This week I went to Essen, so my "Played" list is a bit out of proportion.

Happened

• As I posted last week's update on Monday, and as I was reading back on my notes, I saw the progress I made and decided to go in deep with a foot massage and explore my painful and tight spots. This resulted in a huge improvement in the overall stiffness of my foot, and therefore also in how I walk (maybe not the visible part, but certainly the feeling of it).
• Monday I also went shopping a bit for Altra shoes. These are running shoes, so they have cushioning, but also a feature the wider toebox with extra space for the big toe. I did not end up buying any, for they didn't have my size and I feel like I am spending a bit too much on my foot. Also: I don't think I am able to run yet, these would be for a bit more stabilization of the foot.
• So instead of getting new ones, I wore my old running shoes (the Asics GT-2000 8) for a few normal walks this week. I always size my running shoes a bit bigger (this one is 47) and that also gives a bit more room to the toes. I really want to get rid of the soreness in my left foot and I think stepping back to a bit more support really helped too. I just really value the effect barefoot shoes have on my big toes, so I don't want to wear too restrictive footwear anymore.
• From Thursday to Sunday I went to Spiel in Essen with A., and we played a lot of games, see the list below. My foot went well: I had a different pair of more sturdier shoes with me just in case, and I used those on the first day, but all the other days I wore barefoot shoes all day long and without noticeable pains. I even think the pains I had are much less now, thanks to the massaging.

Played

• Catan: kaartspel voor twee spelers, with Tovenaars en draken expansion – played this in the hotel after I found a copy with all expansions in a local thrift store for €2.50... worth at least 10 times as much.
• Command of Nature – also in the hotel before going to Spiel.
• Kluster – nice game of placing magnets in a circle until they cluster; part of the collection at the Boardgayming Amsterdam stand which we crashed after a day of walking through all the six halls of the Essen Messe.
• Tiny Epic Galaxies – also a staple old staple of A. and me, played at the Boardgayming stand.
• Open Season – a game where you try to hang heads of fantasy races on the wall, each position giving you a special kind of scoring. Reasonable mechanics, questionable theme.
• Eternitium (bought) – certainly a highlight: small and fast deck building game with beautiful artwork, in which you are time travelers trying to find a magic crystal.
• Valroc – much bigger game by the same creator as the above, but this one did not work for me. Too big, and it all felt a bit disconnected, combined with a rather thing story and a draft phase which we skipped in the demo but turned out to be unrecoverable important.
• Dungeon Legends – A. almost bought it but it was sold out. Bit of a tower defense game but with a more dungeon crawler feel to it, also with a bit of deck building. Comes in five (?) different scenarios you can play.
• Hidden Leaders Duel (playtest) – this game actually does not "exist" yet, as it was invented by my old coworker Michiel de Wit, who is now the publisher of the Dutch version of Hidden Leaders. It worked, but only after the game I understood how. (Can also blame the noisy environment for that.)
• Aeon's End: The New Age – we played the German version, with Germans, but they were kind enough to translate along the way. Nevertheless this was quite incomprehensible to me. We were all together trying to defeat a monster, playing cards to cast spells, buying new cards, opening bridges to be able to play more spells... but most of all we put a lot of maggots and flies on a board and that eventually killed us.
• Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City (bought) – after all these weird fantasy games I wanted some time to explore for myself and in the corner with Japanese games I found this lovely game where you are trying to create a highway by carefully placing wooden sticks on wooden blocks, topping them off with cute tiny rubber cars. The end result of the game looks amazingly complicated, how did we get here?
• (I also bought Scout in this corner, but I already played it before...)
• Linx – cute little game that one of the Swiss people pulled out of her bag while waiting for Tokyo Highway to begin. A mixture of rock-paper-scissors and tic-tac-toe. We did not finish it though.
• The Dick Sits – Adrian Collier's new game of which I am a Kickstarted backer. Also seen many iterations of it while playtesting at the Boardgayming evenings, but I really like the final version. Seeing friends explain this game to straight people was a new experience though.
• The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged – this one was also in the corner of the The Dick Sits stand that was reserved for the Boardgayming in Amsterdam community. (I think A. and I were the only ones who used it to play a non-Dick Sits game?) Unfinished game, because it was the end of the day and we were (rightfully) thrown out.
• The Flames of Fafnir – A. really really wanted to play this one. It is even more of a tower defense game, with the giant dragon Fafnir breathing fire in the form of orange marbles that are actually rolled across the board to knock over the miniature heroes and the obstacles that they place.
• Whoosh: Bounty Hunters – weird little game in which you turn over cards with icons of swords, bows, fire, ice etc., and must place your hand on one of the monster cards in the middle if it can be beaten by the matching icons that are currently visible. Not my type of game, but interesting fantasy twist in the genre.
• Go – I was watching a beginner game at the Go stand (both the beginner and the instructor made very weird moves... the instructor even claiming a false victory because there was a move that saved the beginner), when I was greeted by a familiar face – I think from a tournament in Bonn – so we played a quick game on a 13-by-13 board. It came down to komi, which we did not agree on beforehand, so we waived the result away. As I said to him: I should play more Go again.
• Die Patin (almost bought) – a maffia game but you're all animals, trying to control territory in a city by placing mobsters on street corners, while also opening back shops. It has interesting mechanics, including the fact that you can only score by having the biggest of something in one round per game, which makes all players pursue different goals each round. While writing this I am actually sad that A. talked me out of buying this one.
• Gnome Hollow (bought instead) – a cute game in which you are gnomes, trying to create paths (in a Carcassonne style) and collect the mushrooms along those paths, trading them for trinkets while planting flowers. Got less wholesome when A. denied two other players an addition to our shared path, turning it a bit more cutthroat, but thanks to some nice combo's I won anyway.
• Cloudy Kingdom – by a Dutch creator named Wouter, in which you place cards with crossroads (bit Saboteur-like) to connect your two castles, while denying other player's connections.
• Royale: Party at Louis' – by another Dutch creator also named Wouter, where you pick up sets of three cards (from a deck numbered 1 to 12 in different colors / dishes), and try to distribute them among nobles who are eating very specific diets ("give me only odd numbers of chicken", "give me any dish, but with a total value of 25").
• EOS: Island of Angles – a very big game to which A. made an appointment to play, but I am glad he did, because this was my favorite of the big games we played. It's an asymmetrical game (each player has their own set of actions they can take, which are different form the other players), where you are trying to sail towards angels, and win them over in order to fight the demons who are causing trouble. I had my main mechanic (both playing cards from my hand, as well as moving a bit faster than others) blocked for most part of the game, but I still managed to finish second after the instructor, who said she hadn't played on Spiel herself yet, and who did not hold back at all.
• Shogi – A. is a chess player, so I wanted to play the Japanese version of it with him. Of course he won easy, even in the strangeness of promotion and bringing back pieces to the board.
• Choconnect – interesting little four-in-a-row, except that there are three types of chocolate: with decorations of three, four and five, indicating how many in a row you need to win. And also: you slide chocolate in from the side.
• (Apart from this list, I also bought the RPG rulebooks for Thirsty Sword Lesbians and Death in Space.)