Essen 2024

A month has passed since Essen 2024, but finally: here are the images I took and the games I played this year.

As every year, I went through all >1000 games in the GeekPreview. It contains about the same number of games as last year (ca. 1230 in each year, I just checked last year’s preview while writing this), but somehow I ended up with nearly twice as much “Must have” and “Interesting” games as 2023.

I didn’t expect to play even a fraction of them, given the plan to go to Essen one day alone, and one day with my family. But somehow I managed to play eight(!) games on day one…I think this is my all-time Essen record so far. The whole list is here.

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Unboxing Worms - The Board Game

Last winter, I backed Worms - The Board Game on Kickstarter. My package finally arrived this week and today, I unboxed it.

This is the Mayhem Pledge - the cheaper one. The only add-on that I bought was the German language pack, because my native language is German.

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Essen 2023

One year passed, I wrote no new post since my first Essen post, and now it’s October again…Essen time!

Like last year, I went for two days, Thursday and Friday.

And I went through the complete GeekPreview again and picked a mixture of complex games (for me) and lighter games (playable with kids). I ended up with about 10 “Must have” and way too many “Interested” games.

I actually did play eight of them (four each day), and ended up buying all four from day 2.

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Essen 2022

This year, I was finally able to attend the SPIEL fair at Essen again.

The last year I was there was 2019 (IIRC, that was my 13th year in a row).
2020 was a virtual event because of Covid, and 2021 was in-person again, but I wasn’t able to go because of time constraints/family commitments.

This year, I went there for two days, Thursday and Friday. Although I had already planned to write this post before the visit, I was so thrilled to be at Essen again that I forgot to take pictures most of the time. The few pictures I made are all from day 1:

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Humble Beginnings - Space Marines and Terrain

When I was a teenager in the 90s, a friend of mine owned Battle Masters(or “Die Claymore Saga”, as it was called in German), and we played it many times.

Around 1995, the same friend discovered Warhammer 40.000 somewhere, and bought the 2nd edition starter box.

I was fascinated by all of this and bought a box of Space Marines and some paints, and built some terrain pieces as well.

So here are the first miniatures I ever painted, and the first terrain I ever built:

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Gaslands Gates, unpainted

Here are some built (but unpainted) gates for Gaslands, for the “Death Race” scenario.
The “posts” on the first picture are from a TTCombat set.
(it was called “Gothic Street Accessories” or something like that, but I can’t find it on their website anymore, it seems to be out of print.)
The posts on the second one are dowels with some left-over spear tips from Warhammer Skeletons, and the small white tips are broken tines from a comb.

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Sacred Ground for Age of Magic: Crypta

Here’s a nearly finished terrain piece, a crypta for use as a Sacred Ground in Saga: Age of Magic.

It’s based on the one in the Age of Magic rulebook (page 22 in the German book, no idea which page it is in the English book).

The base is exactly 10cm square (4 inch / Saga “M”), the recommended maximum size for Sacred Ground terrain pieces.

The basic structure is a styrofoam block as the center, and lots of single small styrofoam bricks. I got the idea from this German blog.

I really like the final look, but I probably wouldn’t build a larger terrain piece this way…cutting and gluing the bricks for this small building took already too much time.

It’s completely painted now except for the ground, because I’m not sure about the color yet.

I don’t want to use the base colors from my Undead army because it would be too much grey.

And sand colors would go well with my desert board, but I don’t like the idea of a crypta in the desert.

For now, I’ll just leave it like that.

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Chaos Dwarf Conversions

I have a fully assembled Chaos Dwarf army (made up mostly of GW’s classic “big hat” models, plus some Mantic non-dwarf models for use as Abyssal Dwarfs in Kings of War), which is not yet in the gallery on this site because not a single model is painted.

The whole army is already a few years old, but it contains some nice conversions, which I thought would make a good first post for this blog:

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Gaslands

Some cars for Gaslands. I didn’t play the game (yet), but liked the idea of converting toy cars.

See the full gallery here

Asterians

A small Asterian force, used for Deadzone.

See the full gallery here

Undead

The undead are my largest army so far (and the one with the most painted models).

I started collecting them in 2005 and played Warhammer Fantasy with them for about 10 years, spanning multiple rules editions and multiple Vampire Counts army books.

During that time, I built/converted some models that never had any official rules in Warhammer, like the cannon and the werewolves.

Initially I did it just for fun, but when Warhammer was discontinued and my gaming group switched to Kings of War, I was pleased to find out that the Undead in KoW actually have rules for werewolves and catapults.

Later my gaming group switched again to Saga: Age of Magic, and I played my undead army there as Undead Legions.

See the full gallery here

Desert Board

I originally built the desert board for playing Warhammer 40.000 with my Orks. At that time, the only existing terrain pieces were the hills and the large skull, plus some industry terrain pieces (not shown here).

When I started playing Warhammer Fantasy, I didn’t have enough terrain suitable for Fantasy because I couldn’t use the industry pieces, so I gradually built the rest shown here.

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Space Orks

My first complete army. I started collecting/painting and playing Warhammer 40.000 with them in 2002, until about 2005/2006, when I switched to Warhammer Fantasy.

The Orks were unused in a box for years, until I started playing Deadzone in 2016, where I’m using them as Marauders.

See the full gallery here