It’s All Fun and Games (and some work)…in Germany’s Rhineland

The last couple of weeks of our zipping around Europe were definitely our least touristy, but also incredibly pleasant for completely different reasons. By a series of lucky accidents, we had two sets of close friends, two important work contacts for Jess, and one huge game convention for Gabe all within a couple hours train ride of each other in the North Rhineland-Westphalia region of Germany.

Our first stop was in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn, where our friends Sam and Katie had just moved. Both of them are friends of mine from growing up in St Louis (you may have noticed they appeared in a previous post). They’ve been talking about wanting to try living in Europe for about 20 years and despite having three highly energetic children, they decided this was the time. Wow. Serious bravery.

They’re working on adjusting to the new surroundings. The kids are enjoying the international school they attend, but Sam is still working with his team back in Seattle, a 9-hour time difference, and he has meetings and such all through the evening (and well past a reasonable bed time), so establishing new life patterns is still a work in progress. Katie is spending a lot of time just trying to figure out how to get them all settled and comfortable, dealing with various bureaucracies and the like. Ugh.

Moving in is an ongoing process too–they have what they brought on the plane with them in August as well as a few things they had shipped by air, but most of their belongings are being shipped by sea, and because of “containergeddon” that lot hasn’t even left Seattle yet. We did try to help a bit by building an Ikea couch for them while they were out of the house, but there’s still a lot to do. So, settling in is still a long way off. I don’t envy them the hassles they are dealing with, but the adventure of moving abroad seems exciting. (Really! I’m ready! Sign me up!)

Regardless, it was really nice to see people we knew and to have someone to talk to other than ourselves. That was a bit of a change after spending the previous months with basically no other company (minus some very brief visits with others). Really, it was wonderful to get to spend some time with the whole family. Sam and Katie are both incredibly kind, funny, creative people. Their children (Simon, Max, and Audrey) are insane, but also insanely amusing, loving, and curious kids. We enjoyed watching the various art projects they undertook while we were there (from Audrey’s ninja bunny family to Max’s enormous diorama of a medieval village), playing endless games of Clank with them, and chasing them up and down the path along the Rhine a few blocks from their home.

The kids are learning German at school, so when we took a group outing to the bakery, Simon went in with Jess (limited people inside because of COVID) to help her order breakfast for everyone. Impressive for only two months!

We also took a hike up the hill on the other side of the river to Schloss Drachenburg, a small castle-like residence built in the late 19th-century. It was used during WWII as a school for Nazi elite, and therefore had its windows blown out by allied bombers. It was a pretty spot with a pleasant interior and great views of the area. Also, there’s a little playing-up of the “dragon” part of the name along the way…

And when we were at the castle, we ran into a very strange, completely unexplained bit of performance art…

Sadly, after a few days we had to move on and leave our friends behind. Happily, we were just hopping a super-short train ride to the next city up the road to go to our other friends’ house. Jessica’s childhood friend Thais, along with her husband Christian and son David, live in Köln (or Cologne). Thais is Brazilian and Christian is German, but his mom is from Brazil. When we arrived, Christian’s aunt and uncle from Brazil were in town visiting him and his parents. They were joined by two other Brazilian relatives who live in Germany. Basically it was a giant trilingual party (because all of them also spoke at least some English, and occaionally took pity on us to fill us in on what was happening). It was overwhelming, fun, impressive, confusing, ridiculous, and overall enjoyable. They’re a sweet family.

After that first crazy day, we settled into a pretty quiet work week. Jess worked on her reserach while I studied math and did some blogging, and Thais and Christian worked while David went to school. Most afternoons Jess and I went on a walk about the city and in the evening we had dinner and talked late into the night. It was quite pleasant overall.

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One night Jessica and I stayed home with David while Thais and Christian went out for a businessy drinky thing. (I believe that’s the official term, right?) For the first few hours, David had a friend over too, so we had two kids to watch who we couldn’t really talk to. But, as with most kids we’ve seen in Europe, they were pretty independent, playing on their own for a while. When his friend left, David, Jess, and I hung out. Despite his limited English and our utter lack of German and Portuguese, we did okay communicating with gestures, a few shared words, and the occasional use of Google Translate. We had fun playing Memory and Catan Junior and the night ended without any major injuries or serious damage to the apartment, so I’ll call that a success.

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In general, we didn’t go out of our way to “see” a lot in Köln since Jess and I had visited Thais and Christian three years ago and hit a lot of the tourist highlights (the gorgeous Cathedral, the extensive Roman history museum, a great walking tour, etc.). So, this time we mostly just wandered the city and enjoyed the street life, the parks, the architecture, etc. One thing that really stood out was the change in weather–we’d been moving steadily north over the past few weeks and it was now mid-October and therefore definitely fall. After several years in California, the sight of falling leaves was a bit of a novelty!

The one site we did visit was the Ludwig Museum, a great modern and contemporary art museum. There was a cool exhibit there about Picasso and how he was received in and related with East and West Germany. Unfortunately, most of the info for that exhibit wasn’t translated, so we only got a taste of it. But, otherwise, there was some other really fascinating and beautiful art from Germany and around the world. One of my favorites was two different pieces that used photos from Birmingham 1963. Whereas Andy Warhol’s just reproduces some of the most famous shots, Carrie Mae Weems focuses on some less noticed bits, like smirking bystanders and the like. They were an intersting contrast.

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I also really enjoyed Roy Lichtenstein’s version of Rouen Cathedral (Seen at Different Times of Day) especially because the Monet pieces of the same name were some of my favorite things that I saw at the Musée d’Orsay when I first went to Paris in 1999.

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Anyhow, visiting Thais, Christian, and David was a ton of fun. It’s really sweet to see how much joy Thais and Jessica get out of seeing each other. And that joy was also shared with some video reunions with Jessica’s parents and Thais’s mom.

Alas, after a few days in Köln, we were off to our last real stop, Essen. Essen is a name known throughout the board gaming world–the annual convention there is where most of the major European publishers release their biggest games of the year. It just so happened to coincide ridiculously well with our timing for me to go check out the spectacle for a few days. Jessica, meanwhile, had scheduled two meetings with folks to discuss her research, both a quick train ride away, so it was really all very convenient.

[NOTE FOR PEOPLE NOT INTERESTED IN BOARD GAMES: Skip to the last few paragraphs. I’m going to babble about games A LOT here. Just skip down to the next bold text if you like…]

For folks who are interested in board games…

Essen is pretty different from most game conventions I’ve attended in the US. Essen is really more about publishers demoing and selling their stuff, and less about people actually playing games. Whereas most US conventions have most of their space open for people to play games (either scheduled or pickup games), Essen has exactly zero space for that. All of the space is rented by publishers or other people who want a booth (people selling art, clothing, accessories, or just game stores with a ton of games for sale). So, the only way to “play” games at Essen really is to line up at one booth or another and ask to sit down and learn one of the games they are demoing. When you do get to do that, usually you get about a 15-minute “how to play” intro and then about 30 minutes of playtime. Given that these are pretty long, complex games and with all new players, that usually means playing about a quarter or a third of a game before you’re shooed off so they can seat the next group. There are a few publishers with more tables and more space, so they often let people play whole games, but there weren’t too many of those that were my top choices to try, so….here’s quick overviews of the games I “played” with some notes on what I thought about them.

• Origins: The First Builders – This is actually the only “new” game I bought. (I had very limited space in my luggage.) It’s reasonably complicated to strategize in this game, but each action in-and-of-itself is simple. The game uses dice for worker placement, but there are only five “spaces” to place on. Players can use actions an unlimited number of times, but each time the die-value that you need to place on a space increases, so timing of when to use different actions can be pretty tricky. There’s lots of very divergent scoring paths, so I’m really curious to keep trying this and see how it goes. There’s also lots of different variable setup stuff, so that can make repeat plays interesting as well. (Note: I have played two full games since purchasing this and lost terribly both times. Fun!)
• Golem – This game’s gotten a bunch of buzz. It’s got some interesting action selection choices and a lot of different little mechanics working together. Overall, I thought it seemed like it would be interesting to play a few times, but not something I’d want to play repeatedly. So, for folks who like deep games that they try once or twice, buy it! But, for folks like me who want a game with a lot of replayability, I’m not 100% sure this will fit the bill.
• Tabanussi: Builders of Ur – This had some of the same things I like about Golem and more of the things I disliked. It’s a very “you have to do this to do that to do the other thing to maybe eventually score some points” kinda game. This is another “creative use of dice” game–you take dice from your location, which dictates the next location you go to. The dice then become resources you can use. Unfortunately, nothing in the game was very logically connected. There were interesting and tough decisions, and I imagine I’d enjoy it if I played a full game, but my quarter-game left me feeling like things didn’t really fit together too well. Part of the problem was that the most variable part of the game — something about ships that you can build or control or something that then give bonuses and such for various other actions — was never really explained to the players, so I didn’t get a feel for the thing that probably makes for the most interesting decisions. One other minor complaint: some of the colors are used for multiple related-but-different things, so sometimes it’s unclear if you’re looking to trigger the things of X color that you built anywhere or the things that are built in the X color district regardless of what color the buildings are. It was kinda confusing. Maybe I’ll give it another shot someday, but for now, eh…
• Praga Caput Regni – The other game I bought was Vladimir Suchy’s earlier game, Underwater Cities (which I mostly bought because I think its a game Jessica and I will both enjoy). But, I got to try two of his newer games. It seems that with each new game, he’s upping the complexity. Praga uses a cool action selection mechanism, where players choose actions off a rotating display. There’s several action available for free, but others you can choose by spending money and unchosen ones are incentivized with points. Players get very few actual turns, but those turns can be pretty combo-rific. It also seemed like a game with a lot of strategic possibilities. My main knock against it in terms of potentially buying it is that there’s definitely some spatial relations stuff (not Jessica’s favorite) and quite a bit of luck in that aspect since part of it is matching up various icons on different hexes that are played in all sorts of ways all over the place, so it’s hard to know what might or might not be coming. But, overall, it seemed like a solid game for people who like fiddly, thinky games. (Think Tzolkin-like level of complexity maybe.)
• Messina 1347 – Vladimir Suchy’s newest. I tried to get onto the one table with this game for a long time. Finally, I was asked to join a game already in progress, so I had to learn the rules on the fly. Mostly, the rules seemed reasonably easy on the surface, but there’s lots of little icons to figure out, some of which are less obvious than others. There’s also a lot of random elements too, so it was hard to know how to plan from round to round. Overall, I never quite figured out how to piece together a strategy. Then again, I think with a full explanation, this might be more interesting. For now, though, I’m more interested in Praga.
• Squaring Circleville – This is a cute game based on a real place in Ohio that wanted to move from a circular street pattern to a square one. Players use a rondel of action choices to dismantle existing buildings and streets and construct new ones. There’s lots of little bonus tiles and such to consider along the way, so that part looked interesting, but also maybe a little overwhelming. While the game looked like it had some interesting decisions, it seemed overly simple in certain aspects, and overly complex in others. Also, I didn’t love the physical representation of dismantling structures, which was shown by adding your cubes to the board (which seems to me more like a representation of building them). Could be interesting, but I wasn’t quite sold. NOTE: I didn’t actually play, but sat through a rules explanation and watched other players for a while.
• Project L – This is a cool little fast-paced tetris game. Literally tetris. Basically, you use tetris pieces to fill in small puzzles. When you finish a puzzle you are rewarded with a new piece. The game moves quickly, and even with new players, three of us played in about 15 minutes. It seems like it would be a fun filler, but doesn’t have huge repeat value as there’s not a ton of different strategies to try. (Though maybe there’s some Splendor-like strategy of just doing big hard puzzles first…) The pieces are top notch though. And it’s pretty.
• Lost Ruins of Arnak – This has been something of a hit for a while now, but I got to play half a game of it for the first time here. It’s an Indiana Jones-type exploring lost ruins adventure game, with a fair dose of good tactical choices. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I think I’d like to play it more, but I don’t think I’m likely to buy it because it seems like there isn’t a ton of strategic space for massively different routes to victory in repeated plays. But, it’s good fun, in a “Clank”-esque kinda way. (It even uses deck building, though quite differently than Clank.) Components are top notch too, which is a plus.
• Gutenberg – Hot off the presses was this new game about the early printing industry. It’s a cute game with some nice thematic elements about printing presses (like little gears you put together on your board–probably a no-no for Jessica). I only got to play a couple of rounds, but it seemed like it flowed pretty well and had a number of simple but meaningful choices. On the downside, it seemed like those choices basically boiled down to point-optimization and matching various icons with what you had or what was available. There were really only one or two major scoring mechanisms, so not a ton of room for creative decision making or new strategies. That said, I imagine the game is pretty interesting and would be happy to play, it’s just not at the top of my list.
• The Red Cathedral – I actually played a whole game! I’d heard lots of good things about this and it’s definitely a solid game. Turns are fairly quick and the game is overall fairly short and punchy given the tactical depth. But, notice that I said tactical. Since the game depends on players collectively manipulating dice that are circling around a board, and those dice are frequently rerolled, it’s very hard to plan turns ahead of time. It’s easy to hope that you can do certain things, but it’s rare that you can count on them happening. Overall, a solid medium-to-easyish game. Good for when you don’t quite have time or energy for a long super-thinky game, but not so simple or short a game that you just feel like you’re making random choices.
• Ultimate Railroads – This is Russian Railroads souped up with a boatload of expansions. Jessica and I enjoy Russian Railroads, but don’t play a ton because there’s not a ton of difference from game to game (just the engineers). This box includes the German Railroads expansion (which I’ve heard is great, but have never been able to get), the American Railroads expansion (which doesn’t seem mind-blowing, but OK), and a new Asian Railroads expansion. I played just a few rounds on this new Asian Railroads version. It includes some really interesting new choices, including a factory board shared by all the players (rather than building the factories on your own board as in traditional Russian Railroads) and some crazy-looking bonuses on players’ own railroad boards. Overall, I’m pretty excited about this. I rarely buy new versions of games I already own and love, but this one has enough new material in it that I may just break that rule. However, it’s currently only available with German rules, so I’ll wait until it’s republished in English. (An aside: it was a little sad playing this with other people who weren’t very excited about the game. The guy who worked for the publisher and explained the game did such a terrible job that when he walked away I had to reteach the game to the other people at my table. Fortunately, I had asked enough questions to be able to explain the new elements in this expansion. But, it’s a tough, complex game, and starting it from scratch with a bunch of extra-complex elements didn’t go so well for the newbies.)
• Khôra: Rise of an Empire – As the con was closing (there were about 60 minutes left on the clock), I sat down and got a quick explanation of this new quick civ-building game. I liked it. This game felt a lot like 7 Wonders, one of my favorites, but with completely different mechanics. Mostly, each round players roll two (or later three if they expand) dice and use each of those to trigger one of seven different possible actions (numbered zero to six). There are some OK options for lower numbers, but it does seem like continually rolling low might really hurt a player. Regardless, there’s interesting choices about whether to invest in your economy, culture, or military tracks and various ways to score based on each. Even with four new players, we managed to learn the game and play about 2/3rds of the way through before the convention hall closed. I’d like to give this a full play through sometime, but if it holds up, it might be on my list of potential future buys.

That’s it for games I spent any serious time with, but before we move on…a few other notes on Essen:

• There were a lot of people! But, evidently tickets were limited to half as many as usual. And there were only about 2/3rds the number of publishers that are normally there. That meant some oddly empty halls at the convention center.
• Giant games! I love when people make giant games for these things. Giant Carcassonne was pretty cool, but watching giant Galaxy Trucker with people running back and forth to grab parts for their space ships was kinda hilarious.
• There were a few COVID themed games. They were only in German, so I didn’t investigate further, but they seemed to be in poor taste.
• There was a game I didn’t play called “Rifugio: the Italian Hiking Game.” I was sad I didn’t get to try it b/c of our previous hiking this summer, but from what I saw, it didn’t look that amazing…
• There were also some other really cool toys available–wooden contraptions with gears, marble runs, construction stuff, etc.
• And…I managed to spot a copy of Exodus Fleet on one game store’s shelf. They were selling it for €65. Good luck with that (it’s only $30 on Miniature Market). But, it made me smile.

[Enough about games. Now back to your regularly scheduled travel babble.]

After leaving Essen, we had just one day before our flights out of Europe. We spent that day in Düsseldorf, near the airport with the cheapest international flights from the area. Most of the day was devoted to laundry, repacking, Jess doing a video appointment to help with some of her Fulbright paperwork, and the like. We managed to get a short walk in around the city and found some nice parks and a cute downtown core. The weirdest bit was the church with the twisted steeple…

Nope. After typing that, I realized that was a lie. The weirdest part was the kebab shop with everything themed on the show Money Heist (a.k.a. La Casa de Papel). In fact, this show (which I love!) seems to be popular all over Europe. We saw places with stuff from the show for sale all over the place in Italy, Austria, and more. There was a giant painted advertisement for it Cologne, and there was even an escape room-type game about it on sale at Essen. I mean, it’s a great show, but oddly everywhere.

One last odd experience. As I was walking back to our hotel from the laundromat, I stumbled across one of the many “stumbling stones” that are in cities across Germany (and the rest of Europe). If you don’t know about these, they are small metal bricks set in the sidewalk with the names and fates of Jews who were victims of the Holocaust, usually set in front of the places where they had lived. It’s been interesting to see which cities have these and which don’t (Berlin has a ton, for instance, and as I explained before, Munich has basically none). Regardless, this one struck home a bit more than some others…

Finally, tourist visas expiring within hours, we took off early the next day. Jess headed to Toronto to meet with some more folks about her current project, and I flew to New Haven to see friends. My flight was sooooooo empty! Everyone had a row or two to themselves. Nice for a COVID-era flight.

Anyhow, Jess and I are set to meet up in New York later this week and will be there until mid-December. Please send me suggestions of stuff I should do and see. We’ve got 52 days in our apartment there, so I assume that means 52 museums, right? Until next time…