If you are enthusiastic about board games, you cannot avoid the international game days SPIEL in Essen.
The fair has been taking place since 1983 and is about everything that moves the gaming industry and players.
New games are shown here and trends can be experienced here.
It has long been considered the most important event for the industry worldwide.
In October 2019, the organizers celebrated a record attendance: More than 209,000 people had romped about in the exhibition halls to see around 1,400 new products.
Something like this would be unthinkable in the 2020 corona year.
And right now the industry has a lot to celebrate and a lot to tell.
In the months of the corona crisis, the manufacturers of parlor games clearly benefited from increasing demand, as the industry association for game publishers announced last week.
Sales rose by 21 percent across all segments.
In view of this development, they did not want to simply cancel the fair.
So SPIEL was moved to the web, and for the first time took place completely virtually as SPIEL.digital.
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Even if the organizers will not publish key figures for the trade fair until next week, the event should have been a success, at least in terms of audience acceptance.
Just in time for the start on October 22nd, the trade fair website went down on its knees because of the crowd.
But the initial problems were quickly resolved.
In our virtual tour of the trade fair, we present some of the most interesting innovations.
For the first time we were only able to play many of the games digitally on the board game portal Tabletopia.
Due to production delays caused by Corona, some of the new products will only be available in stores in the coming weeks.
The virtual exhibition halls can still be visited until the end of the year.
Go to Spiel.digital here.
Icon: The mirror
