Essen Day 2: It's Alive!

Hi everybody!

The second day of Spiel'11 is over. It was a busy day. A lot of people from all over the world came to our stand. We managed to hold 3 demo games and for tomorrow we alreday planned 2 more.

So far, we are getting a lot of attention and positive feedback and it feels great. So thanks everybody who supported the development of this game during the last 1.5 years. We appreciate it. Also thanks everybody who is showing an interest during this days. We also appreciate it and you are always welcome at our stand in Spiel'11. Special thanks to those who are buying our games - hope you have a great time playing and be sure to let us know what you think!

Lots of things happened today:

• we got in the Boardgamegeek GeekBuzz - it's a top of new games at Spiel'11. We are curently ranked #7 in the medium traffic category and for some time during the day we were ranked #1 overall. For tomorrow, we hope to get into the high traffic, so keep our fingers crossed.
• we got a short review on facebook, by brettspiele-report
• we have the first tweets about W&T
• during the demo games, I saw a strategy that we never thought about during development (and it was effective). I am happy for this, because one of our goals as developers was to create not a game that is played in a predefined way but rather one that is rich and consistent enough that players are allowed creativity in using the rules

A small change in the blog today - I posted most of the pictures on facebook and will only link them here: day 2 pictures. One reason: it is faster to upload on facebook. Second reason: I am experimenting with different ways to provide updates in order to find the most convenient one for the people receiving the information. Feedback is always appreciated.

Finally, just one picture from the demo games today:

Cheers!

Essen Day 1

The stand is prepared. The games are ordered neatly in their boxes on our shelves. We are ready ...

... set ...

9:45 - a large crowd is waiting outside the gate to the exhibition centre. 10:00 - the gates open and the Spiel '11 begins

we even got a demo game going in our booth ..

an last but not least, we sold some games

that's it for today.


Cheers!

Essen Day 0: The Booth

Yesterday we got up early and packed the car ...

... we started towards Essen. It was the last stand preparation day, before the opening on Thursday. We had some rain in the morning, but soon it stopped and we got to the hotel we are staying at, close to Essen ...

Then we went to the exhibition hall and started building IKEA shelves and tables. The electrical screwdriver helped a lot.

Here's our stand near the end of the day:

We did a bit more work after the picture was taken but I dont't have the final picture because we had to live in a hurry as the exhibition grounds were closing. I'll show you tomorrow how it got to look in the end.

Cheers,

Essen: Day -1 The City We Built

Hi all,

Last time I left to go working for our concept for the Inventor's Booth in Essen. We did just that and now we have a game prototype that we shall call for now "The City We Built". It's a city building, bidding, cardgame for 3 to 10 players and we are quite proud of it.

Tonight we finished doing the mechanichs and it was time to print and cut the cards:

... then we procedded to add color graphics:

here's a close-up of the "Saloon":

With the deck ready, we went to Sorin's place to get the electrical screwdriver. Once there, we naturally played a test game. For bidding, we used Twix candies:

One specific bidding round started small...

... and then got bigger ...

.... and even bigger ...

... in the end Sorin almost won the game but we left because it was getting late.

Tomorrow morning (which is actually soon) we leave for Essen where we will prepare our exhibition stand.

Cheers!

Essen: Day -2

Hi everybody,

As we wrote before, we are taking W&T to the Spiel'11 in Essen. While the gates of the event will open for the public on Thursday morning, we have to do some preparations until then. So today we took a trip from Brussels to Essen to see our booth.

Spiel'11 is held in a venue called (I think) Messe Essen. And let me tell you, it is one very impressive venue.

The building complex is huge (I believe there are 12 exhibition halls). It took us 15 minutes to find our hall, the number 4:

... and soon we also found our booth:

... we were able to get the car in the exhibition hall, in front of the booth and offload the first couple of boxes:

... and a W&T poster:

next steps: find some furniture and setup a nice looking exhibition booth. I'll tell you about this later - now I have to run and work on our concept for the Inventor's Booth.

Cheers,