans speak more than one language, particularly
when it comes to the second language being English. While that’s certainly the case in most of the
larger booths, a number of the smaller traders and independents don’t speak
English, so when you’re looking at the games, having access to the net and by
extension the various websites like Boardgamegeek is a godsend, translations to
English are available for most games and while we were there, we were offered
the services of a number of professional translators who do this sort of thing
on a regular basis.
Having the presence of Boardgamegeek direct at the convention was
excellent, they were very knowledgeable and friendly, and from a non-native
point of view, having game experts on hand who were happy to help was a great
benefit.
The food vendors all spoke sufficient English to get across the point
of what you were after and how much, and the local supermarkets all have prices
coming up in numbers, so the language barrier isn’t as much of a problem as you
might think. For those thinking that you
need to speak to people to get anywhere, live in London for a month and you’ll
be disavowed of this notion, it’s no different here.
Observation Five – Have something to do at Night
It’s not an all day convention, opening for the public at ten in the
morning and closing at seven in the evening. There are no activities planned
through the evening and just as there’s no organised play through the day, so
there certainly isn’t any through the night.
Given that we were spending most of the day dealing with trade enquiries
and public questions, the evenings were the best time for us to wind down,
catch a meal, and play the games we’d bought that day while on break with those
we came with. Most of the groups coming
in from outside of the area were travelling in small groups and usually retired
to their hotels to do the same and that seemed to be the best way of doing
things as Essen isn’t very much of a party town. There are a number of restaurants reasonably
priced with good sized portions, but you need to have something planned for the
evening or the nights are going to be long.
There was some kind of motor festival on at the same time as Spiel,
because there were a lot of very expensive cars out on the streets, all of them
making a lot of noise till the early hours of the morning. It could be that this was a one off, but it
did make for trouble when it came to sleeping through the night.
On one of the evenings, being part of the traders group, we were
invited to the trade seminar on the Friday night, which Tiny Wife and I went
along to. Excellent evening talking to
other people who have been around the industry as long as I have and have
similar motivations when it comes to making and playing games, but as it’s only
available to the traders, that’s not much help to everyone else who comes
along.
Conclusions
So what remains among all of this are my own conclusions to the show,
and they are my own personal conclusions, certainly not those of Expo or any
other organisation I work for, which I do feel the need to point out, because
some of the things about the show I didn't like and I wouldn’t want
people considering that these thoughts represent other shows which would make
it sound like sour grapes.
Spiel has the feel of a number of English Wargaming Conventions in the
early part of the century, where people turned up with a long list of precisely what they wanted from the
convention, they came to the con, went around the stalls that they knew they
would find their want list on, and then left. They weren’t interested in
socialising or playing games with people they’d never played against before, they
had no interest in the things that they could find beyond what they came for, they
were just interested in coming to the convention and getting their shopping
list.
Spiel for me felt very much like that, there wasn’t much talking going
on beyond the conversations on the stands (and that was mostly buying and
selling), people were going around small groups, talking to each other and no
one else. Most of the social interaction
that I engaged in was with my own group in the evening when we all got together
and compared the games that we’d picked up that day or talked about the places
we’d been that hadn’t been the convention...
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| There were some exceptions to this, such as Paco Jean and GMS Magazine, who can always be counted upon to be interesting, even in the middle of the show when they're working... |
I’ll most likely be returning next year as part of the Expo crew, but
forewarned is forearmed, I’ll have my shopping list and my evenings planned,
and I’ll have done a refresher course in German as well, just to be sure. In all, it’s a good convention, well
organised and laid out, plenty to see, but if you’re built like most gamers...
Take a spare pair of legs for when the first set wear out...
