We have not long returned from our trip to Germany where we attended the Essenspiel2011 Exhibition. This is an exhibition almost exclusively for board game players, where approximately 800 exhibitors from 32 nations and 154,000 visitors from all round the world attend.
The main bulk of the games are called European or German games, tending to have themes, like Carcassonne where players build a medieval landscape complete with walled cities and monasteries, fields and roads. A similar game is Puerto Rico which is set in the 18th century and players develop a plantation on the island of Puerto Rico.
Another group of games are role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons which rely on group consensus or the judgement of a single player (Dungeon Master or Game Master).
Numenko does not fit into any of these groups and when we first set up and looked around at the range of games we felt a little intimidated and perhaps even insignificant. In addition, the designers of these games are all recognised names in the gaming world and players apparently buy their new games immediately they are put on sale.
During the set up day we managed to find time to wander around the many different halls, totalling more than 44,000 square meters (11 acres!) and check out the many, many games on offer. After this look around we were feeling better and not so intimidated. No one had a game like Numenko!
Feeling more confident we demonstrated the game to many visitors from countries as far apart as Sweden to South Korea, the Czech Republic to Canada, and many visitors from Germany, Netherlands (Holland to you and me), France, China, Finland, Demark, Italy and Portugal.
We were a little disappointed at the low attendance of families to the show but those that passed our stand showed great interest when they realised what the game was about. A fair number of our visitors turned out to be either teachers or had interests in helping children with their maths and numbers. It seems that no matter where you go in the world, parents seem to have a similar need in helping their children with their education.
As I mentioned earlier the designers of games often enjoy considerable following among enthusiasts in German games and they frequently display their names on the game box. This was emphasised on a number of occasions when people realised that I was the inventor of Numenko, and asked me to sign the copy of the game they bought. Am I famous now?
An extra bonus from the exhibition was the interest shown by a number of Distributors who wanted to explore the possibility of selling the games in their respective countries, so keep your fingers crossed for us!
Tom Lennett
