Spielwiesn 2024 gaming recap

We had a fantastic weekend at Spielwiesn in Augsburg, a cozy little board game event in Bavaria (well, not that small actually, they had about 15k visitors after all) 🤩. Of course there is an exhibition area with new releases and demos, but the best thing in this event is the huge gaming area and library. 😉 While we have quite a respectable “library” at home, this is the perfect occasion to try games we miss out on at #SPIEL or older gems that might be harder to find nowadays.

So let’s take a quick look on our highlights of the weekend: 🥰

👑 3 Chapters was a game we heard a lot about at SPIEL, but thought it plays only 3p+. Turns out it has a 2p variant which is fun, so we had to buy it 😁. It practically combines drafting, trick-taking and a Fantasy Realm-esque scoring, and all of this with a fairy tale theme and fun art. 

💰 Caper: Europe is a game I really wanted to try. A tug-of-war duel game of heists. Players play rival bands of thieves, recruiting members, buying equipment and fighting over 3 prestigious locations - all of this with closed drafting. It’s fun and pretty clever, I’m just a bit worried about the limited number of cards in each game.

👘 Yamatai is an older title with a production quality and similar vibes as Five Tribes. Players place boats on the map to gather tokens for recruiting specialists and to match building recipes to place down buildings - all in an effort to have the most prestige. While it’s not on the level of Five Tribes, it is a pretty cool game!

And a few that fell flat for us, because yes, that happens too: 😅

🏹 Mesos is a simple card drafting game. Basically players are all building their tribe with people of different professions. All of them are good and important in some way, but there are constantly events like Hunts or Rituals, which reward you for having more of certain cards. Ultimately in 2p it doesn’t seem to work well.

🎎 Kabuki Tricks was one we decided to buy - unfortunately we immediately regretted this decision. This is a trick-taking game with some twists and a cool Kabuki theater theme, but the 2-player variant advertised on the box really failed to deliver. 😶