We are slowly settling back here at Ares after the whirlwind of the Spiel Essen 2025 (October 23-26, Essen, Germany) tour de force! It’s one of the most hectic events of the year for us, but the effort is always more than worth it. Four days of welcoming visitors from all over the world, inviting them to try our games, are definitely intense, especially when the show is as record-breaking as this year’s Spiel Messe! It was already the largest board game convention in the world, and this year all 4 days went sold out, with 220.000 visitors from over 80 nations… and we were thrilled to play with them all! Another record figure this year was the number of novelties presented, over 1700 brand new games, among which we can proudly say were a few of our own.
WunderWaffen and TEDOKU were our two Spiel Essen debuts. They were demoed every day and we were incredibly happy to also give our visitors the chance to play them with none other than the authors themselves, Walter Obert and Sandro Blasich respectively. The authors walked the players through the rules, answering questions and sitting down with them. Some players also took this opportunity to get their copies of the games autographed!
We also had “Learn with the designers” sessions of Mega Empires – The Far East with authors Flo and Gerart de Haan, who showed as an absolute preview this upcoming addition to the grand series of Mega Empires games – and proved that a game does not have to be intimidating just because of its size, and that even “big” games can be approached by everyone!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Our booth was filled with demo tables showcasing many of our games, ranging from our most recent releases, Quartermaster General: South Front, Perfect Mismatch, and Dirt & Dust, Aeterna and Balconia, released earlier this year, to Altay - Dawn of Civilization, playable along with the preview of its expansion Altay - Seafarers, and even some of our classics, like Sword & Sorcery, War of the Ring - The Card Game, and, of course, War of the Ring. We also had some more games on display only: Viking Route, our latest crowdfunding project, coming Q1, and City of Chaos, with its crowdfunding campaign launching 2026.
Lastly, to spice things up a little, this year we tried coming up with some special events: Play & Win sessions of Perfect Mismatch and Tedoku were held every day. Perfect Mismatch took place in the form of daily contests on the platform Kahoot, while for Tedoku, the win was decided on the roll of a die: for each game, the highest scorer could try their luck and roll the die, and if they got the Tedoku wildcard icon, a copy of the game was theirs. These new experiments were quite successful, as you can tell from the photos in the gallery below!
That’s it for this wrap-up of the show, but before we conclude, we cannot but thank everyone who came by our booth and played with us, and especially thank, from the bottom of our hearts, the amazing friends that form our Essen Spiel crew, that year after year show up with their passion and their love for gaming and make all this possible. Thank you all, and see you next year!
Follow Us on