Dear passengers – please fasten your seat belts, close your mouths and put your mobile phones to one side. We will be landing in Essen shortly….

OK, here we go. As always, a games writer is curious to see what new things there will be at the fair. This year, the main question is “Where?”, because the new “owner” of SPIEL, Spielwarenmesse Nürnberg, has pretty much thrown everything overboard that visitors have internalised over the years. So it will be “Search!”.

Apart from that, we’ll see how many visitors show up in Essen after the top year in 2019. Will close to 200,000 visitors be reached again after all? That was not the case last year and perhaps the peak has now been passed.

The author in me doesn’t need so many people, I’m happy with lots of new games and suggestions. We will see…