This weeks diary was a little bigger than I thought. If you read the previous three parts you know that I played about 30 games while on the weeked trip. Most of the games were light and fluffy and did not have a place in my suitcase. However, there were many games that I bough instantly on sight. I had planned the trip quite well and after two trips to the halls I had bought pretty much everything I wanted.
I’ll start with an image.
- Amerigo Queenie #2 & #3
- AquaSphere
- Castles of Mad King Ludwig
- Deus
- Dice Brewing
- El Gaucho
- Imperial Settlers
- Kanban
- Mangrovia
- Medievalia
- Monster & Maidens
- Mr. House
- Murano
- Mythotopia
- Nehemiah
- Owacon
- Packet Row
- Pagoda
- Pay Dirt w/ 3x expansions
- Port Royal
- Praetor w/ promo
- Relikt
- Russian Railroads miniexpansion
- Singapore
- Steam Map Expansion #4
- Subdivision
- Trains: Rising Sun
- Waggle Dance
- Versailles
Games that I could have bought were Alchemists, Staufer Dynasty, Fields of Arle and Panamax but ultimately were left behind because my wallet was empty and luggages full. Those are the games I will be talking about in the future weeks I’m sure.
My Essen trip was not all about buying and playing. As I am a hobbyist designer I had setup three meetings. The preparation for those meetings were mostly finetuning the rulebooks as recently I got a rejection because one of my rulebooks was just lousy. BTW, thank you for reading my rulebook in the SLS forums. I appreciate you all.
The first meeting was with Hans im Glück, this was first I time I personally met Michael Fronia. I have shown HiG 4/5 of my games and they have tested them all and rejected them all. This has always been done by email. Now it was nice to meetup and talk about my designs. The meeting took place in the Business Lounge and I was happy to notice that Michael wasn’t in a hurry so I could show him all my games. I had a plan for all the three meetings and knew which game to pitch to each publisher. HiG was my first and my first pitch was Hedeby. We didn’t get to play the game but I showed all the possibilites that the game provides and he asked many questions about the gameplay and components. In the end there was interest in the game and Hedeby went with HiG.
The second meeting was with NSKN Games. A rather new game company from Romania. I met with the head of the company Andrei Novac. He is the designer of Praetor and Versailles both of them on the above list. He was a very straightforward guy. I pitched Trails to him. This is a game I haven’t talked about yet but eventually it will get a blog post. With Andrei it was straight to business. He asked can the game be with 2-5? Yes. Is it language independent? Yes. Ok good, what the is about? The game has a similar race element than Louis&Clark where you go along a path towards a goal city visiting towns along the way. Worker placement and so forth. Then he went to a production mode. He asked me about the components and started calculating how many punchboards this game will need and how many tokens/cubes/cards are included. In the end he just nodded and said it is a 45€ game. It’s doable. This was the first time I got this kind of reaction from a publisher and it was refreshing. He was very enthuastic about the game but still very realistic. If he would publish the game it would be 2016 or later and might go through Kickstarter. I’m ok with that and left the prototype with him. When I left he mentioned that this is the second prototype he took with him and he had had several meeting before me.
The third and last meeting was with Huch! & Friends. I pitched Valley of the Kings to Simon Hopp. Simon was very pleasant and courtious. I started by saying that I’m not sure if the game is a Huch game as they produce mainly family and childrens game. Simon was pleased to hear that as he had worried the same thing based on the rulebook but he also told me that the Friends part is where this stands.The first two meeting I hadn’t gotten very far with the pitch as I stumbled how to present the game. With this meeting I took the time to setup and then show how the game plays. The whole pitch took 20 minutes and failing twice had paid off. He was interest in the game so much that he wanted to show it to his publisher partners. So I left the game with him.
My plan had worked. I brought three games with me and I had planned how I would like to give those games away. It went perfectly. All meeting were enthuastic about the games and no one second-quessed my designs or otherwise discouraged by the game itself. Now it is a waiting game to see if something comes out of those meetings.
On my computer I have four folders for my designs. Contracts, Review, Playtest and Ideas. After Essen Contracts folder remains the same with 2 games, Review has 5 games in it, Playtest 1 games (the Tower Defense game) and Ideas is between 30-40 games. I think it is time to bring two movie based games from the Ideas folder to the Playtest folder.
First the Idea 