The biggest source of information in preparation for the onslaught of new games coming in after the end of the Essen show is always the superb Essen preview list on BGG.
But another way of trying to find out what the hot games after Essen could be (and with the number of games coming out we have to be selective), is to have a look/listen and some videos/podcasts talking about their most anticipated games for Essen. It worked quite well for me last year, so I did it again this year. I’ve watched a total of 13 videos on Youtube and made notes about the games that are being mentioned. Sorted by the number of times a game got mentioned, here is my totally non-scientific Top 20 of the most anticipated games for Essen 2019 (in case of a tie, I used the thumbs up on the Essen preview list as a tie-breaker):
Teotihuacan: City of Gods (English edition)
Futuropia
Reykholt
Forum Trajanum
Azul: Stained Glas
Holding On
Gingerbread House
Gugong
The River
Blackout
Underwater Cities
Treasure Island
Coimbra
Dice Hospital
Key Flow
Blue Lagoon
Alone
Arraial
Shadows in Amsterdam
Camel Up (2nd Edition)
Here is the playlist with all 13 videos:
Most of the games in the Top 20 are no surprise because they are the “common ground” between all those videos I’ve watched. But watching all these videos it was interesting to see that the common ground seems to be smaller this year (= a lot of the Top lists included games only mentioned once or twice in the videos) compared to the last two years which indicates for me that we are looking at a good Essen year with a wide selection of interesting games. As always with Essen the trick is to find the games that have staying power beyond the initial hype about nice looking components, interesting themes and a well-known designer (these seem to be the most often used criteria to select games of interest in the preparation for Essen).
Last year’s Top 5 of the podcast summary list was Charterstone, Nusfjord, Altiplano, Meeple Circus and Clans of Caledonia. All five turned out to be really good to solid games and also did quite well in regards to sales (besides Charterstone which for some reasons didn’t do very well).
Rolling Bandits is the new small dice from Blue Orange Games:
ROLL YOUR DICE, GET ON THE TRAIN AND PLUNDER AS MUCH AS YOU CAN TO WIN THE GAME!
The players are at the head of a group of Bandits which they send to the assault of a train in order to plunder the riches. The players will launch their Bandits, attack the train and rob the passengers before the other players. The richest player at the end of the game wins.
The game has arrived today and pre-orders will get shipped tomorrow morning.
It’s a great time of the year for board game fans: We still get a flood of games that have been presented at GenCon but haven’t made their way to Europe yet and we are starting to see the first Essen announcements popping up.
We have added a few new games to our pre-order section, here are a few highlights:
We are heading into the busy part of the year: A lot of interesting pre-orders are suddenly appearing. As always we are trying our best to make most of them available for you and have already started to upload quite a few new interesting games.
Blue Orange Games will release Age of Giants, the first expansion for Kingdomino, at GenCon this year.
Age of Giants adds the option of a fifth player and allows for more player interaction. If a player gets a tile with a giant on it, they add a giant meeple to their kingdom – covering any crown of their choosing. If a tile with a giant’s footsteps comes up, the player must pass a giant meeple from their kingdom to another player’s kingdom, who must then cover a crown in their domain. The expansion eliminates end of game bonuses. Instead, at the beginning of the game, each player draws challenge tiles, which provide new ways to get points.
Hopefully, in Europe will the expansion available a bit earlier, because according to Pegasus the release date for the German edition of the expansion is July.
The two interesting restocks are Bunny Kingdom from Iello and Photosynthesis from Blue Orange Games. And we still have enough copies of the Christmas Tree Promo for Photosynthesis to add one to each copy of the game.
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