Essen SPIEL 2022: A Sparkle of Hope for Board Gaming

The last time I had the chance to attend Essen SPIEL, my son was just five weeks old, not exactly of the age where he could voice his opinion on the latest or greatest casual game.

- Blake Evans-Pritchard

This year he had just turned eight and he loved every minute of the fair. We must have played dozens of new games during the four-day event, and brought a fair few older classics that we found on offer. My son even managed to pick up some useful tips during a 30-minute training session of The Pokémon Trading Card Game, of which he is a huge fan.

But, for all the games that we tried, my son’s clear favorite remained the one that we had accidentally stumbled on at the beginning — Rankster — and we kept returning many times to play it. Eventually, we just had to buy a copy — although how much this had to do with the game and how much with the publisher’s ebullient personality I’m not quite sure. It was probably a healthy mixture of the two.

The Essence of Essen 

We met the effervescent Rikki Tahta as soon as we entered the first hall of the SPIEL 2022. He was hovering over a small collection of tables that were littered with the cards from the one game he was exhibiting, Rankster. Tahta first came to Essen as a visitor 11 years ago and says that he was “blown away — we were just so excited!” 

The following year, he came back with his father and other members of his family and decided to exhibit one of the games that they had developed. He has been coming back every year since and always has a great time. His approach is always the same: bring over a single game and find out what people make of it.