by W. Eric Martin

▪️ The first day of SPIEL Essen 25 is over, with a few publishers reporting increases in sales volume from 2024, sometimes dramatic increases with one publisher noting that it had already sold more in this one day than during all of SPIEL Essen 24. Of course, that publisher brought three times the inventory it had in 2024, and sometimes having goods for sale is all that's needed to bring more sales.

Many people wish that publisher Fractal Juegos would have taken that lesson to heart a few months ago given the extremely short supply of Feya's Swamp, which was only 160 copies or 100 copies or fewer than 77 copies depending on which report you might have seen.

By chance, I ran into Feya's Swamp designers Helge and Anselm Ostertag during the day, and they said that the publisher's presence at this show is more about meeting potential licensing partners than trying to sell as many copies as possible on site. After all, Strohmann Games has already announced a Q1 2026 release date for the German-language edition of the game. Editions are coming in English, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Polish, so folks will get their chance to claim swampy ground before too long. (The copy I used to preview the game in August 2025 will be at BGG.CON 2025 should you be attending that show.)


▪️ Because Jasper de Lange's designer diary had intrigued me, I demoed Bohemians at the Portal Games booth.

Players each represent an artist, and you spend your days searching for inspiration or possibly (ugh) working to keep on top of your bills and not become a wastrel. Each turn, you draw five cards from your deck, then arrange four cards — or three cards and your job tile — to compose our day. By matching half symbols and playing cards of the right color in the right locations, you gain inspiration, with which you can obtain new habits, muses, and (ideally) achievements, the cost of which escalate with each one purchased. Be the first to claim five achievements (or two in our demo game), and you become the top cat, man.

If you don't work, you pick up a hardship — a drinking habit in my case — and that card will cycle through your deck like any other. Each time you draw a hardship or muse, you draw another card, with the hardship automatically affecting you and the power of the muse benefiting you only if you can play it, as some require special conditions.

If you don't exhaust your inspiration in a turn, you can bank it in the atelier, using it later to flush a card row, remove a card from your deck permanently, or avoid a hardship, as I did in the turn above since I lacked enough expression to avoid gaining another hardship. (You need to put on a good face to keep your drinking habit a secret.)


Later in the game, a fellow artist gave me syphilis, which I then passed on to someone else. I didn't have to since I had enough inspiration that turn to pick up a second achievement and win our shortened game, but because I wanted to give them inspiration of a different sort, I chose to do so. Winner's prerogative...


Portal Games had a space for folks to showcase their own artistic qualities in the booth, and I hope that space grows similar to how IELLO's outer booth wall becomes a canvas for attendees.

▪️ SPIEL features many more games than you might catch at first glance, especially since some of the companies on hand are agencies that represent publishers in their quest for publicity and licensing. Belgium company Instaplay, for example, was showing off and selling titles from 25th Century Games, Kyf Édition, Oka Luda, Mandoo Games, and the publisher of the two titles below: Core Studio, which was previously known as C.O.R.E Lab.


Zhou Dabao's Gossip Goose (on right) and Gossip Goose: The King of Bad Movies both combine aspects of Werewolf, Telephone, and Charades, with one player being the leader of a round, almost everyone else being a goose, and one final player being...an evil goose.

The lead goose has witnessed a crime and looks at two cards in secret that feature the criminal geese, each with a distinctive mark, clothing, or hairstyle. Everyone but the leader closes their eyes, then the leader taps a player to have them open their eyes, then they mime the characteristics of the criminals. This player then taps another person and does the same. Once the final player has relayed the signs to the group at large, everyone votes on who they think the evil goose is.

Having taught games to elementary school kids, this design seems ideal for that audience. Possibly for older players as well, of course, but that group springs to mind first given how animated and accusatory they were at the table.


▪️ Mighty Boards is running demo games of For the Gods!, which it plans to crowdfund in February 2026 for release by SPIEL Essen 26.

In this 2-4 player game from Trevor Benjamin, Brett J. Gilbert, and David Thompson, players compete to gain control of regions in the waters around Greece. On a turn, draw five stones from your bag, then spend as many stones as you wish to move your ship from port to port, then spend as many stones of one value (0-3) as you wish to build a temple in a region or add to an existing temple (as long as it's the same value).

When you build in a region, if a god stone is present, you take one and add it to your bag. When you play it later, you can use the power of that god, with 4-5 gods of twelve being present in the game. Apollo lets you draw a new hand of seven stones at the end of the turn you built it, while Zeus lets you add a neutral stone to each of your other temples on the island and Ares lets you remove a god stone from another temple in the region and add it to your bag.


As you keep building, the number of stones in your bag shrinks, with the game ending soon after a player can't fill their hand to five stones.

Each region has a gold medal (and possibly a silver as well), and whoever has the tallest temple in a region claims the gold, with the second tallest claiming silver and the temple value breaking ties. Points can come from elsewhere as Artemis grants you a bronze medal should you erect a temple to her while another ship is in the same harbor and Aphrodite gives you a bonus silver should that temple be the tallest in its region.


▪️ Thanks to another vendor receiving couches they don't need and passing them along to us, the back of the BGG booth has been transformed into a hangout spot for those who need a break from walking the halls, with a GeekBuzz countdown running on the screen for passersby to check out. Ideally the vote count will be boosted before too long to give a more accurate representation of what's making waves at the show...